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AbstractAchieving gender equality and women’s empowerment in food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition, as well as more just, resilient and sustainable food systems for all. This chapter uses a scoping review to assess the current evidence on pathways between gender equality, women’s empowerment and food systems. The chapter uses an adaptation of the food system framework to organize the evidence and identify where evidence is strong, and where gaps remain. Results show strong evidence on women’s differing access to resources, shaped and reinforced by contextual social gender norms, and on links between women’s empowerment and maternal education and important outcomes, such as nutrition and dietary diversity. However, evidence is limited on issues such as gender considerations in food systems for women in urban areas and in aquaculture value chains, best practices and effective pathways for engaging men in the process of women’s empowerment in food systems, and how to address issues related to migration, crises and indigenous food systems. While there are gender-informed evaluation studies examining the effectiveness of gender- and nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, evidence indicating the long-term sustainability of such impacts remains limited. The chapter recommends key areas for investment: improving women’s leadership and decision-making in food systems, promoting equal and positive gender norms, improving access to resources, and building cross-contextual research evidence on gender and food systems.

Cloud data center’s total operating cost is conquered by electricity cost and carbon tax incurred due to energy consumption from the grid and its associated carbon emission. In this work, we consider geo-distributed sustainable datacenter’s with varying on-site green energy generation, electricity prices, carbon intensity and carbon tax. The objective function is devised to reduce the operating cost including electricity cost and carbon cost incurred on the power consumption of servers and cooling devices. We propose renewable-aware algorithms to schedule the workload to the data centers with an aim to maximize the green energy usage. Due to the uncertainty and time variant nature of renewable energy availability, an investigation is performed to identify the impact of carbon footprint, carbon tax and electricity cost in data center selection on total operating cost reduction. In addition, on-demand dynamic optimal frequency-based load distribution within the cluster nodes is performed to eliminate hot spots due to high processor utilization. The work suggests optimal virtual machine placement decision to maximize green energy usage with reduced operating cost and carbon emission.

This paper analyzes India's progress towards a sustainable energy future by AD2030. The India energy scenario is analyzed, taking into account governmental plans, and using the latest planning tools. The importance of hydro, nuclear and renewable sources in the integrated energy system is brought out in the India case study. The study highlights strategies and policy requirements for a sustainable energy infrastructure for India. These findings could be quite relevant, especially to other developing countries, in their quest for sustainable development.

Agricultural waste-based heterogeneous catalysts are emerging as efficient and green catalysts. The present study explored the agricultural waste-based heterogeneous catalyst utilized in the production of biodiesel. The plant waste is composed of organic compounds and various metals which, on combustion, produces ashes that mainly consist of various metal carbonates and oxides. The most commonly employed approach for the solid catalyst preparation from plant materials is the calcination process, and it is performed at temperatures ranging from 300 to 1200°C. It is known that the temperature employed for calcination plays a vital role in the composition and development of the morphology of the catalyst. The variation in alkalinity, porosity, and, accordingly, the catalytic activity of the catalyst is significantly influenced by the calcination temperature. It was found that the potassium present in the form of oxide and carbonate as the main constituent in such catalysts played a significant role in delivering catalytic efficacy. Therefore, a number of agricultural waste-based catalysts were reported as efficient catalysts. The selection of the catalyst may be one of the important issues for application in large-scale biodiesel production. Thus, the present study was undertaken for the preparation of a rank list among the reported catalysts by following the VIKOR (Višekriterijumsko Kompromisno Rangiranje) multicriterion decision-making approach. In this work, the ranking study was performed considering the reported optimum reaction conditions (ORCs) of biodiesel synthesis reactions. The study was conducted strictly on the basis of the parameters, viz., catalyst concentration ( C 1 ), MTOR ( C 2 ), reaction temperature ( C 3 ), reaction time ( C 4 ), and biodiesel yield ( C 5 ). The parameters are considered good if C 1 , C 2 , C 3 , and C 4 are low or minimum and if C 5 is high or maximum. The catalyst prepared from plantain peel showed the best performance and ranked as the first one followed by Musa paradisiaca peel and cocoa pod husk catalysts which are ranked second. Thus, the VIKOR method can be useful for comparison and ranking purposes if there are a large number of data, and this may be expanded for thorough study by considering more criteria which may give more fruitful results.

Abstract Industrial sustainability has gained huge attention in the scientific community owing to the concern of global warming. Establishing sustainability indicators by the application of exergy analysis can guide and motivate industrial sustainability. In this context, an attempt is made to establish sustainability indicators for the industrial sector. Different measures to improve the sustainability of the industrial sector of Bangladesh are also discussed. Based on the energy consumption data from the year 2000–2015, energy, exergy, and sustainability analyses are performed. It is found that the energy efficiency varies from 55.01% to 59.67% and exergy efficiency varies from 53.11% to 56.97%. Exergy efficiency is found to be at lower side due to the accounting of irreversibility. Various sustainability indicators such as sustainability index, depletion number, exergetic renewable share, cumulative exergy loss, and non-renewable exergetic share have been studied as well. It is observed that depletion numbers vary from 43% to 45% and the sustainability index varies from 2.21 to 2.32. Non-renewable exergetic share is as high as 98% and maximum cumulative exergy loss is found to be 217.3 PJ in 2015. Improvement potential shows a continuous increase from 22.75% in 2000 to 101.89% in 2015. Waste heat recovery, energy audit, waste minimization, and adopting renewable energy sources are recommended to increase the efficiency and sustainability of this sector. The outcome of this study reveals that exergy analysis is an effective technique to develop energy conservation policies for this sector.

In the last two centuries, land-use change (LUC) has been the most important direct change driver for terrestrial ecosystems. In contrast with the consequent ecosystem degradation, forward-looking spatial policies and target landscape and land-use planning processes are needed from a sustainability perspective. The present paper proposes a framework of action, including different landscape-planning and ecological approaches: from spatial modelling to recognize LUC and build different scenarios, to ecosystem service (ES) assessment to evaluate possible environmental impacts. Three different scenarios were explored: Trend, No Tillage, and Energy crops. The sediment delivery ratio and carbon storage and sequestration ESs were assessed and compared for each scenario. The results show that regional development in line with past trends could lead to further land degradation (with ES value losses, in a decade, greater than 5%). Instead, the two scenarios proposed in compliance with EU policies could bring benefits, if only those related to moderate LUCs and respecting the naturally grass-vegetated land. The aim of the paper is to support decision makers and local communities in the landscape planning landscape planning process. From the local to global scale, guided and shared LUC management allows us to implement sustainable development, based not only on a deep knowledge of the physical environment but also of social and economic issues.

The present study is designed to evaluate the potential of deoiled algal biomass (DAB) residue as an alternative resource for the production of bioethanol and biopolymers in a biorefinery approach. Hybrid pretreatment method resulted in higher sugar solubilization (0.590 g/g DAB) than the corresponding individual physicochemical (0.481 g/g DAB) and enzymatic methods (0.484 g/g DAB). Subsequent utilization of sugars from hybrid pretreatment for bioethanol using Saccharomyces cerevisiaeresulted in maximum bioethanol production at pH 5.5 (0.145 ± 0.008 g/g DAB) followed by pH 5.0 (0.122 ± 0.004 g/g DAB) and pH 6.0 (0.102 ± 0.002 g/g DAB). The experiments for biopolymer (PHB: polyhydroxybutyrate) production resulted in 0.43 ± 0.20 g PHB/g DCW. Extracted polymer on NMR and FT-IR analysis showed the presence of PHB. Exploration of DAB as an alternative renewable resource for multiple biobased products supports sustainability and also enables entirety use of DAB by addressing the DAB-residue allied disposal issues.