• Energy Research
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Abstract Growing urban populations, changes in rainfall patterns and ageing infrastructure represent significant challenges for urban water management (UWM). There is a critical need for research into how cities should adapt to become resilient to these impacts under uncertain futures. UWM challenges in the Ebbsfleet Garden City (UK) were investigated via a participatory process and potential sustainable solutions were explored using a System Dynamics Model (SDM). Collaborative development of the SDM by the Ebbsfleet Learning and Action Alliance developed stakeholders’ understanding of future UWM options and enabled a structured exploration of interdependencies within the current UWM system. Discussion by stakeholders resulted in a focus on potable water use and the development of the SDM to investigate how residential potable water consumption in the Ebbsfleet Garden City might be reduced through a range of interventions, e.g., socio-environmental and economic policy incentives. The SDM approach supports decision-making at a strategic, system-wide level, and facilitates exploration of the long-term consequences of alternative strategies, particularly those that are difficult to include in quantitative models. While an SDM can be developed by experts alone, building it collaboratively allows the process to benefit from local knowledge, resulting in a collective learning process and increased potential for adoption.

Subterranean ecosystems present ideal opportunities to study mechanisms underlying responses to changes in climate because species within them are often adapted to a largely constant temperature. We have characterized the thermal conditions of caves in the western Alps, and related these hypogean climate data to the occurrence of Troglohyphantes spiders (Araneae, Linyphiidae). Our data indicated that present distributions reflect Pleistocene glaciation events and also pointed to specific responses as a consequence of changes in temperature. Constant temperatures recorded inside caves provide an approximation of the mean annual temperature outside, thus we extended the results to a regional scale. We used ecological niche modeling to predict habitat suitability both in the Pleistocene and under future global warming scenarios. These analyses pointed toward a future decline in habitat suitability for subterranean spiders and the potential extinction of the most restricted endemic species. When compared with other species that live in confined habitats such as islands and mountains, we expect cave species to be as much, if not more, vulnerable to climate change.

Bioavailability has been used as a key indicator in chemical risk assessment yet poorly quantified risk factor. Worldwide, the framework used to assess potentially contaminated sites is similar, and the decisions are based on threshold contaminant concentration. The uncertainty in the definition and measurement of bioavailability had limited its application to environment risk assessment and remediation. Last ten years have seen major developments in bioavailability research and acceptance. The use of bioavailability in the decision making process as one of the key variables has led to a gradual shift towards a more sophisticated risk-based approach. Now a days, many decision makers and regulatory organisations 'more readily accept' this concept. Bioavailability should be the underlying basis for risk assessment and setting remediation goals of those contaminated sites that pose risk to environmental and human health. This paper summarises the potential application of contaminant bioavailability and bioaccessibility to the assessment of sites affected by different contaminants, and the potential for this to be the underlying basis for sustainable risk assessment and remediation in Europe, North America and Australia over the coming decade.

As part of the Industry 4.0 movement, the introduction of digital manufacturing technologies (DMTs) poses various concerns, particularly the impact of technology adoption on the workforce. In consideration of adoption challenges and implications, various studies explore the topic from the perspective of safety, socio-economic impact, technical readiness, and risk assessment. This paper presents mixed methods research to explore the challenges and acceptance factors of the adoption of human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications and other digital manufacturing technologies from the perspective of different stakeholders: from manufacturing employees at all levels to legal experts to consultants to ethicists. We found that some of the prominent challenges and tensions inherent in technology adoption are job displacement, employee’s acceptance, trust, and privacy. This paper argues that it is crucial to understand the wider human factors implications to better strategize technology adoption; therefore, it recommends interventions targeted at individual employees and at the organisational level. This paper contributes to the roadmap of responsible DMT and HRC implementation to encourage a sustainable workforce in digital manufacturing.

Our current society is facing challenges in both sustainability and environmental pollution due to fast urbanization, limited resources, and increasing senior population. Smart cities which aim to increase efficiency and convenience would not be able to solve fundamental challenges caused by urban lifestyles. In 2013, the Universal Village concept was proposed to enhance human-nature harmony through prudent use of technologies and to address the eco-challenges due to fast urbanization.This paper first studies the environmental implications due to urban lifestyles and proposes the suitable UV framework and detailed content of universal village lifestyle in order to address the eco-challenges. The paper then evaluates the development of current smart city technologies and assesses their validity with regard to the concept of Universal Village through systematic studies of several major intelligent systems.Specifically, this paper discusses the subject of connectivity from four perspectives: mutual interaction, feedback loop, dynamic information loop, and material cycle. The paper evaluates whether information feedback loops could be formed for these major systems, and also explores the mutual interaction and dependence among the seemingly independent major systems. We discover that mutual interaction connects the aforementioned systems into an interconnected network and naturally forms dynamic information loops in which the decision of one system may be the required input of another system or vice versa. This implies that proper functioning of these systems requires extensive information sharing among them. One event might dynamically trigger different events. The last connectivity is a material cycle. We explore the whole life cycle of products, including impact from lifestyle, customers’ need, product design, cloud manufacturing, sale channel, feedback collection from customers, reuse and recycling, scrapping, to final waste-disposal, etc., and study how to reduce the demand for resource and waste during the procedure. The idea is to include the perspective of UV lifestyle when designing products: considering the possibility in proactively reducing the need, sharing a product with different people, reusing product parts into the manufacturing, recycling reusable components of finished products before the products’ being fully disassembled, etc. The advantage is to reduce the need for products and to avoid manufacturing the same components from raw materials directly, which demands less resource.In summary, connectivity, as discussed from the four perspectives, would greatly contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of our connected smart systems. Dynamic information loop helps coordinate resource allocation, decreases the collective costs, and reduces demand of natural resources from the natural environment, resulting in less damage to the environment which ultimately enhances system-wide harmony between human and its natural environment, and leads to human happiness in general.