• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close
• 7. Clean energy close
• 13. Climate action close
• 12. Responsible consumption close
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Climate change is a global problem, which affects the various geographical regions at different levels. It is also associated with a wide range of human health problems, which pose a burden to health systems, especially in regions such as Africa. Indeed, across the African continent public health systems are under severe pressure, partly due to their fragile socioeconomic conditions. This paper reports on a cross-sectional study in six African countries (Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Namibia, Ethiopia, and Kenya) aimed at assessing their vulnerabilities to climate change, focusing on its impacts on human health. The study evaluated the levels of information, knowledge, and perceptions of public health professionals. It also examined the health systems’ preparedness to cope with these health hazards, the available resources, and those needed to build resilience to the country’s vulnerable population, as perceived by health professionals. The results revealed that 63.1% of the total respondents reported that climate change had been extensively experienced in the past years, while 32% claimed that the sampled countries had experienced them to some extent. Nigerian respondents recorded the highest levels (67.7%), followed by Kenya with 66.6%. South Africa had the lowest level of impact as perceived by the respondents (50.0%) when compared with the other sampled countries. All respondents from Ghana and Namibia reported that health problems caused by climate change are common in the two countries. As perceived by the health professionals, the inadequate resources reiterate the need for infrastructural resources, medical equipment, emergency response resources, and technical support. The study’s recommendations include the need to improve current policies at all levels (i.e., national, regional, and local) on climate change and public health and to strengthen health professionals’ skills. Improving the basic knowledge of health institutions to better respond to a changing climate is also recommended. The study provides valuable insights which may be helpful to other nations in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Bioplastics are alternatives of conventional petroleum-based plastics. Bioplastics are polymers processed from renewable sources and are biodegradable. This study aims at conducting an environmental impact assessment of the bioprocessing of agricultural wastes into bioplastics compared to petro-plastics using an LCA approach. Bioplastics were produced from potato peels in laboratory. In a biochemical reaction under heating, starch was extracted from peels and glycerin, vinegar and water were added with a range of different ratios, which resulted in producing different samples of bio-based plastics. Nevertheless, the environmental impact of the bioplastics production process was evaluated and compared to petro-plastics. A life cycle analysis of bioplastics produced in laboratory and petro-plastics was conducted. The results are presented in the form of global warming potential, and other environmental impacts including acidification potential, eutrophication potential, freshwater ecotoxicity potential, human toxicity potential, and ozone layer depletion of producing bioplastics are compared to petro-plastics. The results show that the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, through the different experiments to produce bioplastics, range between 0.354 and 0.623 kg CO2 eq. per kg bioplastic compared to 2.37 kg CO2 eq. per kg polypropylene as a petro-plastic. The results also showed that there are no significant potential effects for the bioplastics produced from potato peels on different environmental impacts in comparison with poly-β-hydroxybutyric acid and polypropylene. Thus, the bioplastics produced from agricultural wastes can be manufactured in industrial scale to reduce the dependence on petroleum-based plastics. This in turn will mitigate GHG emissions and reduce the negative environmental impacts on climate change.

We researched China's climate and sustainable development goal with relevant and susceptible instruments capable of inducing and mitigating carbon emissions. Amidst the contributor to the global carbon emissions, China is caught in between mitigating its carbon emission and aiming towards placing its national contribution of emissions to the acceptable levels of 1.5 °C and below 2 °C. Following the intricacies surrounding China's sustainable development as it contains its economic and environmental performance, we adopt China's data of 1980 and 2018 with different scientific approaches (nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL), dynamic ordinary least square test, and bootstrap Granger causality) with different instruments (such as economic growth, financial development, renewable energy, and innovation policies) to research China's sustainable development. For clear exposition and insight into our findings with policies attached, we draw a conclusion from the outcomes of the mentioned approaches. From NARDL and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), we find that economic growth through economic activities is statistically significant in determining the trend (increase) of carbon emissions in China in both periods (short run and long run). However, other selected instruments (financial, renewable, and innovation policies) tend towards controlling and moderating the carbon emissions in China. Thus, China has good prospects to mitigate its carbon emissions if considered tailoring its policies towards favorable instruments. From bootstrap Granger causality, we find similar inferential results that support previous findings thereby confirming the positive implication of the selected instruments to China's sustainable development. Hence, the nexus that is established among the selected instruments clearly show the importance of technological innovation and renewable energy in mitigating carbon emissions.

The global energy demand is increasing due to climate changes and carbon usages. Accumulating evidences showed energy sources using offshore wind from the sea can be added to increase our consumption capacity in long term. In addition, building offshore wind farms can also be environmentally advantageous compared to onshore farms. The assessment of wind energy resources is crucial for the site selection of wind farms. Currently, short-term wind forecast models have been developed to predict the wind power generation. However, methods are needed to improve the forecasting accuracy for ever-changing weather data. So, we try to use deep learning methods to predict long-term wind energy for identifying potential offshore wind farms. The experimental results indicate that PredRNN++ prediction model designed from the spatiotemporal perspective is feasible to evaluate long-term wind energy resources and has better performance than traditional LSTM.

In recent years, the energy consumption structure has been accelerating towards clean and low-carbon globally, and China has also set positive goals for new energy development, vigorously promoting the development and utilization of renewable energy, accelerating the implementation of renewable energy substitution actions, and focusing on improving the consumption capacity of new energy. However, due to the intermittent and unstable characteristics of renewable energy, it is difficult to meet the demands of the power load side in practical applications. Energy storage is an important link for the grid to efficiently accept new energy, which can significantly improve the consumption of new energy electricity such as wind and photovoltaics by the power grid, ensuring the safe and reliable operation of the grid system, but energy storage is a high-cost resource. Therefore, this paper focuses on the energy storage scenarios for a big data industrial park and studies the energy storage capacity allocation plan and business model of big data industrial park. Firstly, based on the characteristics of the big data industrial park, three energy storage application scenarios were designed, which are grid center, user center, and market center. On this basis, an optimal energy storage configuration model that maximizes total profits was established, and financial evaluation methods were used to analyze the corresponding business models. Finally, taking an actual big data industrial park as an example, the economic viability of energy storage configuration schemes under two scenarios was discussed, and an energy storage system construction plan was proposed to promote the zero-carbon target of the big data industrial park.

With the continuous prosperity and development of the shipping industry, it is necessary and meaningful to plan a safe, green, and efficient route for ships sailing far away. In this study, a hybrid multicriteria ship route planning method based on improved particle swarm optimization–genetic algorithm is presented, which aims to optimize the meteorological risk, fuel consumption, and navigation time associated with a ship. The proposed algorithm not only has the fast convergence of the particle swarm algorithm but also improves the diversity of solutions by applying the crossover operation, selection operation, and multigroup elite selection operation of the genetic algorithm and improving the Pareto optimal frontier distribution. Based on the Pareto optimal solution set obtained by the algorithm, the minimum-navigation-time route, the minimum-fuel-consumption route, the minimum-navigation-risk route, and the recommended route can be obtained. Herein, a simulation experiment is conducted with respect to a container ship, and the optimization route is compared and analyzed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can plan a series of feasible ship routes to ensure safety, greenness, and economy and that it provides route selection references for captains and shipping companies.

Flood risk increase due to climate change is one of the world's most pressing issues. Different countries and regions may take or have taken different approaches to deal with it. Therefore, information sharing and learning from each other are essential for achieving flood risk reduction on a global scale, especially in times of climate change. This paper provides a diagnosis of challenges in flood risk management in Japan in response to climate change. It highlights change in hazard and exposure and increase in vulnerability. Further, it placed its attention on new strategies taken by the Japanese government to counteract climate change impacts with a particular focus on the latest legal development to better support flood risk management. Although there are large amounts of research concerning climate action in the existing literature, the majority of them focus on technical and social aspects. The present study enriches literature on flood risk management and sheds new light on how to advance integrated river basin management.