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This paper addresses some questions that climate change raises for international law. It focuses in particular on the request for an advisory opinion submitted by the United Nations General Assembly to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 March 2023. This request is analysed as a further manifestation of the international community’s concern to clarify the international responsibility of states to prevent, mitigate and remedy the damage caused by climate change. The study argues that the ICJ could clarify obligations under existing treaties. There may also be a particular opportunity for the Court to expand its jurisprudence on other sources of international law. In particular, it asks whether the ICJ could confirm the emergence of a specific customary rule on the issue.

A promising technology for renewable energy is energy piles used to heat and cool buildings. In this research, the effects of bio-cementation via microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) using mixed calcium and magnesium sources and the addition of fibres on the thermal conductivity of soil were investigated. Firstly, silica sand specimens were treated with cementation solutions containing different ratios of calcium chloride and magnesium chloride to achieve maximum thermal conductivity improvement. Three treatment cycles were provided, and the corresponding thermal conductivity was measured after each cycle. It was found that using 100% calcium chloride resulted in the highest thermal conductivity. This cementation solution was then used to treat bio-cemented soil samples containing fibres, including polyethylene, steel and glass fibres. The fibre contents used included 0.5%, 1.0% and 1.5% of the dry sand mass. The results show that the glass fibre samples yielded the highest thermal conductivity after three treatment cycles, and SEM imaging was used to support the findings. This research suggests that using MICP as a soil improvement technique can also improve the thermal conductivity of soil surrounding energy piles, which has high potential to effectively improve the efficiency of energy piles.

AbstractThe concept of a ‘just transition’ to a low‐carbon economy is firmly embedded in mainstream global discourses about mitigating climate change. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's political economy elaborated inThe Great Transformation, we interrogate the idea of a just transition and place it within its historical context. We address a major contradiction at the core of global energy transition debates: the rapid shift to low‐carbon energy‐systems will require increased extraction of minerals and metals. In doing so, we argue that extractive industries are energy and carbon‐intensive, and will enlarge and intensify social and ecological injustice. Our findings reveal the importance of understanding how the idea of a just transition is used, and by who, and the type of justice that underpins this concept. We demonstrate the need to ground just transition policies and programmes in a notion of justice as fairness.

The utilization of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased rapidly due to their ability to perform a variety of tasks, including industrial inspection. Conducting testing with actual flights within industrial facilities proves to be both expensive and hazardous, posing risks to the system, the facilities, and their personnel. This paper presents an innovative and reliable methodology for developing such applications, ensuring safety and efficiency throughout the process. It involves a staged transition from simulation to reality, wherein various components are validated at each stage. This iterative approach facilitates error identification and resolution, enabling subsequent real flights to be conducted with enhanced safety after validating the remainder of the system. Furthermore, this article showcases two use cases: wind turbine inspection and photovoltaic plant inspection. By implementing the suggested methodology, these applications were successfully developed in an efficient and secure manner.

Societal relations in rural areas have entered into a new stage of adjustment over the past decade. However, the adjustment, which might bring about profound societal changes in countryside as well as in China as a whole, have not been paid much attention and very few studies have been conducted from the perspective of ecological resource crises. We use the case of a village as an example to show how water pollution, as one of the contributory factors, possibly affect the transition of clans and societal changes in Chinese villages. Through observation and interviews, we find that there is an apparent rise of “New Clanism” within clans, which gradually abandons the tradition of supremacy of clan interests and places family or individual interests at top priority. We also find that clan boundaries get increasingly obscure since the integrity of clans is undermined by the rise of new interest groups across clans, but the boundaries remain relatively clear due to the consistency (albeit incomplete) of clan interests. Some new clan élites and representatives of new interest groups get involved in village governance, which indicates that their goals have shifted from natural resources to social or political capital. The significance of our findings is that they provide not only a unique perspective for the interaction between society and resources, but also some new ideas for the future study of rural China at the environment-social interface.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the factors influencing the success of real estate crowdfunding projects in Spain. This type of crowdfunding invests in real estate assets. We analyzed 60 projects published on the Housers platform, a kind of participative platform that uses the lending and equity crowdfunding modalities. These projects have involved around 36,623 investment decisions and have raised a total amount of almost 26 million euros. The empirical analysis is based on ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression. Our main findings reveal that success differs depending on the type of project; in fact, buy-to-sell projects are less successful than development loan projects. In addition, while total return has a positive impact on project success, in the case of risk level and project term, the impact is negative.