Volume 6 • Issue 2 • PP: 19 –28 • 2026
Sustainable Development and Green Technology: A Critical Review of Advances, Challenges, and Strategic Pathways for the Post-Carbon Era (2020–2025)
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© 2026 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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The intersection of sustainable development and green technology has emerged as one of the most intensively studied and consequential domains in contemporary science and engineering, and between 2020 and early 2026, accelerating climate commitments, post-pandemic economic recovery packages, and unprecedented cost reductions across clean energy pathways fundamentally altered the terms of the decarbonisation debate. This paper presents a systematic review of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies and authoritative reports published during this period, synthesising evidence across six thematic clusters—solar photovoltaics and concentrated solar power, wind energy, green hydrogen, electrochemical energy storage, carbon dioxide removal, and the circular economy—and map-ping publication trends, performance benchmarks, and knowledge gaps across disciplines. Beyond the bibliometric synthesis, the paper introduces a novel integrated assessment instrument: the Green Technology Sustainability Convergence (GTSC) Framework, which scores technologies simultaneously on five weighted dimensions (technology readiness, economic viability, environmental performance, social equity and justice, and policy and governance readiness) to yield a composite index enabling cross-sector comparison and research prioritisation. Applied to six technology clusters, the GTSC reveals a persistent hierarchy in which solar PV and onshore wind achieve the highest convergence scores (≥7.8 out of 10), while direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage remain below 5.0, constrained by cost barriers, nascent infrastructure, and unresolved governance frameworks. Three over-arching research challenges emerge from the synthesis: the critical mineral bottleneck that threatens supply chains underpinning virtually every green technology; the widening digital–physical sustainability divide, whereby AI-assisted optimisation tools are advancing faster than the physical infrastructure and institutional capacity required to act on their outputs; and the persistent gap between nationally determined contributions and the technology deployment rates needed to remain within 1.5 °C of warming. The paper concludes with a structured research agenda and decision-support guidance for researchers, funding bodies, and policymakers working in this field.
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