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Data was either measured in situ in the field (N2O flux, soil moisture, rainfall and air temperature) or samples were taken, processed, and analysed in the laboratory (soil pH, electrical conductivity (EC), ammonium, nitrate, microbial community composition and crop yield). N2O flux data was measured on a mobile gas chromatograph (GC) system and integrated to obtain peak areas on Peak490Win10Canabis programme. The times, peak areas and sample ID were then exported into a .CHR file and imported into Flux.NET.3.3 which calculated N2O flux as an output in Excel which was exported as .csv file for deposit in EIDC. N2O flux was used to calculate cumulative N2O flux using trapezoidal integration in Excel and saved in a separate .csv file for deposit in EIDC. Soil moisture was measured on Accilmas with data stored as a .csv on a DataSnap that was downloaded and sorted by treatment and saved as a .csv file. Rainfall and air temperature were downloaded from the weather station as .csv file. Soil pH and EC were recorded manually into a notebook and input into an Excel spreadsheet and exported as a .csv file. Soil ammonium and nitrate content was measured using the microplate method using a programme called Gen5. Date was exported into an Excel spreadsheet and absorbance units used to calculate ammonium/nitrate content in milligrams per kilogram using a calibration curve from a set of standards in an Excel spreadsheet. This was exported as a .csv file. Crop growth data was recorded in the field in a notebook and input into an Excel spreadsheet and exported as a .csv file. Crop yield was recorded in a notebook and input into an Excel spreadsheet and exported as a .csv file. Microbial community composition was measured using 16S gene sequencing on an Illumina MiSeq. This generated raw sequencing reads which were processed using Python and filtered using QIIME v1.3.1. creating asv.count.table.csv of counts of each Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) per sample and taxa.table.csv of the taxonomic lineage for each ASVs. This dataset contains field data on nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, microbial community composition, crop yield and growth and soil biochemical properties. The field trial consisted of three different treatments of control, conventional microplastic addition and biodegradable microplastic addition where winter barley was grown. The data presented are from field and laboratory measurements. Data was collected by the data authors. The field trial was carried out from September 2020 to July 2021 at Henfaes Field Centre, UK. Research was funded through NERC Grant NE/V005871/1. Do agricultural microplastics undermine food security and sustainable development in developing countries?

The crucial role evaluation can play in the co-development of project design and its implementation will be addressed through the analysis of a case study, the Green Communities (GC) project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Environment within the EU Interregional Operational Program (2007-2013) "Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency". The project's broader goals included an attempt to trigger a change in Italian local development strategies, especially for mountain and inland areas, which would be tailored to the real needs of communities, and based on a sustainable exploitation and management of the territorial assets. The goal was not achieved, and this paper addresses the issues of how GC could have been more effective in fostering a vision of change, and which design adaptations and evaluation procedures would have allowed the project to better cope with the unexpected consequences and resistances it encountered. The conclusions drawn are that projects should be conceived, designed and carried out as dynamic systems, inclusive of a dynamic and engaged evaluation enabling the generation of feedbacks loops, iteratively interpreting the narratives and dynamics unfolding within the project, and actively monitoring the potential of various relationships among project participants for generating positive social change.

Driven by the need to develop a wide variety of products with low environmental impact, biorefineries need to emerge as highly integrated facilities. This becomes effective when overall mass and energy integration through a centralised utility system design is undertaken. An approach combining process integration, energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission analyses is shown in this paper for Jatropha biorefinery design, primarily producing biodiesel using oil-based heterogeneously catalysed transesterification or green diesel using hydrotreatment. These processes are coupled with gasification of husk to produce syngas. Syngas is converted into end products, heat, power and methanol in the biodiesel case or hydrogen in the green diesel case. Anaerobic digestion of Jatropha by-products such as fruit shell, cake and/or glycerol has been considered to produce biogas for power generation. Combustion of fruit shell and cake is considered to provide heat. Heat recovery within biodiesel or green diesel production and the design of the utility (heat and power) system are also shown. The biorefinery systems wherein cake supplies heat for oil extraction and seed drying while fruit shells and glycerol provide power generation via anaerobic digestion into biogas achieve energy efficiency of 53 % in the biodiesel system and 57 % in the green diesel system. These values are based on high heating values (HHV) of Jatropha feedstocks, HHV of the corresponding products and excess power generated. Results showed that both systems exhibit an energy yield per unit of land of 83 GJ ha−1. The global warming potential from GHG emissions of the net energy produced (i.e. after covering energy requirements by the biorefinery systems) was 29 g CO2-eq MJ−1, before accounting credits from displacement of fossil-based energy by bioenergy exported from the biorefineries. Using a systematic integration approach for utilisation of whole Jatropha fruit, it is shown that global warming potential and fossil primary energy use can be reduced significantly if the integrated process schemes combined with optimised cultivation and process parameters are adopted in Jatropha-based biorefineries.

Nowadays, heating using wood, briquettes, or pellets is a curious replacement to fossil fuels such as coal, oil, or gas. Unfortunately, the combustion of biofuels, especially in low-power boilers with unstable operating conditions, releases a lot of gas pollutants (e.g., carbon monoxide (CO), nitric oxide (NO), and various organic compounds) that are usually generated due to the incomplete product combustion. The combustion of biofuel in grate boilers with top-down ignition is a new approach, popular in society (mainly used for coal fuels), which improves the combustion process and reduces the amount of pollutants emitted. This study evaluated the impact of ignition techniques on the emission level of gas pollutants during the combustion of wood logs, briquettes, and pellets of pine in grate-based charging boilers. The combination of top ignition mode with pinewood logs allowed us to achieve a reduction of 6% in CO and sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission into the atmosphere. However, the combination of top-down ignition mode with pellets and briquettes produced, in fully operational conditions, 1- to 18-fold higher levels of CO and SO2 respectively, than bottom-up ignition, after an initial period of low level CO and SO2 emissions. During the tests (mainly with ignition from top), substantial emissions of NO were observed of up to 400 mg·m−3 at 10% O2. Therefore, further research is required to decrease emission related to the content of nitrogen in biomass. In this respect, research of impact on the combustion temperature of such emissions is needed.

AbstractThe integration of power plants and desalination systems has attracted increasing attention over the past few years as an effective solution to tackle sustainable development and climate change issues. In this light, this paper introduces a novel modelling and optimization approach for a combined-cycle power plant (CCPP) integrated with reverse osmosis (RO) and multi-effect distillation (MED) desalination systems. The integrated CCPP and RO–MED desalination system is thermodynamically modelled utilizing MATLAB and EES software environments, and the results are validated via Thermoflex software simulations. Comprehensive energy, exergic, exergoeconomic, and exergoenvironmental (4E) analyses are performed to assess the performance of the integrated system. Furthermore, a new multi-objective water cycle algorithm (MOWCA) is implemented to optimize the main performance parameters of the integrated system. Finally, a real-world case study is performed based on Iran's Shahid Salimi Neka power plant. The results reveal that the system exergy efficiency is increased from 8.4 to 51.1% through the proposed MOWCA approach, and the energy and freshwater costs are reduced by 8.4% and 29.4%, respectively. The latter results correspond to an environmental impact reduction of 14.2% and 33.5%. Hence, the objective functions are improved from all exergic, exergoeconomic, and exergoenvironmental perspectives, proving the approach to be a valuable tool towards implementing more sustainable combined power plants and desalination systems.

Abstract This article focuses on the results obtained by the enforcement of a original greenhouse gas emissions policy, issued in recent years in several municipalities in Northern Italy. The Municipality of Reggio Emilia was one of the firsts in Italy to develop and adopt a voluntary building energy-consumption certification method called Ecoabita, aiming to promote energy efficiency in buildings over its jurisdiction. Several reasons make this project innovative: first, the certification method has been processed through and verified by a quality international agency, secondly the procedure is assisting financial-incentive policies both on mandatory (European Directive 2002/91/CE) and voluntary basis (Municipality Protocol Ecoabita), finally it allows to obtain eligible credits for avoided emissions that can be negotiated on the CO2 exchange market. With specific reference to Reggio Emilia case, acknowledged the amount of actions, that are normally scheduled in the municipality throughout a year, it has been evaluated the benefit, in terms of environmental improvement, descended from the protocol, also projecting their trend in future years up to 2020 as well, demonstrating the scheduled interventions are fundamental in sought of the achievement of the Kyoto and Copenhagen commitments. The entire procedure has been developed in accordance to the parameters given by UNFCCC for these kinds of analyses and has been recently confirmed to be one of the most accurate international accounting procedure by a survey developed by the scientific committee of the European Project LIFE-LAKS.

Project: Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) datasets - These data have been generated as part of the internationally-coordinated Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6; see also GMD Special Issue: http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/special_issue590.html). The simulation data provides a basis for climate research designed to answer fundamental science questions and serves as resource for authors of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR6). CMIP6 is a project coordinated by the Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) as part of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Phase 6 builds on previous phases executed under the leadership of the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and relies on the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) and the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) along with numerous related activities for implementation. The original data is hosted and partially replicated on a federated collection of data nodes, and most of the data relied on by the IPCC is being archived for long-term preservation at the IPCC Data Distribution Centre (IPCC DDC) hosted by the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ). The project includes simulations from about 120 global climate models and around 45 institutions and organizations worldwide. Summary: These data include the subset used by IPCC AR6 WGI authors of the datasets originally published in ESGF for 'CMIP6.HighResMIP.MOHC.HadGEM3-GC31-MM.control-1950' with the full Data Reference Syntax following the template 'mip_era.activity_id.institution_id.source_id.experiment_id.member_id.table_id.variable_id.grid_label.version'. The HadGEM3-GC3.1-N216ORCA025 climate model, released in 2016, includes the following components: aerosol: UKCA-GLOMAP-mode, atmos: MetUM-HadGEM3-GA7.1 (N216; 432 x 324 longitude/latitude; 85 levels; top level 85 km), land: JULES-HadGEM3-GL7.1, ocean: NEMO-HadGEM3-GO6.0 (eORCA025 tripolar primarily 0.25 deg; 1440 x 1205 longitude/latitude; 75 levels; top grid cell 0-1 m), seaIce: CICE-HadGEM3-GSI8 (eORCA025 tripolar primarily 0.25 deg; 1440 x 1205 longitude/latitude). The model was run by the Met Office Hadley Centre, Fitzroy Road, Exeter, Devon, EX1 3PB, UK (MOHC) in native nominal resolutions: aerosol: 100 km, atmos: 100 km, land: 100 km, ocean: 25 km, seaIce: 25 km.