• Energy Research
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Urbanisation poses new and complex sustainability challenges. Socio-economic activities drive material and energy flows in cities that influence the health of ecosystems inside and outside the urban system. Recent studies suggest that these flows, under the urban metabolism (UM) metaphor, can be extended to encompass the assessment of urban ecosystem services (UES). Advancing UM approaches to assess UES may be a valuable solution to these arising sustainability challenges, which can support urban planning decisions. This paper critically reviews UM literature related to the UES concept and identifies approaches that may allow or improve the assessment of UES within UM frameworks. We selected from the UM literature 42 studies that encompass UES aspects, and analysed them on the following key investigation themes: temporal information, spatial information, system boundary aspects and cross-scale indicators. The analysis showed that UES are rarely acknowledged in UM literature, and that existing UM approaches have limited capacity to capture the complexity of spatio-temporal and multi-scale information underpinning UES, which has hampered the implementation of operational decision support systems so far. We use these results to identify and illustrate pathways towards a UM-UES modelling approach. Our review suggests that cause–effect dynamics should be integrated with the UM framework, based on spatially-specific social, economic and ecological data. System dynamics can inform on the causal relationships underpinning UES in cities and, therefore, can help moving towards a knowledge base tool to support urban planners in addressing urban challenges.

This paper addresses the issue whether the concepts mass customization and sustainability are fundamentally compatible by asking the question: can a mass customized product be sustainable? Some factors indicate that mass customized products are less sustainable than standardized products; however other factors suggest the opposite. This paper explores these factors during three life cycle phases for a product: Production, Use and End of Life. It is concluded that there is not an unambiguous causal relationship between mass customization and sustainability; however several factors unique to mass customized products are essential to consider during product development.

AbstractDefining and measuring progress in adaptation are important questions for climate adaptation science, policy, and practice. Here, we assess the progress of urban adaptation planning in 327 European cities between 2005 and 2020 using three ‘ADAptation plan Quality Assessment’ indices, called ADAQA-1/ 2/ 3, that combine six plan quality principles. Half of the cities have an adaptation plan and its quality significantly increased over time. However, generally, plan quality is still low in many cities. Participation and monitoring and evaluation are particularly weak aspects in urban adaptation policy, together with plan ‘consistency’. Consistency connects impacts and vulnerabilities with adaptation goals, planned measures, actions, monitoring and evaluation, and participation processes. Consistency is a key factor in the overall quality of plans. To help evaluate the quality of plans and policies and promote learning, we suggest incorporating our ADAptation plan Quality Assessment indices into the portfolio of adaptation progress assessments and tracking methodologies.

Bioelectrochemical systems have been considered a promising novel technology that shows an enhanced energy recovery, as well as generation of value-added products. A number of recent studies suggested that an enhancement of carbon conversion and biogas production can be achieved in an integrated system of microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) and anaerobic digestion (AD) for waste activated sludge (WAS). Microbial communities in integrated system would build a thorough energetic and metabolic interaction network regarding fermentation communities and electrode respiring communities. The characterization of integrated community structure and community shifts is not well understood, however, it starts to attract interest of scientists and engineers.In the present work, energy recovery and WAS conversion are comprehensively affected by typical pretreated biosolid characteristics. We investigated the interaction of fermentation communities and electrode respiring communities in an integrated system of WAS fermentation and MEC for hydrogen recovery. A high energy recovery was achieved in the MECs feeding WAS fermentation liquid through alkaline pretreatment. Some anaerobes belonging to Firmicutes (Acetoanaerobium, Acetobacterium, and Fusibacter) showed synergistic relationship with exoelectrogens in the degradation of complex organic matter or recycling of MEC products (H2). High protein and polysaccharide but low fatty acid content led to the dominance of Proteiniclasticum and Parabacteroides, which showed a delayed contribution to the extracellular electron transport leading to a slow cascade utilization of WAS.Efficient pretreatment could supply more short-chain fatty acids and higher conductivities in the fermentative liquid, which facilitated mass transfer in anodic biofilm. The overall performance of WAS cascade utilization was substantially related to the microbial community structures, which in turn depended on the initial pretreatment to enhance WAS fermentation. It is worth noting that species in AD and MEC communities are able to build complex networks of interaction, which have not been sufficiently studied so far. It is therefore important to understand how choosing operational parameters can influence reactor performances. The current study highlights the interaction of fermentative bacteria and exoelectrogens in the integrated system.

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the construction of markets for clean technologies by examining the mechanisms through which new technologies succeed (or fail) to be transformed into goods that are both environmentally and economically valuable. We envisage this process as a particular form of market innovation in which new product qualities are inscribed into market architectures. We focus on the market for clean technologies that emerged as a result of the EU Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) directive that required polluting industries, including livestock farms, to implement the “best available techniques” in order to reduce their emissions. Our case study traces a Danish start-up firm's endeavors to commercialize one such “best available technique:” a solution for reducing ammonia emissions from farms. Building on the literature on the shaping of markets, we show that the construction of a market for clean technologies hinges upon the composition of a complex network of actors with divergent, and sometimes conflicting, interests, in which market devices (in this case, a technology list) play a pivotal role. More generally, the paper contributes to discussions on controversies and performativity in market practices and on the construction of markets designed to address environmental issues.