• Energy Research
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Abstract Natural resources exist independent of human intervention. Although these interventions can and do affect the balance between ecological and biological diversity conditions these resources support, and their use to promote economic development. Currently, the unsustainable use of these resources threatens this balance, calling for more sustainable patterns of natural resource use and conservation. The primary responsibility for ensuring the proper balance lies with governments, leading to various policies and programs to preserve natural resources. The ultimate goal is to make the masses aware of natural assets’ importance and encourage their sustainable use. To successfully implement, however, these government practices require public communication and participation, and the full consideration of public opinion at various levels of governance. A predictive analytics framework is proposed for understanding public opinion on government policies to improve sustainable water governance. An integrated policy initiative to balance water resources use and conservation launched by the Indian government served as a test case for applying the framework in an attempt to accurately classify the opinion polarity related to the policy. The conventional feature extraction is applied to pre-processed datasets to extract the relevant features. Subsequently, swarm-based feature selection is applied to filter out optimal features. Lastly, opinion mining and textual analysis are performed to determine the most relevant water management factors that need immediate attention. The proposed framework serves as a policy evaluation strategy in the water management domain. The paper closes with a discussion of the general applicability of the proposed framework.

The basins of the Indus and Ganges rivers cover 2.20 million km2 and are inhabited by more than a billion people. The region is under extreme pressures of population and poverty, unregulated utilization of the resources and low levels of productivity. The needs are: (1) development policies that are regionally differentiated to ensure resource sustainability and high productivity; (2) immediate development and implementation of policies for sound groundwater management and energy use; (3) improvement of the fragile food security and to broaden its base; and (4) policy changes to address land fragmentation and improved infrastructure. Meeting these needs will help to improve productivity, reduce rural poverty and improve overall human development.

Nowadays in India the renewable energy sources are continuum growing to accommodate the current demands of energy. Therefore, for an effective use of this energy, a careful and critical analysis is required. As per literature review, India was reported having a massive potential as superpower source in terms of wind energy In the present research, an effort has been carried out to explore various decision making approaches such as TOPSIS, VIKOR, and Fuzzy analysis, to subsequently rank various Indian states with respect to their wind energy potential. In this perspective, potentiality indices have been found on the justification of five significant factors that influence the effective use of wind energy and then a classification has been proposed. It was found that the wind power density is the most significant parameter while the technical expertise has been found as the least significant among identified parameters. The results presented here indicates that among all alternative states of India, Tamilnadu and Maharashtra have the maximum potential to tap the wind energy potential. This study will act as a guide for various government agencies to re-evaluate and re-formulate their energy policies as well as will help various investors (under the ‘Make in India’ campaign) orientated to do business here, to take a well informed decision. The present study also provides a way to make strong policies, in the area of high wind energy potential, in order to maximize the use of renewable source of energy which allows to tackle the societal need and poverty.

Renewable energy-based off-grid projects have played a crucial role in Sri Lanka’s universal electrification effort. The paper, in this context, unravels two crucial and quite interrelated aspects of decentralised off-grid electrification in the country: a) it critically analyses the off-grid electricity sector development and assesses its contribution to the universal electrification in the country and; b) it examines the current set of challenges associated with the off-grid electrification in the larger context of massive grid expansion. A mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods is employed as tools of analysis. The paper brings out several policy-relevant findings. Strategic policy interventions coupled with targeted policy goals, robust community-centric management structures, well-designed credit systems, and well-structured capacity-building initiatives are identified as key leveraging points for the success of off-grid electrification projects. The techno-economic analysis of an existing micro-hydro project reveals that there exist opportunities for more productive use of existing capacity. Grid interconnection of off-grid energy projects emerges as a major challenge beset with a whole gamut of technical, legal, regulatory, financial, and social conundrums. Interestingly, the intensity of such challenges differs across ownership types.

The threat of biodiversity loss and mass extinction of species with an aftermath will shape all lives now and those to come. In this context, recent empirical studies illustrate various drivers of biodiversity for better environmental quality; however, the impact of the insurance market has not been thoroughly examined. Likewise, the possible non-linearities between biodiversity and its determinants are ignored in the current empirical literature for BRICS economies. Therefore, this work is the first to explore the effect of the insurance market, climate change, and renewable energy on biodiversity in BRICS economies using an advanced method of the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) method. The findings illustrated that a decline in the insurance market alleviates biodiversity loss and stimulates environmental quality. In contrast, an increasing insurance market augments biodiversity loss and negatively affects ecological quality. Furthermore, the findings uncovered that carbon emissions are detrimental to environmental quality. Lastly, the results report that reducing the level of renewable energy worsens biodiversity loss while boosting renewable energy utilization declines biodiversity loss. The policymakers and regulatory authorities in the BRICS should adopt the risk-based approach proposed by the network of greening the financial system (NGFS) to tackle the dilemma of double materiality between financial institutions and biodiversity.

This paper analyses the impact of postponing global mitigation action on abatement costs and energy systems changes in China and India. It compares energy-system changes and mitigation costs from a global and two national energy-system models under two global emission pathways with medium likelihood of meeting the 2 °C target: a least-cost pathway and a pathway that postpones ambitious mitigation action, starting from the Copenhagen Accord pledges. Both pathways have similar 2010–2050 cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. The analysis shows that postponing mitigation action increases the lock-in in less energy efficient technologies and results in much higher cumulative mitigation costs. The models agree that carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear energy are important mitigation technologies, while the shares of biofuels and other renewables vary largely over the models. Differences between India and China with respect to the timing of emission reductions and the choice of mitigation measures relate to differences in projections of rapid economic change, capital stock turnover and technological development. Furthermore, depending on the way it is implemented, climate policy could increase indoor air pollution, but it is likely to provide synergies for energy security. These relations should be taken into account when designing national climate policies.

Sufficient production, consistent food supply, and environmental protection in urban +settings are major global concerns for future sustainable cities. Currently, sustainable food supply is under intense pressure due to exponential population growth, expanding urban dwellings, climate change, and limited natural resources. The recent novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic crisis has impacted sustainable fresh food supply, and has disrupted the food supply chain and prices significantly. Under these circumstances, urban horticulture and crop cultivation have emerged as potential ways to expand to new locations through urban green infrastructure. Therefore, the objective of this study is to review the salient features of contemporary urban horticulture, in addition to illustrating traditional and innovative developments occurring in urban environments. Current urban cropping systems, such as home gardening, community gardens, edible landscape, and indoor planting systems, can be enhanced with new techniques, such as vertical gardening, hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, and rooftop gardening. These modern techniques are ecofriendly, energy- saving, and promise food security through steady supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables to urban neighborhoods. There is a need, in this modern era, to integrate information technology tools in urban horticulture, which could help in maintaining consistent food supply during (and after) a pandemic, as well as make agriculture more sustainable.

Since the Kyoto protocol agreement, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) hasgarnered large emphasis in terms of certified emission reductions (CER) not only amidst the globalcarbon market but also in India. This paper attempts to assess the impact of CDM towardssustainable development particularly in rural domestic utility sector that mainly includes lightingand cooking applications, with electricity as the source of energy. A detailed survey has undertakenin the state of Kerala, in southern part of India to study the rural domestic energy consumptionpattern. The data collected was analyzed that throws insight into the interrelationships of thevarious parameters that influence domestic utility sector pertaining to energy consumption byusing electricity as the source of energy. The interrelationships between the different parameterswere modeled that optimizes the contribution of electricity on domestic utility sector. The resultswere used to estimate the feasible extent of CO2 emission reduction through use of electricity as theenergy resources, vis-à-vis its economic viability through cost effectiveness. The analysis alsoprovides a platform for implementing CDM projects in the sector and related prospects withrespects to the Indian scenario.