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The expansion of irrigated agriculture has increased global crop production but resulted in widespread stress to freshwater resources. Ensuring that increases in irrigated production only occur in places where water is relatively abundant is a key objective of sustainable agriculture, and knowledge of how irrigated land has evolved is important for measuring progress towards water sustainability. Yet a spatially detailed understanding of the evolution of global area equipped for irrigation (AEI) is missing. Here we utilize the latest sub-national irrigation statistics (covering 17298 administrative units) from various official sources to develop a gridded (5 arc-min resolution) global product of AEI for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015. We find that AEI increased by 11% from 2000 (297 Mha) to 2015 (330 Mha) with locations of both substantial expansion (e.g., northwest India, northeast China) and decline (e.g., Russia). Combining these outputs with information on green (i.e., rainfall) and blue (i.e., surface and ground) water stress, we also examine to what extent irrigation has expanded unsustainably (i.e., in places already experiencing water stress). We find that more than half (52%) of irrigation expansion has taken place in regions that were already water stressed, with India alone accounting for 36% of global unsustainable expansion. These findings provide new insights into the evolving patterns of global irrigation with important implications for global water sustainability and food security. Recommended citation: Mehta, P., Siebert, S., Kummu, M. et al. Half of twenty-first century global irrigation expansion has been in water-stressed regions. Nat Water (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00206-9 Open-access peer reviewed publication available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00206-9 Files G_AEI_*.ASC were produced using the GMIA dataset[https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/iso/f79213a0-88fd-11da-a88f-000d939bc5d8]. Files MEIER_G_AEI_*.ASC were produced using Meier et al. (2018) dataset [https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.884744].

Dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Building up and maintaining stocks requires large amounts of resources; currently stock-building materials amount to almost 60% of all materials used by humanity. Buildings, infrastructures and machinery shape social practices of production and consumption, thereby creating path dependencies for future resource use. They constitute the physical basis of the spatial organization of most socio-economic activities, for example as mobility networks, urbanization and settlement patterns and various other infrastructures. This dataset features a detailed map of material stocks for the whole of Germany on a 10m grid based on high resolution Earth Observation data (Sentinel-1 + Sentinel-2), crowd-sourced geodata (OSM) and material intensity factors. Temporal extent The map is representative for ca. 2018. Data format Per federal state, the data come in tiles of 30x30km (see shapefile). The projection is EPSG:3035. The images are compressed GeoTiff files (*.tif). There is a mosaic in GDAL Virtual format (*.vrt), which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. The dataset features area and mass for different street types area and mass for different rail types area and mass for other infrastructure area, volume and mass for different building types Masses are reported as total values, and per material category. Units area in m² height in m volume in m³ mass in t for infrastructure and buildings Further information For further information, please see the publication or contact Helmut Haberl (helmut.haberl@boku.ac.at). A web-visualization of this dataset is available here. Visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society. Publication Haberl, H., Wiedenhofer, D., Schug, F., Frantz, D., Virág, D., Plutzar, C., Gruhler, K., Lederer, J., Schiller, G. , Fishman, T., Lanau, M., Gattringer, A., Kemper, T., Liu, G., Tanikawa, H., van der Linden, S., Hostert, P. (accepted): High-resolution maps of material stocks in buildings and infrastructures in Austria and Germany. Environmental Science & Technology Funding This research was primarly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950). ML and GL acknowledge funding by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (CityWeight, 6111-00555B), ML thanks the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; project Multi-Scale, Circular Economic Potential of Non-Residential Building Scale, EP/S029273/1), JL acknowledges funding by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), project ESR17-067, TF acknowledges the Israel Science Foundation grant no. 2706/19.

Climate change is worsening the number, frequency and duration of natural hazards across the globe, making disaster risk reduction and resilience building among the most pressing challenges ahead. According to UN-Habitat, informal settlements are where the impacts of climate change are the most acute in urban areas and strengthening resilience in these neighbourhoods represents a very complex yet urgent challenge. Today, urban areas are home to 56 per cent of the world’s population and this figure is projected to increase to 60 per cent by 2030 and 68 per cent by 2050, with 90 per cent of the growth by 2050 expected to occur in less developed economies. In these countries, population growth and displacement (including climate-driven migrations) will lead to rapid and unplanned urbanisation forcing a growing number of people into informal settlements. Currently, one billion people live in informal settlements, mostly in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and this figure is expected to grow to 3 billion in 2050. Horizon 2020 MSCA-RISE, Grant Agreement #873119

The energy performance certificate (EPC) is an information and market tool for climate protection which shall foster the market for energy efficient living space. It allows potential renters and buyers to compare the energy performance of buildings and provides recommendations on how the energy efficiency of the building can be improved. However, there are potentials for improvement in terms of the user-friendliness of the certificate and the consideration of occupant behaviour in the modeling of building energy use. Hence, the end-users of EPCs such as buildings owners, tenants, building occupants and building managers play a crucial role regarding the redesign of EPCs because learning about their needs can contribute to improve the certificate and exploring their everyday energy behaviour allows to make more accurate assumptions in the modelling of building energy. This report is a synthesis of the findings from the four user-related tasks in the ePANACEA project which are the stakeholder analysis, the user-needs analysis, the acceptance testing (first and final acceptance test) and the exploration of occupants’ energy behaviour. Each research step is briefly recapped (objectives, methods and highlights of the results). Furthermore, the report shows how the research steps (except for the final acceptance test) have influenced the development of new EPC summary pages during the project life time (final version in October 2022). The final chapter provides the recommendations on the next generation of EPC (with a focus on the content and presentation of content in the certificate) that stem from the user-related tasks, including the outcomes from the final acceptance test.

{"references": ["BIM4EEB, 2020a. Digital Construction Ontologies. Available online: https://w3id.org/digitalconstruction (Accessed on 20 December 2021).", "BIM4EEB, 2020b. BIM Management System. Available online: https://bim4eeb.oneteam.it (Accessed on 21 December 2021).", "BIM4EEB, 2021. BIM4EEB: BIM based toolkit for Efficient rEnovation in Buildings. Available online: https://www.bim4eeb-project.eu/ (Accessed on 21 December 2021).", "Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE), 2020. The European Renovation wave: from words to action.", "Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE), 2021. The renovation wave strategy & action plan: designed for success or doomed to fail?", "Daniotti, B., et al., 2021. An Interoperable BIM-Based Toolkit for Efficient Renovation in Buildings. Buildings, 11(7), 271.", "Digital Europe, 2021. A digital investment plan for Europe.", "Elagiry, M., et al., 2020. Digitalization Tools for Energy-Efficient Renovations, Sustainable Places 2020, Online 28\u201330 October 2020. MDPI.", "European Commission, 2020a. Energy efficiency in buildings", "European Commission, 2020b. A renovation wave for Europe - greening our buildings, creating jobs, improving lives.", "European Commission, 2020c. Renovation Wave: doubling the renovation rate to cut emissions, boost recovery and reduce energy poverty.", "T\u00f6rm\u00e4, S., et al., 2020. Towards BIM-Enhanced Renovation Management Tools with Support to Stakeholder Interaction, Sustainable Places 2020, Online 28\u201330 October 2020. MDPI.", "Valra, A., et al., 2020. The BIM Management System: A Common Data Environment Using Linked Data to Support the Efficient Renovation in Buildings, Sustainable Places 2020, Online 28\u201330 October 2020. MDPI."]} The construction sector is among the main ones responsible for energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions. Hence, buildings retrofitting shall be encouraged and supported by targeted actions to achieve a European climate-neutrality by 2050, as pointed out by EU Agenda objectives. In this context, the European Commission is promoting a Renovation Wave Strategy. One step towards the renovation action is the exploitation of digital tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This paper is related to the potentialities of an ongoing EU funded project –BIM4EEB- and it illustrates the application of two BIM-based tools, namely BIMPlanner and BIM4Occupants, developed within the project. The two tools have respectively the purpose of sharing current information about the progress of construction works among renovation stakeholders and sharing with inhabitants tailored information about indoor conditions, comfort preferences and energy consumption of their houses. Thanks to IoT devices installed in a demonstration building permitted the real-time evaluation and control of several parameters. Therefore, a pilot building, namely the Italian demonstration application of the project, is described for testing the proposed tools. Benefits connected to the BIM framework and IoT devices result in an improvement of data sharing and communication between renovation stakeholders, then in an enhanced building process.

The INTENSSS PA project, funded by Horizon 2020, the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation of the European Union, aims to support the local authorities involved and their stakeholders to develop an innovative integrated sustainable energy planning concept through a participatory, interdisciplinary and multilevel process. By building individual and institutional capacity of the actors involved, using the Regional Living Lab approach, the concept will be applied in order to develop seven sustainable integrated energy plans. In this first article the project activities and the results achieved so far are preliminary described, anticipating a more extensive and detailed publication on the project planned for the December edition of UPLand – Journal of Urban Planning Landscape & Environmental Design. UPLanD - Journal of Urban Planning, Landscape & environmental Design, GREEN 2.0

Micro Teaching by ESR 4 Alejandro Fonseca on "Production of sustainable and recyclable phosphorus flame retardant additives". Talk delivered in the Network-Wide Training Event 6 of C-PlaNeT EU H2020 project at TU/e, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 859885.

2nd generation biofuels gained more importance in recent years since they enable greenhouse gas emission reductions in the transport sector on a larger scale. One promising way to produce alternative fuels is the Biomass-to-Liquid (BtL) process with the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis which produces synthetic hydrocarbons that could directly be used as liquid fuels in an existing infrastructure. One major issue of this process is the production cost. Within the European COMSYN project (Compact Gasification and Synthesis process for Transport Fuels), a new BtL process concept is developed that aims to reduce biofuel production cost up to 35 % compared to alternative routes.