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The ‘4 per mille Soils for Food Security and Climate’ was launched at the COP21 with an aspiration to increase global soil organic matter stocks by 4 per 1000 (or 0.4 %) per year as a compensation for the global emissions of greenhouse gases by anthropogenic sources. This paper surveyed the soil organic carbon (SOC) stock estimates and sequestration potentials from 20 regions in the world (New Zealand, Chile, South Africa, Australia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, India, China Taiwan, South Korea, China Mainland, United States of America, France, Canada, Belgium, England & Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Russia). We asked whether the 4 per mille initiative is feasible for the region. The outcomes highlight region specific efforts and scopes for soil carbon sequestration. Reported soil C sequestration rates globally show that under best management practices, 4 per mille or even higher sequestration rates can be accomplished. High C sequestration rates (up to 10 per mille) can be achieved for soils with low initial SOC stock (topsoil less than 30 t C ha− 1), and at the first twenty years after implementation of best management practices. In addition, areas which have reached equilibrium will not be able to further increase their sequestration. We found that most studies on SOC sequestration only consider topsoil (up to 0.3 m depth), as it is considered to be most affected by management techniques. The 4 per mille number was based on a blanket calculation of the whole global soil profile C stock, however the potential to increase SOC is mostly on managed agricultural lands. If we consider 4 per mille in the top 1m of global agricultural soils, SOC sequestration is between 2-3 Gt C year− 1, which effectively offset 20–35% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As a strategy for climate change mitigation, soil carbon sequestration buys time over the next ten to twenty years while other effective sequestration and low carbon technologies become viable. The challenge for cropping farmers is to find disruptive technologies that will further improve soil condition and deliver increased soil carbon. Progress in 4 per mille requires collaboration and communication between scientists, farmers, policy makers, and marketeers.

Abstract Social acceptance of innovative technologies is a key element of an effective transition towards more sustainable energy economies. However, innovative technologies like genetic modification also tend to spark controversy and backlash. So far, efforts to inform the public about any risks and benefits of novel technologies not only have struggled to foster acceptance but also neglect the interdependent foundations of consumer decision-making. Through a controlled experiment with German consumers (N = 322), we examine whether consumer support and rejection of genetic modification in bioenergy crops is influenced by the statements and actions of actors throughout the supply chain. In specific, we show that the decision of energy companies to sell and support GM bioenergy positively impacts consumer decisions to support. To ensure that decision outcomes were specifically impacted by the expressions of corporate actors, we controlled for the content and valence of information by random assignment to one of three treatments in which participants received positive, negative, or balanced (risks and benefits) information. We find that negative messaging diminished support and increased rejection relative to the other treatments. Lastly, the statements and actions of corporate actors also exerted an indirect influence on consumer decisions through their interactions with social trust and labels, e.g. greater support by farmers had a positive influence only for those who are more generally trustworthy. Given these results, we anticipate more attention to the importance of actors such as farmers and energy companies for the social acceptance of novel technologies in the energy sphere.

In this paper, we investigate the energy harvesting (EH) technique and accordingly design transceivers for a $K$ link multiple-input multiple-output interference channel. Each link consists of two full-duplex (FD) Internet of Things (IoT) nodes exchanging information simultaneously in a bi-directional communication channel. All the nodes suffer from interference, in particular strong self-interference and inter-node interference, due to operating in FD mode and simultaneous transmission at each link, respectively. Further, we divide the received signal at each node into two parts. While one part of the signal is used for information decoding, the other part is used for EH. We jointly design the transmit and receive beamforming vectors and receiver power splitting ratios by minimizing the total transmission power of the system, subject to both signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and EH threshold constraints. Furthermore, the case of multiple-input single-output interference channel is also included for the sake of comparison. We also revisit the above problems for the case when the available channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters is imperfect, where the errors of the CSI are assumed to be norm bounded. Simulation results show that the EH technique can harvest enough energy to support power consumption limited IoT devices by aiding in recharging their respective batteries.

For zero‐defect wave soldering of double‐sided and multilayer printed circuit boards, the copper through‐hole‐plating must be impervious to gas generated in the laminate for the period of a few seconds while the solder is molten. The kinetics of the gas evolution during soldering have been related quantitatively to the integrity of the plated copper. This in turn is related to the quality of the electroless copper (evaluated using the backlighting test), the nature and distribution of the catalyst (evaluated using X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy) and the methods and effectiveness of the hole‐wall preparation (evaluated using scanning electron microscopy). The relevance of laboratory measurements has been confirmed on a wide range of industrial production plating lines.

Parabolic trough power plants are currently the most commercially applied systems for CSP power generation. To improve their cost-effectiveness, one focus of industry and research is the development of processes with other heat transfer fluids than the currently used synthetic oil. One option is the utilization of water/steam in the solar field, the so-called direct steam generation (DSG). Several previous studies promoted the economic potential of DSG technology [1–3]. Analyses’ results showed that live steam parameters of up to 500°C and 120 bars are most promising and could lead to a reduction of the levelized electricity cost (LEC) of about 11% [4]. However, all of these studies only considered plants without thermal energy storage (TES). Therefore, a system analysis including integrated TES was performed by Flagsol GmbH and DLR together with Solar Millennium AG, Schott CSP GmbH and Senior Bergho¨fer GmbH, all Germany. Two types of plants are analyzed and compared in detail: a power plant with synthetic oil and a DSG power plant. The design of the synthetic oil plant is very similar to the Spanish Andasol plants [5] and includes a molten salt two-tank storage system. The DSG plant has main steam parameters of 500 °C and 112 bars and uses phase change material (PCM) for the latent and molten salt for the sensible part of the TES system. To enable comparability, both plants share the same gross electric turbine capacity of 100 MWel, the same TES capacity of nine hours of full load equivalent and the same solar multiple of the collector field of about two. This paper describes and compares both plants’ design, performance and investment. Based on these results, the LEC are calculated and the DSG plant’s potential is evaluated. One key finding is that with currently proposed DSG storage costs, the LEC of a DSG plant could be higher than those of a synthetic oil plant. When considering a plant without TES on the other hand, the DSG system could reduce the LEC. This underlines the large influence of TES and the still needed effort in the development of a commercial storage system for DSG.

The industrial sector accounts for 17% of end-use energy in the UK, and 54% globally. Therefore, there is substantial scope for simulating and assessing potential energy retrofit options for industrial buildings. Building Energy Modelling (BEM) applied to industrial buildings poses a complex but important opportunity for reducing global energy demand, due to years of renovation and expansion. Large and complex industrial buildings make modelling existing geometry for BEM difficult and time consuming. This paper presents a potential solution for quickly capturing and processing as-built geometry of a factory to be utilized in BEM. Laser scans were captured from the interior of an industrial facility to produce a Point Cloud. The existing capabilities of a Point Cloud processing software were assessed to identify the potential development opportunities to automate the conversion of Point Clouds to building geometry for BEM applications. In conclusion, scope exists for increasing the speed of 3D geometry creation of an existing industrial building for application in BEM and subsequent thermal simulation.