Editorial: introduce Catalysis, Energy and Environment

As the energy transition accelerates in parallel with rising environmental risks, many of today’s pressing challenges are converging on a single scientific focus: how to achieve sustainable chemical transformations under real-world constraints. Deep cuts in carbon emissions demand more efficient and reliable pathways for energy conversion and storage; meanwhile, pollution control and resource recovery call for a shift from “end-of-pipe” removal toward valorization and circular management. In this landscape, catalysis is no longer merely a tool for accelerating reactions - it has become a core language for connecting materials, energy, and environmental processes into solutions that can be implemented in practice.

Catalysis, Energy and Environment (CEE) is dedicated to catalytic solutions for sustainable energy conversion and environmental governance, emphasizing synergistic gains in deep decarbonization, pollution control, and resource circularity under realistic constraints. Scientific publishing is already vibrant, and the catalysis, energy, and environment communities are well served by many outstanding journals. Some may still ask: is there room - and need - for a new journal within this landscape? We believe the answer is yes - not because we lack “publication space”, but because we lack an organizing principle centered on applied problems and real constraints. Rather than segmenting research by disciplinary boundaries or driving forces, CEE takes “sustainable energy conversion and environmental governance” as a shared coordinate system, enabling electrical, photonic, thermal, and other routes to be discussed within the same set of practical constraints - efficiency, stability, energy input, realistic media, and scalability. In doing so, CEE aims to distill transferable design principles and deployable technology pathways. Building upon the existing publishing ecosystem, the journal seeks to provide a conceptually distinct nexus where interdisciplinary exchange becomes more natural and the chain from discovery to deployment more continuous.

In scope, CEE will continue to engage three interwoven research landscapes. First, catalytic fundamentals and methodologies: advancing catalyst design, synthesis, and structural tuning; establishing robust structure-activity/selectivity-stability relationships; promoting testable understanding of active sites, reaction pathways, and deactivation evolution; and encouraging multifunctional and hybrid catalytic systems. Second, catalysis for clean and sustainable energy: including water splitting and hydrogen technologies, solar-to-fuels/chemicals conversion, CO₂ conversion and utilization, catalytic upgrading of biomass and wastes, and other key catalytic processes underpinning green energy conversion and storage. Third, catalysis for environmental protection and resource recovery: including water purification and resource recovery, advanced oxidation/reduction processes, catalytic transformation of persistent and emerging contaminants, and the catalytic abatement and intensification of processes for air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). We view these themes not as a parallel checklist, but as mutually reinforcing components along a single pathway of catalysis toward sustainable applications: energy technologies benefit from environmental and circular perspectives, and environmental technologies likewise require attention to energy efficiency and value creation.

CEE’s editorial orientation adopts “real-world constraints” as a common metric. We welcome studies that build a continuous chain of evidence: not only reporting performance, but explaining it; not only demonstrating “higher”, but addressing “why better, how better, and whether it can remain better”. We value rigorous controls and comparable benchmarks, clear elucidation of stability and deactivation mechanisms, and credible validation in realistic media, boundary conditions, or engineering constraints. For application-oriented work, we also encourage authors to confront scale-up and deployment challenges directly - including mass transport and interfacial processes, energy input and process integration, long-term operation, and fluctuating conditions - because these factors often determine whether a catalytic technology can bridge the gap between the laboratory and real settings.

As a Gold Open Access international journal, CEE also aspires to serve as a connector within the innovation ecosystem. Breakthroughs in energy and environmental catalysis rarely arise from a single discipline alone. Progress from fundamental mechanisms to materials systems, then to reactors and process intensification, and finally to verifiable application pathways requires coordinated evolution across academia, engineering, and industry under a shared evaluation framework. Through high standards and transparent, efficient editorial handling and peer review, CEE will safeguard academic quality. We will also encourage reviews and perspective articles that catalyze cross-boundary dialogue, helping the community synthesize key advances, clarify debates, and consolidate reusable benchmarks and methodologies.

We hope CEE will capture not only incremental “metric improvements”, but knowledge and pathways that can be inherited, transferred, and scaled: from mechanism to design principles, from materials to processes, and from laboratories to deployable scenarios. We warmly invite researchers worldwide - authors and reviewers alike - to join this community and bring forward insights that are both visionary and rigorously testable. Let catalysis serve as a reliable bridge between energy and the environment, and let sustainable chemical transformation reach reality faster.