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Abstract The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) marked a milestone in the course of international efforts on global climate action. As part of the COP21 side events, on December 4th the Lima Paris Action Agenda presented a half-day of presentations and round table discussions titled Focus on Private Finance. The event was supported by the Secretary-General of the United Nation, Caisse des Depots, and the I4CE Institute for Climate Economics. This conference report summarizes the findings of the session and the messages delivered by finance industry representatives. Significant investment in low carbon assets is required to maintain global temperature increases below 2 °C. The two resounding themes throughout the session were that in order to attract capital for low carbon investments fossil fuel subsidies must end and a higher carbon price is needed to incentivise investment. Furthermore, accounting and regulatory bodies need to implement more stringent disclosure and reporting requirements so that climate risk is properly understood by investors. There is significant appetite for investment in the low carbon sector which is demonstrated by the growth in the green bond market. Financial institutions have a role to play in aggregating, structuring and de-risking investments to facilitate private finance investment. Policy makers also need to improve the investment environment by creating consistent and stable long term policies which will give investors' confidence.

A focus on land-use and forests as a means to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the global atmosphere has been at the heart of the international climate change debate since the United Nations Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997. This environmental management practice is a process technically referred to as mitigation. These largely technical projects have aimed to provide sustainable development benefits to forest-dependent people, as well as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, these projects have had limited success in achieving these local development objectives. This article argues that this is due in part to the patriarchal underpinnings of the sustainable development and climate-change policy agendas. The author explores this theory by considering how a climate mitigation project in Bolivia has resulted in different outcomes for women and men, and makes links between the global decision-making process and local effects.

Abstract The sustainable indicators are characterized by a low degree of aggregation and a high amount of information. An indicator must show a synthetic representation of a real environmental, by using a value or a parameter, so that they can be easily used by policy makers. It is necessary to connect, therefore, the various systems in an appropriately integrated sustainable system. The indicators need to be aggregated based on the structure of the data. Each indicator must to be defined through a weight with reference to another weighted indicator. In this paper is illustrated the calculation of the assigned weights that uses a procedure based on fuzzy logic and to define a model that allows us to estimate the sustainability of a city. The final result is, therefore, a combination of values assigned by expert opinion for the various criteria, processed using fuzzy logic to obtain a weight with significant objectivity and as it is possible to estimate the sustainability of the city through the weights.

China and India are the world's largest developing economies and also two of the most populous countries. China, which now has more than 1.3 billion people, is expected to grow to more than 1.4 billion by 2050, and India with a population of I billion will overtake China to be the most populous country with about 1.6 billion population. These two countries are home to 37% of the world's population today. In addition, China and India have achieved notable success in their economic development characterised by a high rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the last two decades. Together the two countries account already for almost a fifth of world GDP. The most direct and significant result of economic growth in India and China is the amazing improvement in quality of life (or at least spending power) for an increasing share of the population. The populations of both the countries have experienced a transition from 'poverty' to 'adequate food and clothing',- today growing parts of the population are getting closer to 'well to do lifestyles'. These seLyments of the society are not satisfied any more with enough food and clothes, but are also eager to obtain a quality life of high nutrient food, comfortable living, health care and other quality services. The theme of this paper is to analyse how the major drivers contributed to the environmental consequences in the past, and to take a forward look at the environmental impacts of these driving forces in China and India. The paper identifies population, affluence and technology to be the major drivina forces in environmental pollution for these two countries then applies the simple equation of Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology, or I = PAT to evaluate the effects of changes in these drivers on CO, emissions. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract Cities are the major contributors to energy consumption and CO2 emissions, as well as being leading innovators and implementers of policy measures in climate change mitigation. Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is an agglomeration of cities put forward by China to strengthen international cooperation among “Belt and Road” countries and promote low-carbon, inclusive, coordinated and sustainable development. Few studies have discussed the emission characteristics of GBA cities. This study, for the first time, compiles emission inventories of 11 GBA cities and their surroundings based on IPCC territorial emission accounting approach, which are consistent and comparable with the national and provincial inventories. Results show that (a) total emissions increased from 426 Mt in 2000 to 610 Mt in 2016, while emissions of GBA cities increased rapidly by 6.9% over 2000–2011 and peaked in 2014 (334 Mt); (b) raw coal and diesel oil are the top two emitters by energy type, while energy production sector and tertiary industry are the top two largest sectors; (c) GBA cities take the lead in low-carbon development, emitted 4% of total national emissions and contributed 13% of national GDP with less than a third of national emission intensities and less than three-quarters of national per capita emissions; (d) Macao, Shenzhen and Hong Kong have the top three lowest emission intensity in the country; (e) most of GBA cities are experiencing the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy, while Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Foshan and Huizhou reached their peak emissions and Guangzhou, Dongguan and Jiangmen remained decreasing emission tendencies; (g) for those coal-dominate or energy-production cities (i.e. Zhuhai, Zhongshan, Zhaoqing, Maoming, Yangjiang, Shanwei, Shaoguan and Zhanjiang) in mid-term industrialization, total emissions experienced soaring increases. The emission inventories provide robust, self-consistent, transparent and comparable data support for identifying spatial–temporal emission characteristics, developing low-carbon policies, monitoring mitigation progress in GBA cities as well as further emissions-related studies at a city-level. The low-carbon roadmaps designed for GBA cities and their surroundings also provide a benchmark for other developing countries/cities to adapting changing climate and achieve sustainable development.

Abstract In recent years, distributed energy systems (DESs) have been recognized as a promising option for sustainable development of future energy systems, and their application has increased rapidly with supportive policies and financial incentives. With growing concerns on global warming and depletion of fossil fuels, design optimization of DESs through economic assessments for short-run benefits only is not sufficient, while application of exergy principles can improve the efficiency in energy resource use for long-run sustainability of energy supply. The innovation of this paper is to investigate exergy in DES design to attain rational use of energy resources including renewables by considering energy qualities of supply and demand. By using low-temperature sources for low-quality thermal demand, the waste of high-quality energy can be reduced, and the overall exergy efficiency can be increased. The goal of the design optimization problem is to determine types, numbers and sizes of energy devices in DESs to reduce the total annual cost and increase the overall exergy efficiency. Based on a pre-established DES superstructure with multiple energy devices such as combined heat and power and PV, a multi-objective linear problem is formulated. In modeling of energy devices, the novelty is that the entire available size ranges and the variation of their efficiencies, capital and operation and maintenance costs with sizes are considered. The operation of energy devices is modeled based on previous work on DES operation optimization. By minimizing a weighted sum of the total annual cost and primary exergy input, the problem is solved by branch-and-cut. Numerical results show that the Pareto frontier provides good balancing solutions for planners based on economic and sustainability priorities. The total annual cost and primary exergy input of DESs with optimized configurations are reduced by 21–36% as compared with conventional energy supply systems, where grid power is used for the electricity demand, and gas-fired boilers and electric chillers fed by grid power for thermal demand. A sensitivity analysis is also carried out to analyze the influence of energy prices and energy demand variation on the optimized DES configurations.

Thermal energy storage systems (TES) based on shape-stabilized phase change materials (SSPCM) designed from recycled Tetra Pak (TP) waste, paraffin wax (PW), and expanded graphite (EG) were investigated in this study. This work represents the first study to explore TP waste composed of low-density polyethylene (LDPE)/aluminum (Al) components for energy storage applications. The LDPE part serves as a matrix conserving a material in a compact, solid shape after PW melting; PW acts as an active phase change component contributing to heat absorption/release through a phase change (from a solid to a liquid state, and vice versa) of its crystalline phase. EG serves as a filler that enhances the thermal conductivity and mechanical properties of materials. The focus was put on the optimization of the composition of SSPCM including PW, and EG, to check thermal, mechanical, and rheological properties which influence the future processability of such systems through extrusion, as well as to investigate the synergic effect of graphite and residual Al component on thermal conductivity and leakage of PW. There are two main demands on polymer/PW blends, namely well-separated melting peaks for both components at significantly different temperatures, and good compatibility between polymer and PW. The best performance of SSPCM investigated in this study was found for a mixture having the composition TP/PW/EG = 50/40/10 w/w/w. This mixture shows well-balanced properties, including appropriate heat storage and release parameters, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, toughness and strength, and low leakage of PW from the material. This system can store 116.2 J/g of heat energy and release 93.8 J/g of heat energy. The determination of the heat energy storage and release was performed by the transient guarded hot plate technique. Tensile testing revealed that Young's modulus of the TP/PW/EG = 50/40/10 w/w/w composition was 924 ± 71 MPa and the stress at break was 8.2 ± 1.2 MPa, which are sufficient values from the applicability ...

The uncontrolled growth of urban areas worldwide is pushing a substantial part of the urban population to the fringes of society, confining them to the unsecure and unhygienic settlements that we call “informal.” These settlements lack in intelligible layout and essential services and infrastructures, thus representing a challenging issue for policy makers and urban designers in the development of renewal programs and strategies. In order to support the facing of these issues through an on-site upgrade approach, this paper argues that walkability deeply affects the functioning of informal settlements, so as to propose that they can be identified as “proximal cities,” which expresses the idea that the vital space in informal settlements has soft boundaries and follows a fuzzy logic. A quantitative analysis, based on a configurational approach, and a qualitative analysis, focused on the morphologic features of the settlements, have been implemented. A comparison of the results shows that this approach is suitable to provide a deeper knowledge on informal settlement and informal society under the assumption of their strict mutual connection. A primal definition of proximal cities, suitable for describing some properties of autopoietic urban systems, emerges from the evidence-based relationships between their spatial and social features. In this respect, a case study has been proposed and discussed.