• Energy Research
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High levels of human mobility brought on by global megatrends such as population growth, urbanisation, globalisation, coastward migration, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and sprawling of slums in developing countries are likely to be reinforced by climate change, making it plausible that human mobility will increase significantly during the 21st Century. Within the academic, development and international community there is no uniform view how this potentiality should be faced, but projections typically agree that the majority of this migration can be expected to occur in developing countries characterised by high levels of poverty and vulnerability. Moreover, it can be observed that a significant amount of climate change related migration is already underway. A review of the literature reveals knowledge gaps with respect to both interdisciplinary and local-level research that expressly invites the perspectives of climate migrants. This dissertation responds to these gaps both by drawing on literature in several fields of inquiry, and by intentionally engaging with migration affected populations to identify what preferred solutions they envisage. Taking a humanitarian preparedness approach, this research seeks to identify what migrants want so that appropriate policy instruments for equitable macro-managed migration processes can be discussed, developed, drafted and legislated well before they are needed. To this end, this research aims to learn from various forms of current migrations which may or may not all be climate induced. At its simplest, this thesis argues that policy preparedness is the a priori policy posture of choice. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bolivia, Bangladesh and the Maldives, this research repositions climate migrants at the centre of a scholarly debate that has largely marginalised or even patronised them. It concludes: (1) inviting the contributions of migrants leads to preferable migration outcomes; (2) policy maker foresight is an important success factor; (3) targeted service provision can enable more positive migration outcomes; (4) many migrants wish to stay in their countries/communities, thereby highlighting the importance of in situ adaptation; (5) nomenclature is a non-problem in the minds of most migrants; (6) accountable and responsive government institutions have a key role to play in enabling anticipatory migrations; (7) education is the sine qua non for all future migration preparedness.

Abstract The present paper describes a holistic energy efficient retrofit of low income multiple social housing located in Athens, Greece. A holistic analysis was conducted in order to determine the optimum retrofit plan that includes innovative and state of the art commercially available technologies, passive techniques as well as renewable energy sources, aiming to reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprint, improve indoor environmental conditions and be cost effective at the same time. An extensive experimental campaign including air leakage measurements, thermal imaging, energy consumption and indoor environmental quality measurements was conducted before and after the implementation of the retrofit. In addition, advanced building simulation, occupant surveys and socioeconomic analyses were performed in order to evaluate the impact of the retrofit and estimate specific performance indicators.

Globalization has led to an increasing geospatial separation of production and consumption, and, as a consequence, to an unprecedented displacement of environmental and social impacts through international trade. A large proportion of total global impacts can be associated with trade, and the trend is rising. Advances in global multi-region input-output models have allowed researchers to draw detailed, international supply-chain connections between harmful production in social and environmental hotspots and affluent consumption in global centres of wealth. The general direction of impact displacement is from developed to developing countries—an increase of health impacts in China from air pollution linked to export production for the United States being one prominent example. The relocation of production across countries counteracts national mitigation policies and may negate ostensible achievements in decoupling impacts from economic growth. A comprehensive implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals therefore requires the inclusion of footprint indicators to avoid loopholes in national sustainability assessments. Indicators of environmental and social footprints of international trade must inform assessments of progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, suggests a synthesis of studies on the geospatial separation of consumption and production.

This editorial reviews objective is to support the development of strategies to maximize the effectiveness of first-line and second-line antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens and optimize the training of regimen switching in lower-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). The support is required to fully utilize the survival benefit of available treatment options maintain program cost-effectiveness and enable achievement of universal access to HIV treatment and states that the comprehensive strategy must be evidence based and focused on the rational long-term use of ART at a population level.

Abstract The recent global financial and economic crisis is responsible for the significant decrease of heating energy consumption, especially in low income population that mostly live in non-thermally-performing houses. The decrease of the residents’ income results in lower internal temperatures, hence lower thermal levels and lower indoor environmental quality, which are responsible for health problems and inadequate quality of life for the residents. This paper deals with the problem of energy poverty. The aim is to investigate whether the economic crisis, which affects the heating energy consumption and the indoor thermal quality, has consequences on the social and health problems in low income families of the Republic of Cyprus, during the winter season. To this aim, an extensive continuous monitoring study in terms of indoor air temperatures was carried out, for one year since December 2013 in 38 low income households in Limassol and Paphos, two of the main districts of the island after the capital of Nicosia. Additionally, questionnaires regarding energy, environmental, social, and health data were designed and collected from each household. Consequently, a cluster analysis, based on the monitoring data related to the first two months of 2014 and the survey’s responses, was performed. Poor households of Cyprus were found to live in low indoor thermal quality, i.e. their average indoor air temperatures (ranging from 16 to 19°C) are lower than the accepted limits of the comfort zone for the island (18–21°C in winter). However, the thermal comfort and health conditions were found between the “acceptable” and “good” levels for each cluster. Additionally, a strong correlation is detected between the average internal temperature of the dwellings and the average income of the selected families. Finally, the heating energy consumption was found to be lower than the country’s average for the clusters characterized by high and partial deprivation.

The off-grid solar sector has experienced tremendous growth since 2010, serving approximately 420 million users in the Global South. The adoption of off-grid solar products for household-scale electricity has been particularly strong across Sub-Saharan Africa, catalysed by lowered manufacturing costs, the backing of international aid institutions, and market-friendly policy settings. In light of decades of slow grid expansion, the Malawian state, like those of several nations across the Sub-Saharan African region, is placing great reliance on the off-grid solar market as a means to address acute energy poverty. Specifically, the Malawian Renewable Energy Strategy expects 50% of Malawian households (2.8 million) to be using solar lanterns or solar household systems for basic energy services by 2030. This thesis examines how issues of energy justice are entangled in the adoption of off-grid solar home systems in Malawi. Through the use of multi-site ethnography (2019-2020), it examines insights from Malawian households, solar distributors, repair centres, the Solar Trade Association, and local energy experts. This thesis details how a two-tiered off-grid solar market generates a number of injustices for Malawi's energy-poor, this includes issues of consumer literacy, affordability, product quality, consumer protection, the right to repair, and solar e-waste. Through its analysis of these issues of energy injustice, this thesis demonstrates how market-based off-grid solar home systems tend to reproduce existing structural inequities (social, economic and spatial) in a Malawian setting. Thus, this thesis concludes that while market-based off-grid solar household systems have and continue to provide salient benefits to some Malawian households, they do not represent a just and sustainable solution to structural issues of energy poverty.

Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) pension schemes are defined contribution plans which are pay-as-you-go financed. From a design viewpoint, the countries where NDCs have been implemented cannot guarantee sustainability due to the choice of notional return paid to the contributions and the indexation rate paid to pensions. We study how the scheme should be designed to achieve liquidity and solvency with a limited set of assumptions in a continuous overlapping generations model that increases traceability of the results. The adequacy and actuarial fairness are also jointly studied in the numerical example for the population of Belgium. We find that the proposed indexation and notional rate act as automatic balancing mechanisms that ensure sustainability and actuarial fairness. However, the effect on pension adequacy depends on the generosity of the annuity scheme at retirement. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

"Affordable and clean energy" is enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; #7) because of its importance in supporting the sustainable development of society. As an energy source, coal is widely used because it is abundant and its utilization for electricity and heat generation do not require complex infrastructures and technologies, which makes it ideal for the energy needs of low-income and developing countries. Coal is also essential in steel making (as coke) and cement production and will continue to be on high demand for the foreseeable future. However, coal is naturally found with impurities or gangue minerals like pyrite and quartz that could create by-products (e.g., ash) and various pollutants (e.g., CO2, NOX, SOX). To reduce the environmental impacts of coal during combustion, coal cleaning-a kind of pre-combustion clean coal technology-is essential. Gravity separation, a technique that separates particles based on their differences in density, is widely used in coal cleaning due to the simplicity of its operation, low cost, and high efficiency. In this paper, recent studies (from 2011 to 2020) related to gravity separation for coal cleaning were systematically reviewed using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. A total of 1864 articles were screened after removing duplicates, and after a thorough evaluation 189 articles were reviewed and summarized. Among of conventional separation techniques, dense medium separator (DMS), particularly dense medium cyclone (DMC), is the most popular technologies studied, which could be attributed to the growing challenges of cleaning/processing fine coal-bearing materials. In recent years, most of works focused on the development of dry-type gravity technologies for coal cleaning. Finally, gravity separation challenges and future applications to address problems in environmental pollution and mitigation, waste recycling and reprocessing, circular economy, and mineral processing are discussed.