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Abstract To achieve the EU climate and energy objectives, a transition towards a future sustainable energy system is needed. The integration of the huge potential for industrial waste heat recovery into smart energy system represents a main opportunity to accomplish these goals. To successfully implement this strategy, all the several stakeholders' conflicting objectives should be considered. In this paper an evolutionary multi-objective optimization model is developed to perform a sustainability evaluation of an energy system involving an industrial facility as the waste heat source and the neighbourhood as district heating network end users. An Italian case study of heat recovery from a steel casting facility shows how the model allows to properly select the district heating network set of users to fully exploit the available waste energy. Design directions such as the thermal energy storage capacity can be also provided. Moreover, the model enables the analysis of the trade-off between the stakeholders’ different perspectives, allowing to identify possible win-win solutions for both the industrial sector and the citizenship.

Changes in the main weather features are becoming perceivable in Italy. In the last years, the average temperature and the intensity of rainstorms are increasing. Such phenomena could lead to changes in the earth-atmosphere interaction. Accounting for the high vulnerability of the Italian territory, an obvious consequence would concern the effects on the hydro-geological hazards, including landslides and floods. As a matter of fact, the higher frequency of high magnitude flood and landslide events represent an alarm bell. It is necessary to explore with all available instruments the consequences of the potential climate changes. Since quantitative predictions are not possible, the only way to run is depicting rational scenarios for the most vulnerable contexts adopting a multidisciplinary approach. Based on projections of potential climate changes in the 21st century, the report examines their potential impact in the context of the Italian peninsula. After a general overview about typical slope responses to weather changes, some quantitative scenarios have been depicted for representative geomorphological contexts. The last part of the paper examines changes in the expected risk, based on the characteristics of the Italian territory and its vulnerability, looking at the initiatives to undertake for its mitigation.

Seagrass systems of the Western Pacific region are biodiverse habitats, providing vital services to ecosystems and humans over a vast geographic range. SeagrassNet is a worldwide monitoring program that collects data on seagrass habitats, including the ten locations across the Western Pacific reported here where change at various scales was rapidly detected. Three sites remote from human influence were stable. Seagrasses declined largely due to increased nutrient loading (4 sites) and increased sedimentation (3 sites), the two most common stressors of seagrass worldwide. Two sites experienced near-total loss from of excess sedimentation, followed by partial recovery once sedimentation was reduced. Species shifts were observed at every site with recovering sites colonized by pioneer species. Regulation of watersheds is essential if marine protected areas are to preserve seagrass meadows. Seagrasses in the Western Pacific experience stress due to human impacts despite the vastness of the ocean area and low development pressures.

The crucial role evaluation can play in the co-development of project design and its implementation will be addressed through the analysis of a case study, the Green Communities (GC) project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Environment within the EU Interregional Operational Program (2007-2013) "Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency". The project's broader goals included an attempt to trigger a change in Italian local development strategies, especially for mountain and inland areas, which would be tailored to the real needs of communities, and based on a sustainable exploitation and management of the territorial assets. The goal was not achieved, and this paper addresses the issues of how GC could have been more effective in fostering a vision of change, and which design adaptations and evaluation procedures would have allowed the project to better cope with the unexpected consequences and resistances it encountered. The conclusions drawn are that projects should be conceived, designed and carried out as dynamic systems, inclusive of a dynamic and engaged evaluation enabling the generation of feedbacks loops, iteratively interpreting the narratives and dynamics unfolding within the project, and actively monitoring the potential of various relationships among project participants for generating positive social change.

Abstract This article focuses on the results obtained by the enforcement of a original greenhouse gas emissions policy, issued in recent years in several municipalities in Northern Italy. The Municipality of Reggio Emilia was one of the firsts in Italy to develop and adopt a voluntary building energy-consumption certification method called Ecoabita, aiming to promote energy efficiency in buildings over its jurisdiction. Several reasons make this project innovative: first, the certification method has been processed through and verified by a quality international agency, secondly the procedure is assisting financial-incentive policies both on mandatory (European Directive 2002/91/CE) and voluntary basis (Municipality Protocol Ecoabita), finally it allows to obtain eligible credits for avoided emissions that can be negotiated on the CO2 exchange market. With specific reference to Reggio Emilia case, acknowledged the amount of actions, that are normally scheduled in the municipality throughout a year, it has been evaluated the benefit, in terms of environmental improvement, descended from the protocol, also projecting their trend in future years up to 2020 as well, demonstrating the scheduled interventions are fundamental in sought of the achievement of the Kyoto and Copenhagen commitments. The entire procedure has been developed in accordance to the parameters given by UNFCCC for these kinds of analyses and has been recently confirmed to be one of the most accurate international accounting procedure by a survey developed by the scientific committee of the European Project LIFE-LAKS.

The Soutpansberg Transect investigates the abundance and diversity of ants and spiders along an altitudinal gradient in the Western Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa. It has a north-south orientation over the mountain and is a long term project initiated in 2009. Data collection is carried out in intervals that suit the data logger capacity. To study the diversity patterns in ants and other invertebrate groups across the spatial transect over a long-term period and the climate the invertebrates.

We studied the performance of the AZTI Marine Biotic Index AMBI manipulating input data collected from lagoonal ecosystems. Our data set consisted of macrofaunal abundance and biomass counts gathered at a variety of sites at which the disturbance status was known. Input data were also manipulated using a set of transformations of increasing severity. Biotic indices were calculated using raw and transformed abundance, biomass and production. Among the three categories of AMBI-based indices, medium transformation of data gave the highest correlation with pressures. However, increasing the severity of transformation generally resulted in a decrease of the correlation with environmental factors. The relative importance of ecological groups changed when using abundance or biomass, sometimes leading to an improved ecological status classification. Being biomass and production more ecologically relevant than abundance, using them to derive AMBI-based new indices seems intriguing, at least in lagoonal waters, where the community is naturally disturbed and dominated by opportunists.

It is important to reduce the amount of municipal waste deposited in landfills, Czech Republic, therefore, puts more emphasis on the recovery of mixed municipal waste, which oblige and EU regulations. Production of solid alternative fuel that is suitable also due to less consumption of fossil fuels, is one of the uses of mixed municipal waste (Waste to Energy). A relatively high proportion of glass in mixed municipal waste is a major problem in the production of solid alternative fuel. The glass contained in the solid alternative fuel can be the cause of formation incrusts on heat transfer surfaces in combustion plants. For all examined types of glass, it was found that the melting temperature of the muffle furnace was 750 ° C. When using the method (ISO 540) for determining the temperature of softening , melting and flow showed no effect of the amount of glass in the ash, but the melting point was significantly higher (around 1,200 °C).

Abstract An alkaline earth boro-aluminosilicate glass (Eagle XG), a soda-lime glass, and a light-weight polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) foil, used as typical substrates for photovoltaics, were treated by an energetic proton beam (3 MeV, dose 106–107 Gy) corresponding to approx. 30 years of operation at low Earth orbit. Properties of the irradiated substrates were characterized by atomic force microscopy, optical absorption, optical diffuse reflectance, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and terahertz (THz) spectroscopy. Minimal changes of optical and morphological properties are detected on the bare Eagle XG glass, whereas the bare PET foil exhibits pronounced increase in optical absorption, generation of photoluminescence, as well as mechanical bending. On the other hand, the identical substrates coated with Indium-tin-oxide (ITO), which is a typical material for transparent electrodes in photovoltaics, exhibit significantly higher resistance to the modifications by protons while ITO structural and electronic properties remain unchanged. The experimental results are discussed considering a potential application of these materials for missions in space.