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This report addresses the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization’s desire to minimize the learning time required to understand the implications of smart-grid concepts so APEC members can advance their thinking in a timely manner and advance strategies regarding smart approaches that can help meet their environmental-sustainability and energy-efficiency policy goals. As significant investments are needed to grow and maintain the electricity infrastructure, consideration needs to be given to how information and communications technologies can be applied to electricity infrastructure decisions that not only meet traditional needs for basic service and reliability, but also provide the flexibility for a changing the mix of generation sources with sensitivity to environmental and societal impacts.

The costs for carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage (CCS) in geologic formations is estimated to be $6–75/t CO2 .I n the absence of a mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or some other significant incentive for CCS deployment, this cost effectively limits CCS technology deployment to small niche markets and stymies the potential for further technological development through learning by doing until these disincentives for the free venting of CO2 are in place. By far, the largest current fraction of these costs is capture (including compression and dehydration), commonly estimated at $25–60/t CO2 for power plant applications, followed by CO2 transport and storage, estimated at $0–15/t CO2. Of the storage costs, only a small fraction of the cost will go to accurate geological characterization. These one time costs are probably on the order of $0.1/t CO2 or less as these costs are spread out over the many millions of tons likely to be injected into a field over many decades. Geologic assessments include information central to capacity prediction, risk estimation for the target intervals and development facilities engineering. Since assessment costs are roughly two orders of magnitude smaller than capture costs, and assessment products carry other tangible societal benefits, such as improved accuracy in fossil fuel and ground water reserves estimates, government or joint private–public funding of major assessment initiatives should underpin early policy choices regarding CO2 storage deployment and should serve as a point of entry for policy makers and regulators. Early assessment is also likely to improve the knowledge base upon which the first commercial CCS deployments will rest. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused and still causes unprecedented disruptions in daily lives of billions of people globally. It affects practices and routines across all household consumption domains, including clothing consumption. Drawing on Social Practice Theory, this article explores and compares changes in clothing acquisition practices during COVID-19 across nine countries: the USA, the UK, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Iran, Czech Republic, India, and Hong Kong SAR. Data was obtained through a standardized survey containing rated and open-ended questions, which were analyzed through descriptive quantitative analysis and inductive qualitative content analysis of open-ended questions. The results of this cross-country research indicate that all forms of fashion consumption, including more sustainable practices, have decreased during the pandemic. The most visible impacts have occurred in the material arrangements associated with fashion acquisition practices (e.g., closed physical shops, shipping disruptions, cancelled events, remote work, etc.). However, changes that result from these disruptions may be shorter-lived that changes that happened as a result of changing meanings associated with fashion consumption and its more sustainable forms and new competencies and skills acquired during the pandemic that could ensure more lasting practicing of more sustainable forms of fashion consumption.

A stress corrosion cracking (SCC) model has been adapted for performance prediction of high level radioactive-waste packages to be emplaced in the proposed Yucca Mountain radioactive-waste repository. SCC is one form of environmentally assisted cracking resulting from the presence of three factors: metallurgical susceptibility, critical environment, and tensile stresses. For waste packages of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, the outer barrier material is the highly corrosion-resistant Alloy UNS-N06022, the environment is represented by the water film present on the surface of the waste package from dripping or deliquescence of soluble salts present in any surface deposits, and the stress is principally the weld induced residual stress. SCC has historically been separated into “initiation” and “propagation” phases. Initiation of SCC will not occur on a smooth surface if the surface stress is below a threshold value defined as the threshold stress. Cracks can also initiate at and propagate from flaws (or defects) resulting from manufacturing processes (such as welding). To account for crack propagation, the slip dissolution/film rupture (SDFR) model is adopted to provide mathematical formulae for prediction of the crack growth rate. Once the crack growth rate at an initiated SCC is determined, it can be used by the performance assessment (not in the scope of this paper) to determine the time to through-wall penetration for the waste package. This paper presents the development and validation of the SDFR crack growth rate model based on technical information in the literature as well as experimentally determined crack growth rates developed specifically for Alloy UNS-N06022 in environments relevant to high level radioactive-waste packages of the proposed Yucca Mountain radioactive-waste repository.

Food security—the ability to obtain and use sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food—is a fundamental human need. Climate change is very likely to affect global, regional, and local food security by disrupting food availability, decreasing access to food, and making food utilization more difficult. Food security exists “when all people at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” and affects people through both under- and overconsumption. Food security requires that food be simultaneously (1) available—that it exist in a particular place at a particular time, (2) that people can access that food through economic or other means, (3) that people can utilize the food that is available and accessible to them, and (4) that each of these components be stable over time. Constrictions within any of these components can result in food insecurity. Food is provisioned through a food system that manifests in diverse ways across the globe. The food system includes all activities related to producing, transporting, trading, storing, processing, packaging, wholesaling, retailing, consuming, and disposing of food. Whether an individual food system includes few, many, or all of these elements, each is susceptible to risks from a changing climate. Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, have increased global greenhouse gas concentrations; atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late 1700s to today’s level of about 400 ppm. Concentrations continue to rise, though future levels depend on choices and development pathways yet to be determined. Additionally, the future condition of the food system depends upon socioeconomic trajectories that are external to the food system itself. For these reasons, a range of possible emissions futures and socioeconomic pathways have been considered by this assessment. The Climate Change, Global Food Security, and U.S. Food System assessment represents a consensus of authors and includes contributors from 19 Federal, academic, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations in four countries, identifying climate-change effects on global food security through 2100, and analyzing the United States’ likely connections with that world. The assessment finds that climate change is likely to diminish continued progress on global food security through production disruptions leading to local availability limitations and price increases, interrupted transport conduits, and diminished food safety, among other causes. The risks are greatest for the global poor and in tropical regions. In the near term, some high-latitude production export regions may benefit from changes in climate. As part of a highly integrated global food system, consumers and producers in the United States are likely to be affected by these changes. The type and price of food imports from other regions are likely to change, as are export demands placed upon U.S. producers and the transportation, processing, and storage systems that enable global trade. Demand for food and other types of assistance may increase, as may demand for advanced technologies to manage changing conditions. Adaptation across the food system has great potential to manage climate-change effects on food security, and the complexity of the food system offers multiple potential points of intervention for decision makers at every level, from households to nations and international governance structures. However, effective adaptation is subject to highly localized conditions and socioeconomic factors, and the technical feasibility of an adaptive intervention is not necessarily a guarantee of its application if it is unaffordable or does not provide benefits within a relatively short time frame, particularly for smaller operations around the world with limited capacity for long-term investments. The accurate identification of needs and vulnerabilities, and the effective targeting of adaptive practices and technologies across the full scope of the food system, are central to improving global food security in a changing climate.

AbstractTwenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis3 still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever4. Notwithstanding agreements to incorporate nature’s values into actions, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)5 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals6, predominant environmental and development policies still prioritize a subset of values, particularly those linked to markets, and ignore other ways people relate to and benefit from nature7. Arguably, a ‘values crisis’ underpins the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change8, pandemic emergence9 and socio-environmental injustices10. On the basis of more than 50,000 scientific publications, policy documents and Indigenous and local knowledge sources, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessed knowledge on nature’s diverse values and valuation methods to gain insights into their role in policymaking and fuller integration into decisions7,11. Applying this evidence, combinations of values-centred approaches are proposed to improve valuation and address barriers to uptake, ultimately leveraging transformative changes towards more just (that is, fair treatment of people and nature, including inter- and intragenerational equity) and sustainable futures.

In 2005, a comprehensive comparison of life cycle impact assessment toxicity characterisation models was initiated by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)–Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Life Cycle Initiative, directly involving the model developers of CalTOX, IMPACT 2002, USES-LCA, BETR, EDIP, WATSON and EcoSense. In this paper, we describe this model comparison process and its results—in particular the scientific consensus model developed by the model developers. The main objectives of this effort were (1) to identify specific sources of differences between the models’ results and structure, (2) to detect the indispensable model components and (3) to build a scientific consensus model from them, representing recommended practice. A chemical test set of 45 organics covering a wide range of property combinations was selected for this purpose. All models used this set. In three workshops, the model comparison participants identified key fate, exposure and effect issues via comparison of the final characterisation factors and selected intermediate outputs for fate, human exposure and toxic effects for the test set applied to all models. Through this process, we were able to reduce inter-model variation from an initial range of up to 13 orders of magnitude down to no more than two orders of magnitude for any substance. This led to the development of USEtox, a scientific consensus model that contains only the most influential model elements. These were, for example, process formulations accounting for intermittent rain, defining a closed or open system environment or nesting an urban box in a continental box. The precision of the new characterisation factors (CFs) is within a factor of 100–1,000 for human health and 10–100 for freshwater ecotoxicity of all other models compared to 12 orders of magnitude variation between the CFs of each model, respectively. The achieved reduction of inter-model variability by up to 11 orders of magnitude is a significant improvement. USEtox provides a parsimonious and transparent tool for human health and ecosystem CF estimates. Based on a referenced database, it has now been used to calculate CFs for several thousand substances and forms the basis of the recommendations from UNEP-SETAC’s Life Cycle Initiative regarding characterisation of toxic impacts in life cycle assessment. We provide both recommended and interim (not recommended and to be used with caution) characterisation factors for human health and freshwater ecotoxicity impacts. After a process of consensus building among stakeholders on a broad scale as well as several improvements regarding a wider and easier applicability of the model, USEtox will become available to practitioners for the calculation of further CFs.