• Energy Research
• Restricted close
• 11. Sustainability close
• FR close
• AT close
• PL close

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories. Each of the maps focuses on one issue in the adaptation debate and provides.The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalists…) and to citizens willing to engage with the issues of climate adaptation.It employs advanced digital methods to deploy the complexity of the issues related to climate adaptation and information design to make this complexity legible.

Ostrava in the Moravian-Silesian region (Czech Republic) is a European air pollution hot spot for airborne particulate matter (PM), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and ultrafine particles (UFPs). Air pollution source apportionment is essential for implementation of successful abatement strategies. UFPs or nanoparticles of diameter <100 nm exhibit the highest deposition efficiency in human lungs. To permit apportionment of PM sources at the hot-spot including nanoparticles, Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) was applied to highly time resolved particle number size distributions (NSD, 14 nm-10 μm) and PM0.09-1.15 chemical composition. Diurnal patterns, meteorological variables, gaseous pollutants, organic markers, and associations between the NSD factors and chemical composition factors were used to identify the pollution sources. The PMF on the NSD reveals two factors in the ultrafine size range: industrial UFPs (28%, number mode diameter - NMD 45 nm), industrial/fresh road traffic nanoparticles (26%, NMD 26 nm); three factors in the accumulation size range: urban background (24%, NMD 93 nm), coal burning (14%, volume mode diameter - VMD 0.5 μm), regional pollution (3%, VMD 0.8 μm) and one factor in the coarse size range: industrial coarse particles/road dust (2%, VMD 5 μm). The PMF analysis of PM0.09-1.15 revealed four factors: SIA/CC/BB (52%), road dust (18%), sinter/steel (16%), iron production (16%). The factors in the ultrafine size range resolved with NSD have a positive correlation with sinter/steel production and iron production factors resolved with chemical composition. Coal combustion factor resolved with NSD has moderate correlation with SIA/CC/BB factor. The organic markers homohopanes correlate with coal combustion and the levoglucosan correlates with urban background. The PMF applications to NSD and chemical composition datasets are complementary. PAHs in PM1 were found to be associated with coal combustion factor.

The Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) was an international, multiplatform field campaign to measure long-range transport of air pollution from South and Southeast Asia toward the Indian Ocean during the dry monsoon season in January to March 1999. Surprisingly high pollution levels were observed over the entire northern Indian Ocean toward the Intertropical Convergence Zone at about 6°S. We show that agricultural burning and especially biofuel use enhance carbon monoxide concentrations. Fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning cause a high aerosol loading. The growing pollution in this region gives rise to extensive air quality degradation with local, regional, and global implications, including a reduction of the oxidizing power of the atmosphere.

Abstract The concept of Zero Energy Building (ZEB) has gained wide international attention during last few years and is now seen as the future target for the design of buildings. However, before being fully implemented in the national building codes and international standards, the ZEB concept requires clear and consistent definition and a commonly agreed energy calculation methodology. The most important issues that should be given special attention before developing a new ZEB definition are: (1) the metric of the balance, (2) the balancing period, (3) the type of energy use included in the balance, (4) the type of energy balance, (5) the accepted renewable energy supply options, (6) the connection to the energy infrastructure and (7) the requirements for the energy efficiency, the indoor climate and in case of gird connected ZEB for the building–grid interaction. This paper focuses on the review of the most of the existing ZEB definitions and the various approaches towards possible ZEB calculation methodologies. It presents and discusses possible answers to the abovementioned issues in order to facilitate the development of a consistent ZEB definition and a robust energy calculation methodology.

In this article, we introduce and study a two-stage stochastic optimization problem suitable to solve strategic optimization problems of car-sharing systems that utilize electric cars. By combining the individual advantages of car-sharing and electric vehicles, such electric car-sharing systems may help to overcome future challenges related to pollution, congestion, or shortage of fossil fuels. A time-dependent integer linear program and a heuristic algorithm for solving the considered optimization problem are developed and tested on real world instances from the city of Vienna, as well as on grid-graph-based instances. An analysis of the influence of different parameters on the overall performance and managerial insights are given. Results show that the developed exact approach is suitable for medium sized instances such as the ones obtained from the inner districts of Vienna. They also show that the heuristic can be used to tackle very-large-scale instances that cannot be approached successfully by the integer-programming-based method.

Tourism is an important economic sector that has a significant impact on sustainability indicators, such as GHG emissions and cohesion. Local policy makers are increasingly challenged to manage the urban tourism system at large. As part of a EU funded project, the authors have conceptualized sustainable urban tourism as the ‘management of competing values’ represented in a conceptual model of ecology, visitability, livability, equity, economic growth and smart citizenship. A simulation game was designed and implemented to improve social learning about these competing values. The game was played in six European cities, with around 15 local policy-makers and stakeholders in each session. The players indicated a high level of satisfaction with the game and social learning. In order to understand to what extent the game is able to validate and communicate the competing values model, the start and end states of the tourism values of the cities, as logged in the game’s dashboard, were analyzed in a comparative manner. The analysis shows significant differences in how cities manage sustainable tourism, with marked differences in ecology and smart citizenship. The differences in tourism issues and policy making styles demonstrate the value of a simulation approach to support future planning processes.

This paper discusses the oil palm expansion in the State of Para, located in the Brazilian Amazon. It focuses on land use change aspects put in perspective with the sustainability criteria for biofuels of the European Renewable Energy Directive (RED). The study shows that palm oil production for energy purposes appears very promising in Brazil. In parallel to local targets, the mandatory European biofuel targets represent an important market potential for the country. It seems too early to know whether the export of palm oil biodiesel from Brazil to Europe will be significant or not. However, it is likely that palm oil exports for biodiesel production in Europe occur in the coming years. Although the RED includes some essential conditions for sustainable production of biofuels, we argue that the values imposed for calculating carbon stocks do not reflect diversity of pastureland where oil palm expansion occurs in the Brazilian Amazon. The use of certain land areas authorised within the RED may also represent a significant limit in terms of biodiversity protection. This study provides new insights that may be used to improve life cycle assessment of biodiesel from palm oil in order to avoid unintended policy consequences.

In this work, several models have been coupled in order to represent the whole forest-to-energy production chain: the growth phase, the primary transformation, and the ultimate conversion to heat and/or electricity. Combined with literature data for wood transportation, they gave a complete balance of emissions to compare with fossil-based alternatives. An economic analysis completes the work. The results show that wood-based scenarios do perform better than their fossil counterparts, but also that the primary transformation and transportation items can greatly diminish this advantage. Further work will focus on determining the best metric to assess the climate change impact of forestry scenarios based on the timing of carbo dioxide emissions as well as geophysical effects such as albedo and evapotranspiration. Proceedings of the 24th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 6-9 June 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 1402-1404