• Energy Research
• 2025-2025close
• 13. Climate action close
• 11. Sustainability close
• 15. Life on land close
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Creating and delivering products and services that promote sustainability is increasingly important in today’s economy. Novel services based on digital technologies and infrastructure can significantly contribute to sustainable development, as demonstrated by digitally enabled car-sharing services where increased asset utilization reduces production-related greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is still limited knowledge on how digital service innovation can purposefully be applied to promote sustainability. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic literature review and perform a qualitative inductive analysis of 50 articles on the impact of digital service innovation on social, environmental, and economic sustainability. We provide a comprehensive overview of real-world applications and identify five underlying mechanisms through which innovation with digital services can drive sustainable development. In doing so, we aim to pave the way to purposefully conceive, design, and implement digital services for sustainability.

To aid researchers in studying the capabilities and benefits of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, Argonne National Laboratory collected a robust set of on-road driving data of the Audi Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory (GLOSA) system implemented in the e-tron battery electric vehicle. This dataset includes 33 tests, each roughly 27 miles in length and roughly 45 to 75 minutes in duration. The team selected Kane County Highway Route 34 from Main Street in Batavia, Illinois to Middlecreek Lane in St. Charles, Illinois as the route do to its high density of GLOSA-active lights and the most opportunities to observe the system per hour of test time. The data include parameters from the following sources: GLOSA system driving the dash indicators, multiple powertrain parameters including real-time battery power/energy consumption, GPS, front radar gap, and rear radar gap. 

The global goal to mitigate climate change (CC) is to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) by 2050; the European Union (EU) aim is to cut GHGE at least by 55% already by 2030. These ambition targets require new GHGE mitigation measures across all land use sectors (LULUCF), where wetlands, as carbon (C) rich ecosystem, can effectively contribute to climate targets, biodiversity, and water-related ecosystem services. Natural peatlands accumulate C effectively due to water-logged conditions. However, they can turn into high GHG sources if they are drained, therefore there is still need to enhance knowledge regarding how and/or how much C is sequestered or released by peatlands after their restoration, as well as the socioeconomic effects.“ALFAwetlands - Restoration for the future” (www.alfawetlands.eu) is a Horizon Europe funded project (2022-2026), which is coordinated by Luke and carried out at local to EU levels with 15 partners across Europe. It’s main goal, in short, is to mitigate CC while supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) and being socially just and rewarding. This includes, e.g., increasing the knowledge about C storage and release in peatlands, specifically after restoration. While, in terms of C fluxes, focussing on peatlands, the project scope is larger and includes additionally floodplains, coastal wetlands and few artificial wetlands. ALFAwetlands will develop and indicate management alternatives for wetlands including such that have been or will be restored during this project. Measures under this project are not restricted to ecological restoration but include rehabilitation and re-vegetation action to improve ecosystem conditions (e.g., peatland forest: continuous-cover-forestry, cultivated peatlands: paludiculture). Studies are conducted in 9 Living Labs (LL’s) including 30 sites, which are located in wetlands in different parts of Europe (north-south gradient). At the local level, LL’s support and integrate interdisciplinary and multi-actor research on ecological, environmental, economic, and social issues. Experimental data from local sites are scaled-up and will be utilized e.g., by models to gain and understanding the potential impacts of upscaled wetland restoration measures. To achieve ALFAwetlands goals, 5 research workpackages are being implemented, namely: 1)improve geospatial knowledge base of wetlands, 2)co-create socially fair and rewarding pathways for wetland restoration, 3)estimate effects of restoration on GHGE and BES, with the data achieved from field experiments, 4)develop policy relevant scenarios for CC and BES, and 5)study societal impacts of wetland restoration. The project will also encourage stakeholders to utilise outputs and support their active participation in wetland management.

The analysis of global catastrophic events often occurs in isolation, simplifying their study. In reality, risks cascade and interact. Therefore, it is essential to consider the interconnected nature of global risks. This investigation explores the interplay between nuclear winter and planetary boundaries. It may seem reasonable to assume that respecting planetary boundaries, which define a safe operating space for the planet, is preferable before a nuclear war. However, that does not always seem to be the case. For instance, increased nitrogen emissions today could serve as a nutrient buffer during nuclear winter. Contrastingly, mitigating climate change, means an even larger temperature drop in nuclear winter in comparison with pre-industrial times. This exploratory study also highlights planetary boundaries that could enhance human survival if we adhere to their limits, both presently and after a nuclear war. The best example being biosphere integrity, as conserving it has no direct downsides and would make the Earth system more resilient to resist the shock of a nuclear winter.

The climate crisis is the biggest threat to the health, development, and wellbeing of the current and future generations. While there is extensive evidence on the direct impacts of climate change on human livelihood, there is little evidence on how children and young people are affected, and even less discussion and evidence on how the climate crisis could affect violence against children.In this commentary, we review selected research to assess the links between the climate crisis and violence against children.We employ a social-ecological perspective as an overarching framework to organize findings from the literature and call attention to increased violence against children as a specific, yet under-examined, direct and indirect consequence of the climate crisis.Using such a perspective, we examine how the climate crisis exacerbates the risk of violence against children at the continually intersecting and interacting levels of society, community, family, and the individual levels. We propose increased risk of armed conflict, forced displacement, poverty, income inequality, disruptions in critical health and social services, and mental health problems as key mechanisms linking the climate crisis and heightened risk of violence against children. Furthermore, we posit that the climate crisis serves as a threat multiplier, compounding existing vulnerabilities and inequities within populations and having harsher consequences in settings, communities, households, and for children already experiencing adversities.We conclude with a call for urgent efforts from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to further investigate the specific empirical links between the climate crisis and violence against children and to design, test, implement, fund, and scale evidence-based, rights-based, and child friendly prevention, support, and response strategies to address violence against children.

The Honda Smart Home demonstrates zero-carbon living and transportation capacity.

Batteries can effectively improve the security of energy systems and mitigate climate change by facilitating wind and solar power. The installed capacity of battery energy storage system (BESS), mainly the lithium ion batteries are increasing significantly in recent years. However, the battery degradation cannot be accurately quantified and integrated into energy management system with existing heuristic battery degradation models. This paper proposed a hierarchical deep learning based battery degradation quantification (HDL-BDQ) model to quantify the battery degradation given scheduled BESS daily operations. Particularly, two sequential and cohesive deep neural networks are proposed to accurately estimate the degree of degradation using inputs of battery operational profiles and it can significantly outperform existing fixed or linear rate based degradation models as well as single-stage deep neural models. Training results show the high accuracy of the proposed system. Moreover, a learning and optimization decoupled algorithm is implemented to strategically take advantage of the proposed HDL-BDQ model in optimization-based look-ahead scheduling (LAS) problems. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HDL-BDQ model in LAS of a microgrid testbed. 12 pages