Each year the RELX Environmental Challenge is awarded to projects that best demonstrate how they can provide sustainable access to safe water or sanitation. Projects must have clear practical applicability, address identified need and advance related issues such as health, education, or human rights. Applications close on 7 June 2019.
Key Performance Indicators are important instruments, both in defining high-level goals (international or national) and when planning smart energy communities. However, there is often a gap between the high-level goals, and possible and planned measures on the community level. Evaluation of development scenarios against a defined set of indicators and goals can help urban planners and other stakeholders understand the consequences of their strategies. This article presents a scenario calculator designed to link detailed measures with overall climate goals.
This book chapter addresses goals 12, 7, 11 and 15 by looking at the environmental and economic impact of the utilization of biomass resources.
With growing health risks from rising temperatures in the Global South, the lack of essential indoor cooling is increasingly seen as a dimension of energy poverty and human well-being. Air conditioning (AC) is expected to increase significantly with rising incomes, but it is likely that many who need AC will not have it. We estimate the current location and extent of populations potentially exposed to heat stress in the Global South.
#SmartME has been one of the first initiatives in Italy to realize a Smart City through the use of open technologies. Thanks to the use of low cost sensor-powered devices scattered over the city area, different “smart” services have been deployed having the Stack4Things framework as the common underlying middleware. In this paper, we present the results obtained after 2 years of project highlighting the vertical solutions that have been proposed in different areas ranging from environmental monitoring to parking management.
The built environment is responsible for large negative ecological impacts due in part to the vast amount of materials used in construction. Concurrently, construction and demolition activities result in vast amounts of materials being buried, burnt, and dumped. It is essential therefore to analyze the impact of building materials acquisition, use, and transformation on the ecosystems people inhabit and rely upon for well-being. Typically, this is examined in terms of material use, energy use, and emission of pollutants including greenhouse gases.
This book chapter advances SDGs 11 and 12 by discussing the integrated coastal management approach to coastal zone management policy for a sustainable coast.
There has recently been a conscious push for cities in Europe to be smarter and more sustainable, leading to the need to benchmark these cities’ efforts using robust assessment frameworks. This paper ranks 28 European capital cities based on how smart and sustainable they are. Using hierarchical clustering and principal component analysis (PCA), we synthesized 32 indicators into 4 components and computed rank scores. The ranking of European capital cities was based on this rank score.
The pollution of the marine environment by solid wastes, either directly introduced into the sea or discharged into the oceans from rivers or pipelines, is considered from the perspective of both their impacts and their regulation. The waste materials covered include dredged material, particulate wastes from sand/gravel extraction, and land reclamation, and industrial wastes including mining wastes, munitions, and plastics/litter.
Elsevier,
Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences, Volume 4: Encyclopedia of Ecology (Second Edition), 2019, Pages 344-351
This book chapter addresses goals 11, 12, and 15 by showing that human population growth is not the only matter for consideration in ecological engineering. What matters for the future is not only how many people there will be, but what they will do in their everyday life; this will impact the life systems surrounding them and how equipped they will be to face emerging challenges. In coming decades, the survival and well-being of humans and the security of environmental resources will continue to be challenged by rapid population growth.
