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Abstract This study investigates the macroeconomic effects of adverse oil price shocks on a small oil-exporting economy — the Azerbaijan economy. We estimate a recursive (near) VAR model by using monthly macroeconomic data from 2006 to 2018. The results indicate the Azerbaijan economy is adversely influenced by an oil price decline. Specifically, we find that a negative oil price shock deteriorates trade balance, causes a currency depreciation, increases inflation and falls economic activity. Furthermore, our findings imply that the oil price-led devaluation shapes the inflationary and recessionary consequences of this shock.

East Lisbon is being exposed to large-scale urban regeneration processes, where luxury residential projects and mixed-use spatial developments are already underway. Thus, it is a living laboratory for “smart”, “creative” and “green” projects, as well as related urban public space interventions. Braço de Prata is an urban space overlooked by developers, being surrounded by obsolete industrial buildings. Concerning the recent interest in international investments in brownfield regeneration and greenfield developments, it represents an attractive urban terrain as a post-industrial working-class neighbourhood, where “smart” and “green” suggest transforming space so that both new and old residents can live and work together and share public space regardless of analysis on their environmental recognitions. The aim of this paper is to present an empirical evaluation model that examines the possible impacts of environmental negligence through the reorganisation of the physical and social fabric. The analyses focus on dwellers’ moral understanding of their changing environment as site-specific domains to address the unique conditions that affect transiently defined presumptions about the collective needs. Taking an evaluative approach in the Braço de Prata case, this paper demonstrates the specific socio-ecological implications of urban inequality in post-industrial neighbourhoods that could be threatened by new decisions, both through urban planning approaches and instruments.

Solar energy, since it is available every day, is seen as one of the most valuable renewable energy resources. Thus, the energy of sun should be efficiently used in various applications. The most known applications that use solar energy are heating water and spaces. High efficiency solar collectors need appropriate selective surfaces to absorb the heat. Selective surfaces (Selektif-Sera) used in this study are applied to flat collectors, which are produced by a roll to roll cost effective coating of nano nickel layers, developed in Selektif Teknoloji Co. Inc. Efficiency of flat collectors using Selektif-Sera absorbers are calculated in collaboration with Institute for Solar Technik Rapperswil, Switzerland. The main cause of high energy consumption in industry is mostly caused from low temperature level processes. There is considerable effort in research to minimize the energy use by renewable energy sources such as solar energy. A feasibility study will be presented to obtain the potential of solar thermal energy utilization in the textile industry using these solar collectors. For the feasibility calculations presented in this study, textile dyeing and finishing factory located at Kahramanmaras is selected since the geographic location was an important factor. Kahramanmaras is located in the south east part of Turkey thus has a great potential to have solar illumination much longer. It was observed that, the collector area is limited by the available area in the factory, thus a hybrid heating generating system (lignite/solar thermal) was preferred in the calculations of this study to be more realistic. During the feasibility work, the calculations took into account the preheating process, where well waters heated from 15 °C to 30-40 °C by using the hot waters in heat exchangers. Then the preheated water was heated again by high efficiency solar collectors. Economic comparison between the lignite use and solar thermal collector use was provided to determine the optimal system that can be used efficiently. The optimum design of solar thermal systems was studied depending on the optimum collector area. It was found that the solar thermal system is more economic and efficient than the merely lignite use. Return on investment time is calculated as 5.15 years. {"references": ["http://www.aee-intec.at/0uploads/dateien561.pdf, Accessed on 18/05/2016.", "http://www.solarthermalworld.org/sites/gstec/files/SoPro_Leaflet_en.pdfAccessed on 18/05/2016.", "Kalogirou S. \"The potential of solar industrial process heat applications\", Applied Energy, 2003, vol. 76, no. 4, pp. 337-361.", "S Mekhilef, R Saidur, A Safari, \"A review on solar energy use in industries\", Renewable and Sustainable Energy, 2011, vol. 15, no. 4 pp. 1777-1790.", "Taibi, E, Gielen D, Bazilian M. \"Measuring energy poverty: Focusing on what matters\", Renewable and Sustainable Energy, 2012, vol.16, no.1, pp. 735-744", "Faninger, G., \"The potential of Solar Heat in the future energy system\", IFF-University of Klagenfurt, Austria; www.uni-klu.ac.at/iff/ikn/downloads/Potential_of_Solar_Heat.pdf, Accessed on 18/05/2016", "Vannoni, C., Battisti, R., Drigo, S., Potential for Solar Heat in Industrial Processes, Task 33, 2008. Solar Cooling and Heating Committee of the International Energy Agency (IEA).", "TMMOB Mechanical Engineering Chamber Report, \"T\u00fcrkiye'nin Enerji G\u00f6r\u00fcn\u00fcm\u00fc\", 2012, pp. 1588", "Kad\u0131rgan F., Roll to roll manufacturing of solar selective sheets, PCT patent, PCT/IB2010/055006, WO/2012/059789 \n[10]\thttp://www.estif.org/fileadmin/estif/content/policies/downloads/D23-solar-industrial-process-heat.pdf, Accessed on 20/05/2016"]}

With the increasing need for energy in the world, the demand for renewable energy sources is increasing day by day. This increase in energy need directs governments and private sector investors to renewable energy sources. Wind energy is one of the most important renewable energy resources on earth. In recent years, the share of wind energy in the amount of energy produced by renewable energy sources has been increasing. Wind energy emerges as a sustainable energy source due to its environmental friendliness and ability to renew itself. These features of wind energy have a great effect on the increase of its share in the energy sector. In order to get the highest efficiency from wind energy, the correct positioning of wind farms, that is, the concept of site selection is very important. One of the most important parameters in site selection of wind farms is the wind energy source and the wind speed accordingly. In order to create wind speed maps, wind speed data obtained from a certain number of stations should be interpolated for the study area. In this study, wind speed data obtained from 32 meteorology stations in Balikesir province were used. With the help of these data, wind velocity maps were created with five different interpolation methods, namely IDW, Kriging, Natural Neighbor, Spline and Trend, within the borders of Balikesir province. Finally, the results obtained by these five methods were compared with the real wind speed values according to root mean square error and evaluations were made.

Bioenergy is considered a sustainable substitute to fossil-fuel resources and the development of a prudent combination of renewable and innovative conversion technologies are essential for the valorization and effective conversion of biowaste to value-added commodities. Here, a negative pressure-induced carbonization process was proposed for the valorization of lignin-enriched biowaste precursor to bio-oil and environmental materials (biochar) at various temperatures. The high heating values (HHV) of the as-prepared biochars from the lignin enriched precursor under negative pressure (low-medium vacuum) were within 25.9-31.5 MJ/kg, which matched satisfactorily to the commercial charcoal. Whereas, the bio-oils produced from the lignin enriched precursor under vacuum conditions was a blend of complex aromatic and straight-chain hydro-carbons, including aldehyde, ketone, phenol, and furans, exhibiting ability as potential heating-oil with HHV within 21.2-28.2 MJ/kg. Moreover, the biochars produced under vacuum environments at higher temperature showed greater stability (22.5-35.9%) than those produced under N2 atmosphere.

AbstractRemittances to the Philippines constitute a prominent part of its economy. However, remittances' effects on its environment have not been researched. In this regard, this research examines the direct and indirect impacts of remittance inflows on the Philippines' environmental sustainability for the 1977–2016 period by proposing a multivariate model, and by utilising the augmented ARDL and VECM methods to estimate this model. Our findings indicate that remittance inflows threaten environmental sustainability in the long‐run both directly and indirectly through boosting income and energy (oil) consumption. The results additionally imply that income and energy consumption also increase the ecological footprint of the Philippines in the long‐run. However, economic globalisation's long‐run impact is insignificant, yet its short‐run impact is significantly negative on the country's level of environmental degradation. Additionally, the findings reveal that the feedback hypothesis is valid between income and energy consumption in the long‐run, but the neutrality hypothesis is valid in the short‐run. This research's findings reveal that remittance inflows' impact on the environment is significant, and can occur through direct and various indirect channels, therefore, these inflows should be an integral part of sustainability policies in the Philippines, as ignoring them could cause further environmental decline.

We researched China's climate and sustainable development goal with relevant and susceptible instruments capable of inducing and mitigating carbon emissions. Amidst the contributor to the global carbon emissions, China is caught in between mitigating its carbon emission and aiming towards placing its national contribution of emissions to the acceptable levels of 1.5 °C and below 2 °C. Following the intricacies surrounding China's sustainable development as it contains its economic and environmental performance, we adopt China's data of 1980 and 2018 with different scientific approaches (nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL), dynamic ordinary least square test, and bootstrap Granger causality) with different instruments (such as economic growth, financial development, renewable energy, and innovation policies) to research China's sustainable development. For clear exposition and insight into our findings with policies attached, we draw a conclusion from the outcomes of the mentioned approaches. From NARDL and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), we find that economic growth through economic activities is statistically significant in determining the trend (increase) of carbon emissions in China in both periods (short run and long run). However, other selected instruments (financial, renewable, and innovation policies) tend towards controlling and moderating the carbon emissions in China. Thus, China has good prospects to mitigate its carbon emissions if considered tailoring its policies towards favorable instruments. From bootstrap Granger causality, we find similar inferential results that support previous findings thereby confirming the positive implication of the selected instruments to China's sustainable development. Hence, the nexus that is established among the selected instruments clearly show the importance of technological innovation and renewable energy in mitigating carbon emissions.

This study searches the impact of tourism growth on emission pollutants in Cyprus (north), which is a small island in the Mediterranean and has shown significant development in hotel and casino sectors in the last two decades. Results from time-series analyses reveal that an inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis is confirmed for Cyprus with and without tourism development. Tourism also exerts positively significant and long-term effects on the levels of carbon emissions, revealing that growth in the tourism sector causes degradation in the environment.