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The Soutpansberg Transect investigates the abundance and diversity of ants and spiders along an altitudinal gradient in the Western Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa. It has a north-south orientation over the mountain and is a long term project initiated in 2009. Data collection is carried out in intervals that suit the data logger capacity. To study the diversity patterns in ants and other invertebrate groups across the spatial transect over a long-term period and the climate the invertebrates.

This paper focuses on binomial mobility-sustainability. Particular attention is paid to pedal mobility and to the fact that cycle transport ia a mean for a correct use of space. The work analyzes the route taken by Apulia Region, that conseiders cycle mobility as palnning and programming instrument, trasversally linked several filed.

Increasing the rate of renovation for the existing building stock is a crucial challenge for EU’s energy policy. The Smart City Block (SCB) project proposes an innovative answer to this challenge. The underlying hypothesis is that introducing a collective dimension to renovation could result in increasing rates of renovation while also impacting positively the efficiency of the renovation and the social ties within urban areas. The collective dimension considered is the city block in Brussels.The first part of this paper describes the theoretical part of the project that was necessary to develop an adapted methodology. It describes the SCB offering, Brussels segmentation and some results of surveys.The SCB offering shows that many different options can be proposed to the city block dwellers, ranging from a collective insulation, efficient heating systems and shared photovoltaics to collective kitchen garden in the inner space of the block, shared vehicles or shared spaces. This is especially relevant for Brussels where city blocks often have an inner space that could be used. Besides, the segmentation of Brussels based on city block characteristics offers a typology that can be further used to target specific environmental or social deficit.However, the collective dimension introduced in the project is challenging for western individualistic minds. In order to evaluate the acceptance of households, a survey was conducted on 4 city blocks in Brussels, representing over 450 households. It shows a clear willingness to investigate the concept further but only if concrete proposals with estimations of energy and financial savings are provided. Sharing space, equipment and activities was more positively accepted than what we initially expected. Although the attitude-behaviour gap must not be underestimated, this opening can be viewed as an evolution of lifestyles in some segments of the population. Governance and institutional arrangements are expected to play a critical role in supporting this evolution.The second ...

Moral panic, our predisposition to exaggerate threats against our livelihood and start blaming ourselves, is as old as human history. We always feared “others”, people with skin colors or ethnicity other than ours, people coming from other corners of the globe, and the infectious diseases the strangers might bring along. This paper deals with a new version of such moral panics which is arguably even more intense than the previous ones, but which relates to a new dimension of human experience, namely globalization. The health, economic and environmental challenges we are now faced with are posed globally. The moral panic today stems from this triple challenge. Our central thesis is that these three emergencies are interrelated, but there is no simple causal relationship between them. They can only be addressed in a global manner, while we still live in a world which is segmented into sovereign nation-states.

In Sardinia (Italy), the highest frequency of extreme events is recorded in the Central-East area (3-4 events per year). The presence of high and steep mountains near the sea on the central and south-eastern coast, causes an East- West precipitation gradient in autumn especially, due to hot and moist currents coming from Africa. Soil structure and utilization make this area highly vulnerable to flash flooding and landslides. The specific purpose of this work is to provide a description of the heavy rainfall phenomenon on a statistical basis. The analysis mainly focuses on i) the existence of trends in heavy rainfall and ii) the characterization of the distribution of extreme events. First, to study possible trends in extreme events a few indices have been analyzed by the linear regression test. The analysis has been carried out at annual and seasonal scales. Then, extreme values analysis has been carried out by fitting a Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) to the data. As far as trends are concerned, different results are obtained at the two temporal scales: significant trends are obtained at the seasonal scale which are masked at the annual scale. By combining trend analysis and GPD analysis, the vulnerability of the study area to the occurrence of heavy rainfall has been characterized. Therefore, this work might support the improvement of land use planning and the application of suitable prevention systems. Future work will consider the extension of the analysis to all Sardinia and the application of statistical methods taking into account the spatial correlation of extreme events.

The present study deals with the use of renewable energy sources (RES) for biofuel production in addition to the power derived from hydroelectric and heat produced by district heating plants. It follows and integrates the main aim to reduce the use of fossil fuels in the considered study area according to the Directive Europe 2020. The possibility to address animal manure and other local biomass to the biogas yield with subsequent upgrading to biomethane was investigated, starting from the production up to the end use. The proposed solution implies the realization of one centralized biogas plant coupled with the upgrading section and one filling station. Details were deepen in order to improve the economic sustainability of the plant, the direct involvement of farmers in the management company and the acceptance level from the residents. Proceedings of the 19th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 6-10 June 2011, Berlin, Germany, pp. 2099-2101

In this thesis, I analyze the impacts of the design and implementation of different environmental policy tools from a theoretical and empirical perspective: certificates providing information on the energy performance of buildings (chapter 1); urban road pricing schemes such as congestion charges (chapter 2); quantity-based policy tools to support production with non-polluting technologies (chapter 3).In chapter 1, co-authored with Luisa Dressler, we study how energy performance certificates (EPCs) impact the residential rental market. These certificates can help solve information asymmetries between landlords and tenants about the thermal quality of dwellings for rent, which, in turn, is expected to facilitate investment aimed at improving dwellings' energy performance. However, disclosure of EPCs is often incomplete, which hampers their effectiveness in relieving such information asymmetries. Moreover, even when a certificate is available, landlords do not always disclose it. This contradicts the so-called information unraveling result, according to which all landlords should disclose quality information unless it is costly to do so: in such a setting, information eventually unravels. Using a cross-sectional dataset of residential rental advertisements from the Belgian region of Brussels, we empirically evaluate incentives to disclose energy performance ratings. We find that two fundamental assumptions underlying the unraveling result are not confirmed in our setting: firstly, tenants value energy performance of rental property only when dwellings are of very high quality; secondly, tenants do not appear to rationally adjust their expectations when faced with dwellings that withhold their energy performance rating. Finally, we formulate specific policy advice for reforming EPC mechanisms to increase disclosure rates.In chapter 2, I study how urban congestion pricing impacts the use of sustainable mobility options such as bike sharing, presenting evidence from the city of Milan, Italy.As concern for air ...