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Given the highly climate-sensitive character of agricultural production, climate change has obvious and important ramifications for agricultural commercialisation, which in turn has a bearing on poverty, gender empowerment, and food and nutrition security. The nature and extent of climate change implications for agricultural commercialisation will depend on: the magnitude of the climate impacts that farmers have to deal with; and, the extent to which sustainable intensification processes can be pursued in ways which strengthen, rather than weaken, adaptive capacity and resilience in the face of climate change. This brief provides a summary of a longer working paper, which offers a review of recent literature on the implications of climate change for agricultural commercialisation and APRA’s research in this area.

Over the last 18 months Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), El Camino Real Engineering, Inc. (CRE), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) have worked on the development of disturbance-free power at the medium voltage substation level. The work resulted in the Secure Bus concept, a system in which a medium voltage bus in a substation is immune to power outages and voltage sags on the utility source. The Secure Bus voltage is also immune to voltage sags resulting from faults on any distribution feeder connected to the bus. The Secure Bus concept originated from work conducted to improve power quality for large high-tech manufacturing facilities, in particular for large semiconductor manufacturing plants. For the demands on quality power of a modern facility conventional equipment is not adequate for protecting the end user. For example, the operation of conventional vacuum breakers during short circuit conditions on a feeder circuit, requiring 3 to 5 cycles for breaker opening, does not allow for fast enough current interruption to avoid a voltage dip on the main bus. A sever voltage sag could result in a shut down of sensitive equipment being supplied by the other feeder circuits, which are connected to the main bus. The circumvent the problem, a fast breaker was introduced which interrupts the short circuit before the current causes a significant voltage disturbance. To make the bus immune also to power disturbances caused by power outages, energy storage is introduced to provide the necessary energy back-up in case the primary source is not available.

In the pursuit of creating efficient CdTe p-n homojunctions, we developed iodine (I) n-type doped CdTe using Cadmium Iodide (CdI2) as a dopant in varying concentrations (1018 cm-3, 1019 cm-3 and 1020 atoms·cm-3 target concentrations) in CdTe. Iodide doped crystals were grown using a Modified Vertical Bridgman furnace (MVB). Single crystals were characterized using XRD (X-Ray Diffraction), Hall effect, IR (Infrared) Microscopy, UV-VIS-NIR (Ultraviolet-Visible-Near infrared Spectroscopy) and FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy). Partners at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) also provided data for Hall Effect and Two Photon Excitation Time Resolved Photoluminescence (2PE TRPL) of wafers and films. Photoluminescence mapping (PL mapping) was obtained from Klar scientific, and glow discharge mass spectrometry (GDMS) for purity and final doping concentration was obtained from the National Research Council Canada. Due to poor carrier properties in the crystals as-grown, two annealing treatments were explored, in either tellurium or cadmium vapor. Homojunctions were made at NREL by depositing n-type films from these crystals on p-type single crystals, CdTe:P grown and WSU. The n-type films were created using the close-space sublimation epitaxy (CSSE) process. Herein is reported the results of the grown CdTe:I crystals and, to a lesser extent, the properties of the CdTe:I thin films formed by CSSE.

The 17th International Conference on Knowledge Management was held in the historic city of Potsdam, Germany. Since the conference was among the first post-pandemic face to face conferences, the overall theme of the 17th edition of the ICKM conference rightly focused on “Knowledge, Uncertainty and Risks: From individual to global scale†at different levels of analysis and agency. This document highlighted one of the local keynote speeches by Prof. Ortwin Renn, scientific director at the International Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam (Germany) and professor for environmental sociology and technology assessment at the University of Stuttgart.

Predicted performance during both steady state and transient reactor operation determines the steady state operating limits on LMFBRs. Unnecessary conservatism in performance predictions will not contribute to safety, but will restrict the reactor to more conservative, less economical steady state operation. The most general method for reducing analytical conservatism in LMFBR's without compromising safety is to develop, validate and apply more sophisticated computer models to the limiting performance analyses. The purpose of the on-going Natural Circulation Verification Program (NCVP) is to develop and validate computer codes to analyze natural circulation transients in LMFBRs, and thus, replace unnecessary analytical conservatism with demonstrated calculational capability.

M.S.

Mode of access: Internet.

This Article examines the genesis and context of SE4All, placing the effort within both itshistorical and international policy contexts. It highlights the voluntary nature of the initiative andargues that its effective implementation and the achievement of its goals require the articulation ofan applicable international legal framework that aids the transformation of SE4All’s policy actionsinto binding international legal commitments. The article contends that such a transformation doesnot depend on the creation of entirely new legal rules or institutions. Instead, an effective frame-work for successful implementation of SE4All can be derived from existing rules of internationalhuman rights law and sustainable development law. Reliance on these twin bodies of interna-tional law will increase the prospects for SE4All to achieve energy access and related goals thatits predecessor initiatives have failed to accomplish

The recent dispositions related to the energy performance of buildings, launched by the European Directives 2002/91/EC and 2010/31/EU, turned attention to the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). The aim of this study is to investigate the economic effects of the recent Italian statutory provisions related to energy performance of buildings on listing behaviour. With this aim an hedonic regression analysis is performed, in order to measure the impact of EPC level on listing prices. The study, based on a set of more than 500 housing property asset collected in 2012 from real estate advertisements websites, is focused on the Turin real estate market as a case study. Furthermore this paper contributes to the early limited literature on implication of the impact of EPC level on Italian housing market, representing one of the first systematic evidence about the energy certifications in the housing listing prices. Aestimum, Aestimum 65 (2014)