• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close
• 11. Sustainability close
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From the perspective of the recent orientations of virtual geographies, the idea of smart and novelty villages in the context of renovated material rural worlds is conceptualized. The sum of new virtual and new materiality produces virtual and novelty spaces and places, which acquire a precise territorial dimension in the rural policy and politics of smart villages. Smart villages can not only be framed in global smart contexts, but they can also play a fundamental role in de-global territorial horizons as an instrument of resistance to global processes of rural restructuring. The smart political idea or orientation takes shape in each rural community with a different expression in the form of new local materials. The concept of quality virtuality is developed theoretically along three axes: the encounter between smart, novelty and new materials; the smart in the equitable rural community; and the right to disconnection in remote rural areas.

Coastal areas are more densely populated than inland areas and present faster rates of population increase and urbanization. This trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, and thus, the demand of natural resources in coastal areas, such as water and energy resources, increasing the pressure and impact on the environment, superposed to the effects of climate change. Currently, in Europe, the demand for heating in buildings and businesses outnumbers the demand for cooling. However, the latter is gradually catching up due to rising demand for air cooling or refrigeration for industry such as food, technological and medical supplies. The energy required to cool buildings in Europe is expected to increase by more than 70% by 2030, while energy used to heat buildings may decrease by 30% (UE, 2018). Low Temperature Geothermal Energy (LTGE) is most likely the green energy production method for heating and cooling with the highest potential to provide affordable and clean energy and meet the CO2-emissions reduction goals of the Green Deal. Despite advances on LTGE technologies, the efficiency of these systems remains inherently sensitive to changes in hydrodynamics and the media (e.g., changes in the groundwater thermal regime). Groundwater, on the other hand, is the world's largest freshwater resource, and it is especially important in coastal areas because interactions between aquifer systems and sea water may lead to salinization and resource loss. Because geothermal systems and coastal aquifers interact directly, specially at groundwater discharge areas, it is clear that a better understanding of the potential interactions of geothermal systems with current and prospective coastal aquifer processes is essential for their design and foreseeing potential environmental effects. To address these issues, we model variable-density groundwater coupled with heat transport to simulate the long-term evolution of groundwater salinity and aquifer thermal energy discharge. We find that the heating/cooling-induced water density variations affect the seawater intrusion. Understanding the behavior of the groundwater system is required to ensure sustainable water, energy, and coastal ecosystem management.

This paper provides an overview of the last 40 years of use, and in many cases abuse, of the natural resources in Catalonia, a country that is representative of European countries in general, and especially those in the Mediterranean region. It analyses the use of natural resources made by mining, agriculture, livestock, logging, fishing, nature tourism, and energy production and consumption. This use results in an ecological footprint, i.e., the productive land and sea surface required to generate the consumed resources and absorb the resulting waste, which is about seven times the amount available, a very high number but very similar to other European countries. This overexploitation of natural resources has a huge impact on land and its different forms of cover, air, and water. For the last 25 years, forests and urban areas have each gained almost 3% more of the territory at the expense of agricultural land; those municipalities bordering the sea have increased their number of inhabitants and activity, and although they only occupy 6.7% of the total surface area, they account for 43.3% of the population; air quality has stabilized since the turn of the century, and there has been some improvement in the state of aquatic ecosystems, but still only 36% are in good condition, while the remainder have suffered morphological changes and different forms of nonpoint source pollution; meanwhile the biodiversity of flora and fauna remains still under threat. Environmental policies do not go far enough so there is a need for revision of the legislation related to environmental impact and the protection of natural areas, flora, and fauna. The promotion of environmental research must be accompanied by environmental education to foster a society which is more knowledgeable, has more control and influence over the decisions that deeply affect it. Indeed, nature conservation goes hand in hand with other social and economic challenges that require a more sustainable vision. Today’s problems with nature derive from the current economic model, which is environmentally unsustainable in that it does not take into account environmental impacts. Lastly, we propose a series of reasonable and feasible priority measures and actions related to each use made of the country’s natural resources, to the impacts they have had, and to their management, in the hope that these can contribute to improving the conservation and management of the environment and biodiversity and move towards sustainability.

6 páginas.- 2 figura.- 29 referencias.- 1st Conference on Information Technology for Social Good, GoodIT 2021, Rome 9-11 September 2021 New challenges such as climate change and sustainability arise in society influencing not only environmental issues but human's health directly. To face these new challenges IT technologies and their application to environmental intelligent monitoring become into a powerful tool to set new policies and blueprints to contribute to social good. In the new H2020 project, WatchPlant will provide new tools for environmental intelligence monitoring by the use of plants as "well-being"sensors of the environment they inhabit. This will be possible by equipping plants with a net of communicated wireless self-powered sensors, coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) to become plants into "biohybrid organisms"to test exposure-effects links between plant and the environment. It will become plants into a new tool to be aware of the environment status in a very early stage towards in-situ monitoring. Additionally, the system is devoted to be sustainable and energy-efficient thanks to the use of clean energy sources such as solar cells and a enzymatic biofuel cell (BFC) together with its self-deployment, self-awareness, adaptation, artificial evolution and the AI capabilities. In this concept paper, WatchPlant will envision how to face this challenge by joining interdisciplinary efforts to access the plant sap for energy harvesting and sensing purposes and become plants into "biohybrid organisms"to benefit social good in terms of environmental monitoring in urban scenarios. © 2021 Owner/Author. Project WatchPlant has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the FET grant agreement, no. 101017899 Peer reviewed

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a subset of targets that can be advanced through standard urban management activities. In particular, routine urban vegetation management comprises a number of activities with potential impact on Goal #4 (quality education), #11 (sustainable cities and communities), #13 (protect the planet), #15 (life on land), and, perhaps less obviously, but equally important, on Goal #8 (good jobs and economic growth). This paper discusses how urban vegetation management can help achieve the SDGs at a local level. Drawing on a case study (Talavera de la Reina, Spain), it is shown that an intelligent approach to urban vegetation management can leverage resources towards the SDGs at little or no cost to municipalities. Minor modifications and conceptual changes in how standard practices are carried out can make a difference. Including this dimension can even result in a positive balance for the municipal budget. Our analyses and proposals are of broad and direct applicability for urban areas worldwide and can help city authorities and officials to align their cities with the SDGs simply by making minor adjustments to how they currently deal with urban vegetation.

Solar energy is an energy intermittent source that faces a substantial challenge for its power dispatchability. Hence, concentrating solar power (CSP) plants and solar process heat (SPH) applications employ thermal energy storage (TES) technologies as a link between power generation and optimal load distribution. Ordinary Portland cement (OPC)-based materials are widely used in sensible TES, but their use is limited to operation temperatures below 400 to 500 °C because of thermal degradation processes. This work proposes a geopolymer (GEO)-based concrete as a suitable alternative to OPC concrete for TES that withstands high running temperatures, higher than 500 °C. To this end, thermophysical properties of a geopolymer-based concrete sample were initially measured experimentally; later, energy storage capacity and thermal behavior of the GEO sample were modeled numerically. In fact, different thermal scenarios were modeled, revealing that GEO-based concrete can be a sound choice due to its thermal energy storage capacity, high thermal diffusivity and capability to work at high temperature regimes.