• Energy Research
• Restricted close
• Embargo close
• 15. Life on land close
• 2. Zero hunger close
• US close
• DE close

In this study, air concentrations of BaP in two different seasons (winter 2015 and summer 2016) and BaP levels in ground vegetation from Tarragona County were used as control simulations performed with the WRF-CHIMERE air quality modelling system, in order to reproduce the incidence of that hazardous chemical in air and soils. The CTM was validated for the present climatology, showing a good ability to represent air and soil concentrations of BaP over the target domain (petrochemical, chemical, urban and background sites), particularly in the winter. Then, the variation of the BaP concentrations in air and soils were simulated for the time series 1996-2015 and for the climate change scenario RCP8.5 (2031-2050). While an increase is projected for the levels in air, particularly in chemical and remote sites where the variation can go up to 10%, in terms of soil deposition the findings are the opposite, with an evident decrease in soil BaP concentrations, particularly for background sites. Finally, a potential health effect of BaP for the local population (lung cancer) was assessed. Although according to the projections the EU threshold for BaP atmospheric incidence (1 ng m-3) will not be reached by 2050, there will be an increase in the life-time risk of lung cancer, particularly in the most populated areas within the simulation domain.

The transition to a low carbon future is starting to affect landscapes around the world. In order for this landscape transformation to be sustainable, renewable energy technologies should not cause critical trade-offs between the provision of energy and that of other ecosystem services such as food production. This literature review advances the body of knowledge on sustainable energy transition with special focus on ecosystem services-based approaches and methods. Two key issues emerge from this review: only one sixth of the published applications on the relation between renewable energy and landscape make use of the ecosystem service framework. Secondly, the applications that do address ecosystem services for landscape planning and design lack efficient methods and spatial reference systems that accommodate both cultural and regulating ecosystem services. Future research efforts should be directed to further advancing the spatial reference systems, the use of participatory mapping and landscape visualizations tools for cultural ecosystem services and the elaboration of landscape design principles.

Since 2007, a range of new modeling approaches and tools have been developed for sustainability impact assessment (SIA), but a lack of universal acceptance of SIA tools in applied policy making is observed. The current article gives an overview of experiences from several European and international projects, critically reviews the selected SIA tools and then discusses a number of reasons for the observed disconnect of the tools with the potential users. Largely based on the experiences of the presented SIA tools focusing land use policy advice, a decision tree is designed, which may facilitate an adequate, region and developmental phase specific selection of tool-box components for the development of SIA tools in future. Elements to ensure end-user participation are also integrated in the decision tree in order to increase the likelihood of the tool in applied land use policy advice. In addition, the Challenges in SIA tool development and use are further discussed.

The Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) is one of the world’s most vulnerable deltas to climate change and sea level rise. Adequate understandings of future hydrological changes are crucial for effective water management and risk-proofing, however, this knowledge body is currently very limited. This study quantifies the responses of the VMD’s river flow regime to multiple stimuli, namely future upstream inflow variation, local climate change, and sea level rise. The one-dimensional hydrodynamic model MIKE 11 was used to simulate discharges and water levels across the delta. We developed four scenarios to represent changes in the upstream discharges, precipitation changes and sea level rise, covering the 2036–2065 period. We downscaled climate data and applied three bias-correction methods for five General Circulation Models (GCM), and two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). The climate change projections show similar trends of increasing wet season precipitation and decreasing dry season precipitation. However, cross-scenario variations are sometimes large, depending on the individual GCMs, the RCPs and specific locations. The hydraulic simulation results indicate that, under discharge changes between −20% and +10%, combined with in-delta precipitation variations during the dry season, river discharges at the four representative stations could reduce substantially from −2.5% to −100.2%. During the wet season, the calculated river discharges show increase between 7.3% and 46.7% under four considered scenarios. Substantial changes in the VMD’s river flow regime could have potentially serious implications for water management, especially saltwater intrusion, and therefore calling for timely adaptation measures.

Stories play an exceptionally important role in how people assign value to a place. Taken together, all those stories essentially give a place an identity. The aim of placemaking is to ensure that the people using a place can appreciate that place. Placemaking approaches are focussed on strategic interventions in a place and aimed at changing the meaning and value of that place for local people, thus creating a qualitative place for enhanced storytelling. Using greenery is a common approach in place-making. Urban greenery has gone through a process of emancipation in the past 15 years. This emancipation has led to awareness that urban greenery is about more than just ecology and biodiversity, but also has social and economic consequences for a city’s fortunes. It is clear that green spaces do not stand alone: they are part of a complex urban system, and the use of green spaces in this complex system has immediate repercussions for how the city functions. With the changing role of green spaces within cities, the need to manage these spaces is emphasized. In this sense, the place-making approach, along with the storytelling approach could provide valuable insight on the planning and management of green spaces within the urban environment, with the aim to enhance quality of life by means of the social connection between people, the users of the space, and the qualitative place provided. This research illustrated that green space managers would need more social and organizational skills to manage modern urban green spaces in an attempt to create qualitative, usable spaces for citizens, spaces that are built upon stories and spaces that would further enable future stories of citizen life. The Story Behind the Place: Creating Urban Spaces That Enhance Quality of Life (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271918395_The_Story_Behind_the_Place_Creating_Urban_Spaces_That_Enhance_Quality_of_Life [accessed Dec 21, 2015].

Species distribution models (SDMs) provide realistic scenarios to explain the influence of bioclimatic variables on plant pathogen distribution. Diplodia sapinea is most harmful to plantations of both exotic and native pine species in Italy, causing economic consequences expecially to edible seed production. In this study, we developed maximum entropy models for D. sapinea in Italy to reach the following goals: (i) to carry out the pathogen's first geographical distribution analysis in Italy and determine which ecogeographical variables (EGVs) may influence its outbreaks; (ii) to detect the effect of climate change on the potential occurrence of disease outbreaks by 2050 and 2070. We used Maxent ver. 3.4.0 to develop SDMs. We used six global climate models (BCC-CSM1-1, CCSM4, GISS-E2-R, MIROC5, HadGEM2-ES and MPI-ESM-LR) for two representative concentration pathways (4.5 and 8.5) and two time projections (2050 and 2070) to detect future climate projections of D. sapinea. The most important EGVs influencing outbreaks were land cover, altitude, mean temperature of driest and wettest quarter, precipitation of wettest quarter, precipitation seasonality and minimum temperature of coldest month. The distribution of D. sapinea mostly expanded in central and southern Italy and shifted in altitude upwards on average by ca. 93m a.s.l. Moreover the fungus expanded the range where disease outbreaks may be recorded in response to an increase in the mean temperature of wettest and driest quarter by ca. 1.9 C and 5.8 C, respectively in all climate change scenarios. Precipitation of wettest quarter did not differ between current and any of future models. Under different climate change scenarios D. sapinea's disease outbreaks will be likely to affect larger areas of pine forests in the country, probably causing heavy effects on the dynamics and evolution of these stands or perhaps constraining their survival.

Roundtables for sustainable beef have evolved in national contexts as well as at the global level as a multi-stakeholder process to address sustainability concerns in the cattle sector. However, due to their relatively recent inception, the literature on the beef roundtables is extremely limited and very little scholarly work has traced their process or impact. We used semi-structured interviews with key informants to examine the governance, actions, and potential impacts of the roundtables for sustainable beef, and identified opportunities and challenges for achieving greater sustainability impact. We found that the beef roundtables are in different stages of development and implementation and that they have diverse approaches based on their geographic contexts. However, they have universally adopted a model of sector-wide continuous improvement, in contrast to roundtables for other commodities, which have in many cases adopted formal certification programs. Activities by the roundtables for sustainable beef have variously included working towards definitions of sustainable beef; setting sustainability principles and criteria; and creating working groups to address specific aspects of sustainability (e.g., verification, deforestation). Our interviews identified opportunities to expand the roundtables’ roles, activities, and sustainability impacts. This study provides a benchmark of the roundtables’ efforts to date, and generates hypotheses and ideas for how they could evolve in the future.

Estuaries are among the most valuable aquatic systems by their services to human welfare. However, increasing human activities at the watershed along with the pressure of climate change are fostering the co-occurrence of multiple environmental drivers, and warn of potential negative impacts on estuaries resources. At present, no clear understanding of how coastal ecosystems will respond to the non-stationary effect of multiple drivers. Here we analysed the temporal interaction among multiple environmental drivers and their changing priority on shaping phytoplankton response in the Bahía Blanca Estuary, SW Atlantic Ocean. The interaction among environmental drivers and the number of significant direct and indirect effects on chlorophyll concentration increased over time in concurrence with enhanced anthropogenic stress, changing winter climate and wind patterns. Over the period 1978-1993, proximal variables such as nutrients, water temperature and salinity, showed a dominant effect on chlorophyll, whereas in more recent years (1993-2009) climate signals (SAM and ENSO) boosted indirect effects through its influence on precipitation, wind, water temperature and turbidity. Turbidity emerged as the dominant driver of chlorophyll while in recent years acted synergistically with the concentration of dissolved nitrogen. As a result, chlorophyll concentration showed a significant negative trend and a loss of seasonal peaks reflecting a pronounced reorganisation of the phytoplankton community. We stress the need to account for the changing priority of drivers to understand, and eventually forecast, biological responses under projected scenarios of global anthropogenic change.