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Abstract Chemical contamination has impaired ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and the provisioning of functions and services. This has spurred a movement to restore contaminated ecosystems and develop and implement national and international regulations that require it. Nevertheless, ecological restoration remains a young and rapidly growing discipline and its intersection with toxicology is even more nascent and underdeveloped. Consequently, we provide guidance to scientists and practitioners on when, where, and how to restore contaminated ecosystems. Although restoration has many benefits, it also can be expensive, and in many cases systems can recover without human intervention. Hence, the first question we address is: “When should we restore contaminated ecosystems?” Second, we provide suggestions on what to restore—biodiversity, functions, services, all 3, or something else—and where to restore given expected changes to habitats driven by global climate change. Finally, we provide guidance on how to restore contaminated ecosystems. To do this, we analyze critical aspects of the literature dealing with the ecology of restoring contaminated ecosystems. Additionally, we review approaches for translating the science of restoration to on-the-ground actions, which includes discussions of market incentives and the finances of restoration, stakeholder outreach and governance models for ecosystem restoration, and working with contractors to implement restoration plans. By explicitly considering the mechanisms and strategies that maximize the success of the restoration of contaminated sites, we hope that our synthesis serves to increase and improve collaborations between restoration ecologists and ecotoxicologists and set a roadmap for the restoration of contaminated ecosystems. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2016;12:273–283. © 2015 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of SETAC Key Points We merge insights from ecological and economic theory and on-the-ground restoration activities to provide guidance on what endpoints should be targeted for restoration in contaminated ecosystems and when, where, and how to restore ecosystems degraded by contaminants. We encourage practitioners to consider restoration as early as possible (i.e., before injury or before remediation) and to restore both structural and functional endpoints. We also promote consideration of broader landscape and seascape contexts and new ideas and approaches that can overcome the scientific and financial limitations of restoration. We urge more reciprocal transfer of knowledge among theorist and practitioners and academics, industry, government, tribal organizations, NGOs and the public to improve the science of restoration.

Common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.) is a highly allergenic annual ruderal plant and native to Northern America, but now also spreading across Europe. Air pollution and climate change will not only affect plant growth, pollen production and duration of the whole pollen season, but also the amount of allergenic encoding transcripts and proteins of the pollen. The objective of this study was to get a better understanding of transcriptional changes in ragweed pollen upon NO2 and O3 fumigation. This will also contribute to a systems biology approach to understand the reaction of the allergenic pollen to air pollution and climate change. Ragweed plants were grown in climate chambers under controlled conditions and fumigated with enhanced levels of NO2 and O3. Illumina sequencing and de novo assembly revealed significant differentially expressed transcripts, belonging to different gene ontology (GO) terms that were grouped into biological process and molecular function. Transcript levels of the known Amb a ragweed encoding allergens were clearly up-regulated under elevated NO2, whereas the amount of allergen encoding transcripts was more variable under elevated O3 conditions. Moreover transcripts encoding allergen known from other plants could be identified. The transcriptional changes in ragweed pollen upon elevated NO2 fumigation indicates that air pollution will alter the transcriptome of the pollen. The changed levels of allergenic encoding transcripts may have an influence on the total allergenic potential of ragweed pollen.

Brazil uses taxes, subsidies, and blending mandates as policy instruments to manage and stabilize its transportation fuel markets. The fuel sector has been very dynamic in recent years due to frequent policy adjustments and variable market conditions. In this paper, we use a price endogenous economic simulation model to analyze the impacts of such policy adjustments under various challenging conditions in the global ethanol and sugar markets. Our analysis specifically focuses on Brazilian producers' supply responses, consumers' driving demand and fuel choice, ethanol trade, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and social welfare. The model results show that (i) under a low ethanol blending rate, conventional vehicles would be driven significantly less while flex-fuel and ethanol-dedicated vehicles would not be affected significantly; (ii) lowering the fuel taxes adversely affects the competitiveness of sugarcane ethanol against gasoline blends, thus lowering producers' surplus; and (iii) while a reduction in fuel taxes is advantageous in terms of overall social welfare, it has serious environmental impacts by increasing the GHG emissions from transportation fuels consumed in Brazil.

Sustainability is important to Las Vegas hospitality organizations because they operate in an environment with constrained resources. Water supply is one such constrained resource and Lake Mead is and has been far below its normal level. This lake provides the potable water supply for Southern Nevada. Southern Nevada, which is anchored by Las Vegas, worked to reduce their water consumption by 32 billion gallons between 2002 & 2014 (Southern Nevada Water Authority, 2015). This pattern tells me that Las Vegas is aware of the footprint they leave on the environment and look for ways to reduce said footprint. This is where sustainability comes into play; efforts like the water reduction are led by hospitality organizations that not only participate, but educate their team members to do the same. As the years pass, operators will need to strategize on how the choices they make not only affect their bottom line, but what effects they have on society and our local environment. This study will attempt to clarify what sustainable decisions organizations have made in the past, what their impact has been, what drives change in terms of sustainability, and then what dictates their ability to make future decisions based on those prior practices. As Las Vegas is considered a leader in the hospitality industry, the broader hospitality market can apply practices shown to have relevant benefits.

Does temperature affect economic performance? Has temperature always affected social welfare through its impact on physical and cognitive function? While many studies have explored the indirect links between climate and welfare (e.g. agricultural yield, violent conflict, or sea-level rise), few address the possibility of direct impacts operating through human physiology. This paper presents a model of labor supply under thermal stress, building on a longstanding physiological literature linking thermal stress to health and task performance. A key prediction is that effective labor supply – defined as a composite of labor hours, task performance, and effort – is decreasing in temperature deviations from the biological optimum. We use country-level panel data on population-weighted average temperature and income (1950-2005), to illustrate the potential magnitude of the effect. Using a fixed effects estimation strategy, we find that hotter-than-average years are associated with lower output per capita for already hot countries and higher output per capita for cold countries: approximately 3%-4% in both directions. We then use household data on air conditioning and heating expenditures from the US to provide further evidence in support of a physiologically based causal mechanism. This more direct causal link between climate and social welfare has important implications for both the economics of climate change and comparative development.

Electric vehicles (EVs) offer an attractive long-term solution to reduce the dependence on fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emission. At the same time, charging a large fleet of EVs distributed across the residential area poses a challenge for the distribution network. In this paper, we formulate this problem by building on the optimal power flow (OPF) framework to model the network constraints that arises from charging EVs at different locations. To overcome the computational challenge when the control horizon is long, we study a nested optimization approach to decompose the joint OPF and EV charging problem. We characterize the optimal EV charging schedule to be a valley-filling profile, which allows us to develop an efficient offline algorithm with significantly lower computational complexity compared to centralized interior point solvers. Furthermore, we propose a decentralized online algorithm that dynamically tracks the valley-filling profile. Our algorithms are evaluated on the IEEE 14 bus system with real residential load profiles, and the simulations show that our online algorithm performs almost optimally under different settings.

The reduction of greenhouse gases from buildings forms the cornerstone of policy to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, the automation of urban scale building energy modeling systems required to meet global urban demand has proven challenging due to the bespoke characteristics of each city. One such point of uniqueness between cities is that of urban microclimate, which may play a major role in altering the performance of energy efficiency in buildings. This research proposes a way to rapidly collect urban microclimate data through the utilization of satellite readings and climate reanalysis. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this data by composing an analysis against three years of monthly building energy consumption data from New York City. As a whole, microclimate in New York City may be responsible for large swings in urban energy consumption. We estimate that Central Park may reduce the electricity consumption of adjacent buildings by 5-10%, while vegetation overall seems to have no appreciable impact on gas consumption. We find that favorable urban microclimates may decrease the gas consumption of some buildings in New York by 71% while others may increase gas consumption by as much as 221%. Additionally, microclimates may be responsible for the decrease of electricity consumption by 28.6% in regions or increases of 77% consumption in others. This work provides a method of curating global, high resolution microclimate data, allowing researchers to explore the invisible walls of urban microclimate which interact with the buildings around them. 16 pages, 18 figures

Sewage sludge handling is becoming a concern in Europe due to its increasing amount and the presence of contaminants, such as heavy metals and pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs). Currently, over 70% of sludge in Europe is treated thermally by incineration or used as fertilizer in agriculture. New thermochemical methods are under development and are expected to be implemented in the near future. This paper considers the life cycle environmental impacts of the following five alternatives for sludge handling, taking into account the presence of heavy metals and PPCPs: i) agricultural application of anaerobically digested sludge; ii) agricultural application of composted sludge; iii) incineration; iv) pyrolysis; and v) wet air oxidation. The results suggest that anaerobic digestion with recovery of nutrients and electricity has the lowest environmental impacts in 11 out of 18 categories considered. For the mean to maximum resource recovery, composting is the worst alternative, followed by pyrolysis with lower recovery rates. Agricultural application of anaerobically digested sludge has the highest freshwater ecotoxicity due to heavy metals, unless their concentration is in the lowest range, as found in some European sewage sludge applied on land. Therefore, stricter control of heavy metals in the sludge is needed for this option to limit freshwater ecotoxicity to the levels comparable with the thermal processes. The results also indicate that PPCPs have a negligible contribution to freshwater ecotoxicity when compared to heavy metals in the anaerobically digested sludge. Since thermal processes are currently drawing attention due to their potential benefits, the findings of this work suggest that their adoption is environmentally beneficial only if high resource recovery rates can be achieved.