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Climate change is a current phenomenon: the temperatures rise, rainfall patterns are changing, glaciers melt and the average global sea level is rising. It is expected that these changes will continue and that the extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts, will become more frequent and intense. The impact and vulnerability factors for nature, for the economy and for our health are different, depending on the territorial, social and economic aspects. The current scientific debate is focused on the need to formulate effective policies for adaptation and mitigation to climate change. The city plays an important role in this issue: it emits the most greenhouse gas emissions (more than 60% of the world population currently lives in urban areas) and the city is more exposed and vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Urban planning and territorial governance play a crucial role in this context: the international debate on the sustainability of urban areas is increasing. It’s necessary to adapt the tools of building regulations to increase the quality of energy - environment of the cities. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2014: INPUT 2014 - Smart City: planning for energy, transportation and sustainability of the urban system

The relationship between cities and energy consumption has been of great interest for the scientific community for over twenty years. Most of the energy consumption, indeed, occurs in cities because of the high concentration of human activities. Thus, cities are responsible for a big share of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). However, the debate on this topic is still open, mainly because of the heterogeneity of published studies in the selection, definition and measurement of the urban features influencing energy consumption and CO2 emissions, as well as in the choice of the energy sectors to be considered, in the territorial scale of analysis, and in the geographical distribution of the sample. Therefore, the goal of this research is to systematize and compare the approach, methodology and results of the relevant literature on the relationship between cities and energy consumption over the last twenty years. Furthermore, this critical review identifies the knowledge gap between what is known and what is still under debate and, based on that, it proposes a conceptual framework that will help to outline a new direction for future research and support local policy makers in the definition of strategies and actions that can effectively reduce urban energy use and CO2 emissions. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, Vol 10, No 3 (2017): Methods, tools and best practices to increase the capacity of urban systems to adapt to natural and man-made changes

Abstract Despite low energy and fuel consumption levels in the rail sector, further improvements are being pursued by manufacturers and operators. Their primary efforts aim to reduce traction energy demand, replace diesel, and limit the impact of electrified overhead infrastructures. From a system‐level perspective, the integration of alternative energy sources on board rail vehicles has become a popular solution among rolling stock manufacturers. Surveys are made of many recent realizations of multimodal rail vehicles with onboard electrochemical batteries, supercapacitors, and hydrogen fuel cell systems. The ratings, technical features, and operating data of onboard sources are gathered for each application, and a comparison among different technologies is presented. Traction system architectures and energy‐control strategies of actual multimodal units are explored and compared with literature research. Moreover, the maturity and potential of recent technologies and alternative topologies of power converters for multimodal traction systems are discussed. Ultimately, onboard storage systems are compared with other solutions for energy‐saving and catenary‐free operation, with particular focus on their current techno‐economic attractiveness as an alternative to diesel propulsion.

AbstractEnvironmental histories that span the last full glacial cycle and are representative of regional change in Australia are scarce, hampering assessment of environmental change preceding and concurrent with human dispersal on the continent ca. 47,000 years ago. Here we present a continuous 150,000-year record offshore south-western Australia and identify the timing of two critical late Pleistocene events: wide-scale ecosystem change and regional megafaunal population collapse. We establish that substantial changes in vegetation and fire regime occurred ∼70,000 years ago under a climate much drier than today. We record high levels of the dung fungus Sporormiella, a proxy for herbivore biomass, from 150,000 to 45,000 years ago, then a marked decline indicating megafaunal population collapse, from 45,000 to 43,100 years ago, placing the extinctions within 4,000 years of human dispersal across Australia. These findings rule out climate change, and implicate humans, as the primary extinction cause.

Urban logistics is a field that studies the best solutions for urban freight distribution with high environmental objectives. However, most actions are started by public authorities without taking into account the impacts of the new organizational schemas in the existing distribution enterprises’ organization. This paper proposes a case study from Padova, Italy: the city logistics system Cityporto, from which the sustainability of such systems is discussed in a Sustainable Development point of view, for both enterprise and collective dimensions, in order to relate the particularities of city logistics to the corresponding supply chains, i.e. to global logistics. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, Vol 3, N° 2 (2010): City Logistics

Urbanization is an onerous human activity: it affects municipal budget and foremost it costs the environment. Nevertheless, an ever-growing number of people (more than 75% of the European population) is living in cities and towns, so that identifying sustainable urban development solutions is a dramatically urgent need. Already in the 70s, some researches proposed parameters to evaluate urbanization costs in Italy, but they mainly focused on the economic and financial sustainability of real estate development. The land value capturing approaches proved to be inadequate when municipal budgets are facing growing social unbalances and critical environmental threats. The question being not just “where the money for urban infrastructures could come from”, but also “what could be a more sustainable development model”. In any case, now we are forced to rethink the whole organization of our urban life to defend ourselves from largely unknown threats, pandemics, COVID-19 being probably one among others that we could face in the near future. It is not yet clear if a link exists between the spread of the virus, the health consequences and the environmental conditions, but what probably will need to be assessed is the effect of population density on the spread of contamination. Even the traditional provision of services and public spaces will need to be defined again in order to protect and serve urban population. New evidences will force planners to redefine their thoughts and schemes. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2020: Special Issue. Covid-19 vs City-20

Abstract Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a potential significant mitigation strategy to combat climate change and ocean acidification. The technology is well understood but its current implementation must be scaled up nearly by a hundredfold to become an effective tool that helps meet mitigation targets. Regulations require monitoring and verification at storage sites, and reliable monitoring strategies for detection and quantification of seepage of the stored carbon need to be developed. The Cseep method was developed for reliable determination of CO2 seepage signal in seawater by estimating and filtering out natural variations in dissolved inorganic carbon (C). In this work, we analysed data from the first-ever subsea CO2 release experiment performed in the north-western North Sea by the EU STEMM−CCS project. We successfully demonstrated the ability of the Cseep method to (i) predict natural C variations around the Goldeneye site over seasonal to interannual time scales; (ii) establish a process-based baseline C concentration with minimal variability; (iii) determine CO2 seepage detection threshold (DT) to reliably differentiate released−CO2 signal from natural variability and quantify released−CO2 dissolved in the sampled seawater. DT values were around 20 % of the natural C variations indicating high sensitivity of the method. Moreover, with the availability of DT value, the identification of released−CO2 required no pre-knowledge of seepage occurrence, but we used additional available information to assess the confidence of the results. Overall, the Cseep method features high sensitivity, automation suitability, and represents a powerful future monitoring tool both for large and confined marine areas.