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Domino reactions were designed to allow the byproduct of an upstream reaction to be internally recycled to catalyze a downstream reaction in a one-pot tandem sequence. Nitroarene reduction by In(0) generates an amine and In (III) byproducts. Addition of aldehyde followed by Danishefsky's diene or silyl ketene acetal provides access to dihydropyridin-4-ones or beta-amino esters, respectively, in yields that are comparable or superior to the reported stepwise reactions.

This chapter uses data on Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to examine the nature of climate change mitigation and adaptation actions being pursued in African countries and assesses the extent to which preferred mitigation and adaptation priorities advance the cause of sustainable development on the continent. The prospective synergies between mitigation and adaptation approaches and sustainable development are assessed. Also, the pathways through which resource constraints and institutional and policy environment affect Africa’s ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change are examined, as well as the degree to which these constraints are being addressed. It is argued that Africa’s ability to benefit from sustainable development synergies embedded in the mitigation and adaptation strategies in the INDCs will be greatly limited by institutional and policy environment that hinders funding, capacity building, and technological innovation systems development. The slow pace of efforts to address these impediments further erodes confidence that climate adaptation in Africa will be effective at sufficiently contributing to a reduction in climate change risks to the continent.

The prevailing need for a more sustainable management of natural resources depends not only on the decisions made by governments and the will of the population, but also on the knowledge of the role of energy in our society and the relevance of preserving natural resources. In this sense, critical work is being done to instill key concepts—such as the circular economy and sustainable energy—in higher education institutions. In this way, it is expected that future professionals and managers will be aware of the importance of energy optimization, and will learn a series of computational methods that can support the decision-making process. In the context of higher education, this paper reviews the main trends and challenges related to the concepts of circular economy and sustainable energy. Besides, we analyze the role of simulation and serious games as a learning tool for the aforementioned concepts. Finally, the paper provides insights and discusses open research opportunities regarding the use of these computational tools to incorporate circular economy concepts in higher education degrees. Our findings show that, while efforts are being made to include these concepts in current programs, there is still much work to be done, especially from the point of view of university management. In addition, the analysis of the teaching methodologies analyzed shows that, although their implementation has been successful in favoring the active learning of students, their use (especially that of serious games) is not yet widespread.

The assessment of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and air pollutants emitted to and removed from the atmosphere ranks high on international political and scientific agendas. Growing international concern and cooperation regarding the climate change problem have increased the need to consider the uncertainty in inventories of GHG emissions. The approaches to address uncertainty discussed in this special issue reflect attempts to improve national inventories, not only for their own sake but also from a wider, system analytic perspective. They seek to strengthen the usefulness of national emission inventories under a compliance and/or global monitoring and reporting framework. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the benefits of including inventory uncertainty in policy analyses. The issues raised by the authors and featured in their papers, along with the role that uncertainty analysis plays in many of their arguments, highlight the challenges and the importance of dealing with uncertainty. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clearly stresses the value of conducting uncertainty analyses and offers guidance on executing them, the arguments made here in favor of performing these studies go well beyond any suggestions made by the IPCC to date. Improving and conducting uncertainty analyses are needed to develop a clear understanding and informed policy. Uncertainty matters and is key to many issues related to inventorying and reducing emissions. Considering uncertainty helps to avoid situations that can create a false sense of certainty or lead to invalid views of subsystems. Dealing proactively with uncertainty allows for the generation of useful knowledge that the international community should have to hand while strengthening the 2015 Paris Agreement, which had been agreed at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, considering uncertainty does not come free. Proper treatment of uncertainty is demanding because it forces us to take the step from “simple to complex” and to grasp a holistic system view. Only, thereafter, can we consider potential simplifications. That is, comprehensive treatment of uncertainty does not necessarily offer quick or easy solutions for policymakers. This special issue brings together 13 papers that resulted from the 2015 (4th) International Workshop on Uncertainty in Atmospheric Emissions, in Cracow, Poland. While they deal with many different aspects of the uncertainty in emission estimates, they are guided by the same principal question: “What GHGs shall be verified at what spatio-temporal scale to support conducive legislation at local and national scales, while ensuring effective governance at the global scale?” This question is at the heart of mitigation and adaptation. It requires an understanding of the entire system of GHG sources and sinks, their spatial characteristics and the temporal scales at which they react and interact, the uncertainty (accuracy and/or precision) with which fluxes can be measured, and last but not least, the consequences that follow from all of the aforementioned aspects, for policy actors to frame compliance and/or global monitoring and reporting agreements. This bigger system context serves as a reference for the papers in the special issue, irrespective of their spatio-temporal focus, and is used as a guide for the reader.

Abstract Sweet sorghum, a C4 plant, is known to be a unique, versatile, and potential energy crop that can be separated into starchy grains, soluble sugar juice, and lignocellulosic biomass. The fermentable sugars in the juice (53–85% sucrose, 9–33% glucose, and 6–21% fructose) can be directly fermented into ethanol. The grain is primarily starch (62–75%), which can be hydrolyzed and fermented into ethanol. The bagasse, a fibrous lignocellulosic material, can be used to produce cellulosic ethanol, heat and/or power co-generation. In this review, the potential of sweet sorghum for bioenergy production (of various forms) using recently developed cultivars with improved agronomic performance was discussed. In addition, sweet sorghum was compared with other starch, sugar, and lignocellulosic feedstocks. Studies have been conducted on alternative pathways to convert whole sweet sorghum stalks and bagasse into bioenergy. However, very little review of the techno-economic analysis of bioenergy production and co-products from sweet sorghum has been published. The aim of this research was to review the current knowledge of agronomic requirement for cultivating sweet sorghum, the productivity of recently developed cultivars for bioenergy production, and pathways of converting sweet sorghum crop into bioenergy as well as the techno-economic feasibility of using sweet sorghum for bioenergy.

Abstract Torrefaction converts raw biomass into a product with higher energy density, higher fixed carbon, better grindability, HHV and longer shelf life. The extent of improvement in these and other properties can be governed by appropriately regulating the reactor operating conditions for a specified biomass. The industrial applications ranging from biofuels to chemicals have different priorities for the specific characteristics of the torrefied biomass. Some of the earlier studies on torrefaction have quantified the overall process performance by defining a parameter or index for the degree or severity of torrefaction. However, very few attempts have been made to relate the torrefaction severity to the properties of the torrefied biomass. In this paper, we have simplified the reference condition for earlier proposed definition of index of torrefaction (Basu et al. [1]) and showed that there exists a quantifiable functional relationship between the defined index and the characteristics of the torrefied biomass. The mapping co-relations depend on the type of biomass feedstock, and the index informs the type of biomass appropriate for a specific application. While this paper focuses only on classical torrefaction characteristics such as energy density, proximate and elemental analyses, and batch and continuous grindability, this analysis can be generalized to quantify other non-classical characteristics such as densification, cooking fuel characteristics, and biochar-soil interactions.

Previous studies show that individuals’ energy consumption tends to outweigh the technical efficiency gains. Occupancy behavior accounts for about 30% of the variance in overall heating consumption and 50% in cooling consumption. In addition, overall energy savings of 10%–20% due to simple behavioral adjustments are a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately, few studies have focused on the specific cases of behavior in low-income houses, where unique individual energy behavior, demographic, and socio-economic factors come into play. This article investigates energy-related occupancy behavior in low-income families through real-time power, indoor environment, and occupancy presence measurement. Four residential houses with different building envelope materials are used as test-beds. Occupancy behavior includes thermostat schedules, occupancy presence, and major appliance usages. A simulation study is further conducted to show the energy impact of occupancy behavior.

This report examines relationships between a comprehensive set of definitions of and viewpoints on the concept of Sustainability and the abilities of communities and individuals in the United States to meet the behavioral prescriptions inherent in these definitions and viewpoints. This research is timely because sustainability is becoming a cornerstone of national and international environmental strategies designed to simultaneously achieve environmental, economic, and social goals. In the United States, many communities have adopted sustainability principles as the foundation for both their environmental protection efforts and their socioeconomic development initiatives. This research is important because it highlights serious problems communities and inviduals may have in achieving sustainability expectations, and illustrates how much work is needed to help communities and individuals overcome numerous considerable and complex constraints to sustainability.