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The drought prone North-West Bangladesh is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly because of less water availability in the dry period and high water requirement for crop production. Improved understanding of recent changes in crop water demand in the dry season is important for the water resources management in the region. A study was carried out to determine the potential impacts of recent climate change during last three decades on trends of water requirements of Boro rice. The reference crop evapotranspiration (ETo), potential crop water requirement (∑ETC), effective rainfall during the crop growing period (ER), potential irrigation requirement for crop evapotranspiration (∑ETC − ER) and net irrigation requirement of Boro rice were estimated using observed daily climate data in the CropWat model for the period of 1980 to 2013 for four North-West districts. Significant decreasing trends of ETo were observed in most of the dry months due to increasing relative humidity and decreasing wind-speed and sun-shine hours. The results showed decreasing trends of potential crop water requirement, i.e. the total crop evapotranspiration (∑ETC), of Boro rice due to decreasing reference crop evapotranspiration and shorter crop growing periods. The variations in trends of potential irrigation requirement for crop evapotranspiration (∑ETC − ER) found among different districts, are mainly linked to variations in trends of changes in effective rainfall. The net irrigation requirement of Boro rice has decreased, by 11% during the last three decades at an average rate of −4.4 mm year−1, instead of decreasing effective rainfall, mainly because of high rate of decrease of crop evapotranspiration (−5.9 mm year−1). Results indicate that a warming climate does not always result in higher agricultural water use and that climate change can also result in reduced water demands because of changes in humidity, wind-speed and sun-shine hours.

Estuarine aquatic systems and braided rivers in and adjacent to the Sundarbans and the vast area of the Ganges tidal floodplain next to the core forest area in Bangladesh holds rice aquatic faunal diversity and provides plenty of opportunities to grow fish, shrimps and crabs. Currently these systems provide direct employment opportunity for 1.2 million people and indirect or seasonal livelihood for more than 10 million people across the southwest coast. Hilsa is the largest fishery in this region and shrimp brings the highest cash and export earnings. Proper implementation of fisheries regulation is critical to ensure conservation of the rich fish diversity of this region as well as to continue to support livelihood of millions of people living on fisheries. While aquaculture is the major contributor to national fish production, agricultural GDP and export earning, it requires planned advancement from the current state to continue to grow in harmony with environment. Integration with rice and other crops, and with mangrove wherever possible can bring long-term sustainability of these systems. Change in the river flow due to siltation and reduced upstream flow, climate change, sea level rise, outbreak of disease in fish and crustaceans are major challenges for future growth and sustainability of both aquaculture and fisheries in this region. Collaborative and multi-disciplinary research should be undertaken to address these challenges. In addition, there should be mechanism to bring research outputs into use and make impact on sustainability.

Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is a promising technology for converting organic-rich waste biomass such as swine manure (SM) and sewage sludge (SS) into energy-dense bio-crude. Until now, one of the major challenges associated with HTL is the pumpability of high dry-matter containing fibrous feedstocks for continuous processing. In this context, this batch scale study presents a suitable approach for enhancing the pumpability of the fibrous material, specifically SM, by co-processing with SS. Obtained results showed that SM was not pumpable itself due to its fibrous nature, but became pumpable by the addition of SS at overall 25 % dry matter content. It was highlighted that the sample mixture containing ~80 % of the SM was smoothly pumped with 20 % SS. Subsequently, HTL experiments were carried out on samples mixed under the ratios SM:SS (100:0, 0:100, 50:50, 80:20, and 20:80). The highest bio-crude yield (42.38 %) via maximum synergistic effect was obtained from the sample SM/SS (50:50) at ratio 1:1 with the best HHV of 36 MJ/kg. Almost 60–70 % mass of all bio-crudes contained volatiles at 350 °C. ICP-AES measurements revealed that the majority of the inorganic elements were concentrated into the solid phase, while 40–50 % of the potassium and sodium were transferred to the aqueous phase. In conclusion, using SS as a co-substrate with SM not only enhances the pumpability of SM, but its co-liquefaction has demonstrated beneficial synergistic effects on improving the energy recovery of the bio-crude.

Achieving environmental sustainability has become a global concern amidst increasing climate change threat. Using quarterly frequency data for the case of Russia from 1992 to 2018, the present study explores the interaction between disaggregated energy consumption (renewable energy and non-renewable energy), trade flow and economic growth on a broader measure for environmental degradation (ecological footprint). The choice of the variables draws strength from initiative of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDG, 7, 8 11 and 13) for responsible energy consumption and clean energy consumption while mitigating climate change issues. The study applied the quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) and nonparametric causality-in-quantiles to capture these associations. The outcomes from the QQR disclosed that in the majority of the quantiles, trade openness and renewable energy use contribute to environmental sustainability, while nonrenewable energy amplifies ecological footprint. Furthermore, growth in Russia escalates its ecological footprint. Moreover, in the majority of the quantiles, all the exogenous variables can predict ecological footprint. Given the outcomes of this study, it outlines the need for a paradigm shift for alternative and clean energy consumption in Russian energy mix amidst its economic growth trajectory while accounting for green-development approaches. Pathways to fully achieve the sustainability targets are carefully outlined in the concluding section.

Mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions has become an utmost important global agenda, keeping into consideration the associated environmental hardships. As a result, it is important to unearth the factors which can neutralize carbon emissions to transform the world economy into a low-carbon one. Against this backdrop, this study explores the carbon dioxide neutralizing effects of economic growth, international tourism, clean energy promotion, and technological innovation in the context of five European Union (EU-5) nations during the 1990-2015 period. This study's main contribution is in terms of its approach to test the interaction effect between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and energy innovation on carbon dioxide emissions. The econometric analysis chronologically involves the employment of unit root, cointegration, causality, and regression methods. Overall, the findings support the inverted-U-shaped economic growth-carbon dioxide emissions nexus to verify the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. Besides, the Pollution Haven Hypothesis in the context of the selected panel is also verified as higher FDI inflows are seen to boost the carbon dioxide emission levels. The results also confirm that energy innovation moderates the harmful effect of air transport (a proxy for international tourism) on carbon dioxide emissions during the developing stage of the tourism industry. On the other hand, renewable energy promotion is found to curb carbon dioxide emissions. These findings suggest that the European governments need to enhance investments in their respective renewable energy sectors and simultaneously ensure the development of clean industries, which can collectively help these nations become carbon-neutral in the future.

This study is one of the first to investigate consumer preferences toward organic food in a developing country, Pakistan, where organic food is not certified. Responses to a survey based on the the...

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are becoming one of the latest trends in the Internet of things. However, in WMSNs the energy constraint is a significant issue. In this paper, an idea of integrating energy harvesting technique with energy efficient scheduling mechanism is proposed. In order to increase the overall energy efficiency, the previously studied scheduling algorithm is used and integrated with a multi-core processor technique. Since increasing the number of cores in a processor decreases the overall energy efficiency, integration of energy harvesting with the processor can alleviate energy loss. The proposed idea constitutes of implementing the technique of lightweight processor (LWP) on a first core and leaving the second core in idle state with multiple lightweight processor implementation. The second core is divided into two parts namely, the main part and the multiple LWPs. The main part of the second core is used to relieve the processing speed issue and the multiple LWPs are used to cover up the flaws of missing deadlines if the number of tasks are increased. The second core comes in operation when the battery capacity is above 50%, using the RF energy harvesting scheme. This method increases the overall energy efficiency of each sensor node from 38% to 60% compared to the single core and single LWP method.