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This report is a policy briefing containing the main findings of the PhD project Co-Creation of Sustainability-Oriented Innovations (SOIs) in Tourism. This project was conducted in close partnership with the Barcelona City Council to co-design institutional innovations to address sustainability challenges in the city by widely engaging stakeholders in a participatory process. To enable an open participatory process, the project was nested in the Consell de Turisme i Ciutat, which gathers key public, private and civil society organizations to discuss the main tourism development issues in the city of Barcelona. The project gathers data by conducting individual interviews, and a series of stakeholder workshops to better understand the complexity of designing SOIs collectively. Amongst the main findings, this report identifies how individual and collective conceptual nuances of innovation and sustainability affect the stakeholders' ability to embark on sustainability innovations in tourism. Further, it describes collective objectives, drivers and barriers that stakeholders identified when developing SOIs. The report also offers an analysis of current tourism specific and non-tourism SOIs in Barcelona and potential ways in which these existing SOIs could be leveraged to facilitate systemic change. One of the key findings of the study is a collection of co-created SOIs by the stakeholders, which are analysed in terms of their sustainability impact and their type of innovation. These SOIs include a wide range of policy actions and interventions related to management, product development and marketing, education, incentives and monitoring and evaluation. Amongst these SOIs, during the project, the stakeholders decided to focus on expanding on four SOIs which could have a greater potential to create systemic change in the sustainable development of the city and thus in the tourism sector. These four SOIs are presented in this report as one-page business plans to facilitate its potential application. Finally, the study provides a series of recommendations to enhance collaboration and governance mechanisms to allow SOIs to thrive as collective actions that are powered by legitimacy, trust and a fair distribution of power. In this line, to empower stakeholders to utilize the findings of this project the report introduces the idea of creating a Sustainability Innovation LivingLab.

In this issue we address the practice of rainwater harvesting in different settings, presenting experiences from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Paraguay. Some of the papers were originally presented at the IX International Meeting of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network“Water, Rights, and Utopias: priorities in the process of democratization of water politics“, João Pessoa, Paraiba, Brazil, 3-7 September 2018. Article 1 was authored by David Sauri, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, co-editor of this issue. The article provides an overall introduction to the topic of rainwater harvesting. Article 2, by Martin Sanzana Calvet, Institute of Strategic Studies for Human Development (INEDH), Concepción, Bio-Bio, Chile, addresses the practice of fog catching in arid and semi arid regions of Chile. In Article 3, Daniel Tagle-Zamora, University of Guanajuato, Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, presents findings from research on the implementation of public policies oriented at the provision of rainwater catchment technologies, mostly for domestic use ,in several municipalities of the semi arid State of Guanajuato, Mexico. Article 4 was co-authored by Roberto de Sousa Miranda, Federal University of the interior of Pernambuco and Federal University of Campina Grande, Paraiba, Brazil, and Laiany Tassila Ferreira, Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Brazil.The article discusses the implementation of a national plan to provide rainwater cisterns in the semi arid region of North eastern Brazil, with emphasis on the experience of the State of Paraiba. Finally, Article 5, by Ana Maria Attias Sole and Ricardo Lombardo Lopez, from the North-eastern National University, Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina, provides an overview of the historic legacy of water practices and technologies inherited fromthe“syncretism”between indigenous communities (Tupi-Guarani), and the Jesuit territorial expansion that took place between the early seventeenth and the mid eighteenth centuries in a large region of South America encompassing parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The article focuses mainly on examples from Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, and provides insights into the significance of historical-cultural research in the production of knowledge about rainwater technologies and the associated culture and practices, which also contributes to our network’s Thematic Area 7, Water-related Art, Communication, Culture, and Education.

A simulation model was developed for the hydrolysis of lactose, the main carbohydrate in whey, as the first stage in the production of 2G bioethanol (second generation) obtained from food waste. The acid and enzymatic hydrolysis of a model substrate of whey (5-20% w/w lactose) was studied experimentally to obtain the necessary kinetic parameters for the modeling and simulation of the reactors involved for a scale of 88 t of whey/h. This analysis demonstrated comparative advantages of enzymatic hydrolysis in terms of reactor dimensions and operating conditions. By means of an exergo-economic analysis of this process, it was determined that the enzymatic hydrolysis with concentration 20% w/w lactose, reaction modeled as pseudo-first order in an optimal system of two reactors (5 m3 and 4 m3) of complete mixture in series, be the most beneficial for achieving an 82% conversion, involving an exergo-economic cost of 31.2 U$S/s.

This investigation is framed in the analysis of impacts in the local development starting from the taking of decisions on projects of rural energy in Cuban communities that have as economic main activity the agricultural sector, illustrated the results of a case study where the technological most viable options are selected under the optics of the improvement of indicators of community resources. The methods and used materials are characteristic of a field work with application model are characterized for the taking of decisions in the energy area and their sources SURE, as geographical region the community isolated rural “Manantiales” linked to the agrarian sector in the republic of Cuba and the present period review in the thematic one approached. The main indicators are sketched in each resource of the rural community under the optics of the SURE in their version 3.0, as well the characterization of the prediction of the impacts at each technological option on the resources, is exhibited a mean of impacts and the classification of the technologies according to the level of achievements contribute to the indicators of community resources, obtaining as a result that the hydro energy technology is the most viable option with a value of 100 points in the scale from 0 to 100, followed by the GRID with 91.11 and of the photovoltaic systems based on silicon panels with 90.57, in this case all technologies contribute a significant level of achievements to the local community development.

This paper presents the heat exchanger networks (HEN) application to the esterification of used vegetable oils (UVOs) with acid catalysis for the biodiesel production. Different methods are applied to obtain minimum heat quantities and the HEN for a processes capacity of 0,19 kg/s of UVOs. A minimum temperature difference (∆Tmin) of 10 °C is considered and the minimum requirements of warming and cooling, resulting in 4629, 87 W and 10066, 30 W, respectively. When the heat exchanger net is applied, the required steam service in the process decreases in 78,92% and the cooling water service in 62,48%, demonstrating that the integration reduces the energetic requirements in relation to the non-integrated process