Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
Research refers to reports by organisations or research by academic institutions relating to urban sustainability issues. If you have research that relates to urban sustainability issues and could benefit people and organisations that are relevant to cities around the world, please post this information on SustainableCitiesNet.com. To do so visit the “How to use this site†page and follow the prompts.
Searching for a Miracle: Report
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on December 7th, 2009
Source: PostCarbon Institute
In November, the Post Carbon Institute and the International Forum on Globalization released their important and challenging new report Searching for a Miracle. The report, authored by Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg and edited by Jerry Mander, explores the question of whether any combination of known energy sources can successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?
The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.
The report makes the case that it is necessary to prepare societies for dramatic shifts in consumption and lifestyle expectations. It will also be necessary to promote a new ethic of conservation throughout the industrial world. A sharp reversal of today’s globalization of commercial activity—inherently wasteful for its transport energy needs—must be anticipated and facilitated, and government leaders must encourage a rapid evolution toward economies based on localism especially for essential needs such as food and energy.
The study remarks that this is not necessarily a negative prospect, as some research shows that, once basic human needs are met, high material consumption levels do not correlate with high quality of life.
The emphasis by policy makers on growth as the central goal and measure of modern economies is no longer practical or viable, as growth will be limited by both energy shortages and by society’s inability to continue venting energy production and consumption wastes (principally, carbon dioxide) into the environment without catastrophic consequences. Standards for economic success must shift from gross metrics of economic activity, to more direct assessments of human well-being, equity, and the health of the natural world.
Read the full article.
Tags: behaviour change, economics, energy
1 Comment » |
Email This Post
Small-scale wind farms
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on December 1st, 2009
Source: Environmental Research Web
Image via physicsworld
From “Fish inspire wind farm configuration”, Edwin Cartlidge
Conventional wind turbines work best when located as far as possible from the destructive vortices of neighbouring turbines. However, a pair of scientists in the US have worked out that the performance of other kinds of turbine actually improves when they are placed close to one another, concluding that wind farms could therefore be made much smaller than they are today. The familiar propeller-like turbine with a horizontal axis of rotation can convert 50% or more of the energy from the wind that it is exposed to. In a wind farm, however, the wake from one turbine will disturb the air reaching the blades of its neighbours meaning that turbines must be placed far apart.
A less familiar family of turbines have a vertical axis of rotation. Individually, these vertical-axis turbines are less efficient than the horizontal-axis devices because only part of the turbine can be pushed by the wind at any one time, and they have therefore proven far less popular. However, these turbines have a significant advantage over the horizontal-axis variety – their power output can be increased when they are placed very close to one another. Now, Robert Whittlesey and John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology have worked out how best to arrange such closely spaced turbines by drawing on the work of aeronautical engineer Daniel Weihs, who showed in the 1970s how fish save on energy by swimming within schools. Such fish form a series of offset rows, and Weihs found that fish get carried forward by the vortices created by the swimming motion of their two closest companions in the row immediately in front of them. Whittlesey and Dabiri wondered whether the relative spacing of vortices produced by an individual fish might serve as a good template for the arrangement of vertical-axis turbines within a wind farm and set up a computer model to test this idea.
Read the full article by Edwin Cartlidge.
Tags: energy, innovation, wind
No Comments » |
Email This Post
Climate-change affordability: Economic study
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on November 19th, 2009
Source: Environmental Research Web
Image: D Sharon Pruitt via flickr CC
From “Climate-change policy is affordable after all” by Liz Kalaugher
Climate policy is cheaper than most economic studies have suggested. Indeed it is affordable without causing any disastrous effects on our economies. That’s according to Jeroen van den Bergh of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. “I wasn’t satisfied with the dominant economic approaches, notably cost-benefit analysis of climate policy,” van den Bergh told environmentalresearchweb. “In addition, I had the feeling that many important arguments, including very down-to-earth ones, were being left out of the debate on climate policy. I decided therefore to list all the relevant alternative perspectives on the cost of climate policy I could come up with in a single paper.”
Writing in Climatic Change, van den Bergh details twelve new angles on climate policy cost that haven’t received any attention so far. He believes that cost-benefit analysis isn’t appropriate for climate change policies as it’s hard to be certain about the costs of climate damage, to put a cost on the value of a human life, or to handle scenarios that have a small probability of taking place but would have a high impact, including irreversible changes such as a slow-down of the global thermohaline circulation, or the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The studies tend also to neglect the impact of climate change on human conflict, biodiversity, economic development and human populations. Cost-benefit analyses carried out to date have come up with a wide range of estimates for climate costs. Instead van den Bergh prefers to assess the cost of a reasonably safe climate policy.
“If it can be argued that a safe climate policy means considerably lower net costs than the absence of such a policy, it is rational to be in favour of such a policy,” he writes. “This represents a kind of cost-effectiveness combined with precaution, given the uncertainties involved, aimed at avoiding extreme damage costs due to climate change.”
Tags: behaviour change, climate change, economics, governance, policy
No Comments » |
Email This Post
The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Book Release
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on November 11th, 2009
Source: Eanth-L, e-list for the field of ecological/environmental anthropology.
Image: boris van hoytema via flickr CC
Exploring the complexity of sustainable development within a rapidly changing nation…
Though China’s economy is projected to become the world’s largest within the next twenty years, industrial pollution threatens both the health of the country’s citizens and the natural resources on which their economy depends. Capturing the consequences of this reality, Bryan Tilt conducts an in-depth, ethnographic study of Futian Township, a rural community reeling from pollution.
The industrial township is located in the populous southwestern province of Sichuan. Three local factories – a zinc smelter, a coking plant, and a coal-washing plant-produce air and water pollution that far exceeds the standards set by the World Health Organization and China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. Interviewing state and company officials, factory workers, farmers, and scientists, Tilt shows how residents cope with this pollution and how they view its effects on health and economic growth. Striking at the heart of the community’s environmental values, he explores the intersection between civil society and environmental policy, weighing the tradeoffs between protection and economic growth. Tilt ultimately finds that the residents are quite concerned about pollution, and he investigates the various strategies they use to fight it. His study unravels the complexity of sustainable development within a rapidly changing nation.
“The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Environmental Values and Civil Society”, by Bryan Tilt
Tags: behaviour change, book, China, sustainable development
No Comments » |
Email This Post
Nature, Science and Livelihood: effective carbon capture & storage
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on November 2nd, 2009
Source: The Ecologist, from the article “Forests and oceans more effective than carbon capture technology”, Oct 14
Two new reports say existing forest and ocean systems offer the most cost effective way to capture and store carbon – far cheaper than industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology.
Forests:
Research led by University of Michigan has shown that there is more potential than we realise for forests to act as carbon ’sinks’. The study looked at 80 forests in the developing world over 15 years and found that local ownership rather than government control of the land was the best guarantee against misuse. The research suggested this is because local communities were dependent on the forests for their livelihoods, and so valued its preservation more highly. ‘The urgency of the global need to increase carbon storage in forests and local reliance on forests for continuing livelihood benefits through extraction of forest biomass make it especially important that scientists better understand the relationship between carbon storage in forests and their contributions to livelihoods,’ said lead author Professor Arun Agrawal. ‘We show that larger forest size and greater rule-making autonomy at the local level are associated with high carbon storage and livelihood benefits,’ he said.
Marine Systems:
In a separate development, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has estimated that marine ecosystems are storing carbon equal to half the annual emissions of the global transport sector. It says that 55 per cent of the biological carbon captured in the world is removed from the atmosphere by marine organisms, producing so-called ‘blue carbon’. Unlike carbon capture and storage on land, where carbon may be locked away only for decades or centuries, that stored in the oceans remains for millennia. ‘We already know that marine ecosystems are multi-trillion dollar assets linked to sectors such as tourism, coastal defense, fisheries and water purification services: now it is emerging that they are natural allies against climate change,’ said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director. ‘Indeed this report estimates that halting losses and catalysing the recovery of marine ecosystems might contribute to offsetting up to seven percent of current fossil fuel emissions and at a fraction of the costs of technologies to capture and store carbon at power stations,’ he added.
Kate says: Unfortunately, this is not necessarily all good news… Check out this article in the Guardian on how carbon absorption is raising ocean acidity to corrosive levels.
Tags: carbon-capture, ecosystem, Provocations
No Comments » |
Email This Post
Resource: Climate Change Map
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on October 30th, 2009
Source: Met Office, UK
Image: Met Office
A new map illustrating the global consequences of failing to keep temperature change to under 2 °C was launched [last week] by the UK Government, in partnership with the Met Office. The map was developed using the latest peer-reviewed science from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other leading impact scientists. The poster highlights some of the impacts that may occur if the global average temperature rises by 4 °C above the pre-industrial climate average. Ahead of December’s international climate change talks in Copenhagen, the Government is aiming for an agreement that limits climate change as far as possible to 2 °C. Increases of more than two degrees will have huge impacts on the world.
The poster shows that a four degree average rise will not be spread uniformly across the globe. The land will heat up more quickly than the sea, and high latitudes, particularly the Arctic, will have larger temperature increases. The average land temperature will be 5.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The impacts on human activity shown on the map are only a selection of those that may occur, and highlight the severe effects on water availability, agricultural productivity, extreme temperatures and drought, the risk of forest fire and sea-level rise. Agricultural yields are expected to decrease for all major cereal crops in all major regions of production. Half of all Himalayan glaciers will be significantly reduced by 2050, leading to 23% of the population of China being deprived of the vital dry season glacial melt water source.
“The map’s release marks a significant shift in political discourse on climate change, with many politicians until recently unwilling to discuss the possibility of a failure to hit the 2C target “, David Adam and Allegra Stratton, guardian.co.uk.
Read the full article.
Tags: climate change, discussion, governance, Resource
No Comments » |
Email This Post
Measuring Urban Heat via Cargo Bike
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on September 29th, 2009
Source: Environmental Research Web
Image: amsterdamize
Researchers from Wageningen University, Netherlands, used the warm days in August to map out the urban climate in the cities of Rotterdam and Arnhem. During four time intervals on a 24 hours’ day, mobile traverse measurements were carried out with two cargo bicycles with measurement equipment.
The results may indicate to which extent heat stress may become a problem. Future projections of climate change show that frequency of heat waves will increase substantially in the next decades. Particularly in cities heat stress may become a serious problem due to the so-called Urban Heat Island effect (UHI), the phenomenon where the average temperature in the city is higher than in the surrounding area.
For technical reasons, the researchers use cargo bikes to transport the measurement apparatus. With a cargo bike it is easy to manoeuvre through the narrow streets in the city, while the instruments remain horizontal. The cargo bikes are equipped with a thermometer that registers the temperature, a humidity meter, a sensor for wind direction and wind speed, sensors that measure the amount of sunlight and sensors for the exchange of heat radiation. The measurements were conducted every second. In addition, the route was photographed at fixed intervals from 50 cm above the ground with a fisheye lens pointed upwards. This can be used to determine the percentage of the sky that is “covered” with buildings or greenery as seen from street level. This coverage largely determines the strength of the urban heat island effect. The felt temperature is determined by the air temperature combined with radiation, humidity and wind. The instruments are powered by a solar panel mounted on the baggage carrier.
Read the full article.
Source: Environmental Research Web
Tags: cargo bikes, cities, climate change, innovation
No Comments » |
Email This Post
Seeking Innovation for Behaviour Change
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 26th, 2009
Source: Food Climate Research Network
Image: Earth Hour, The Mirror
Defra , UK (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), wishes to commission a programme of action based research to test innovative approaches for encouraging and in turn potentially catalysing pro-environmental behaviours and sustainable patterns of consumption.
Informed by the available evidence base, the particular emphasis is to move towards influencing behaviour through testing interventions which focus on the internal and/or (where possible) external causes of behaviour.
The findings will inform the design and practical application of policies, communications initiatives and strategies to encourage pro-environmental behaviour.
Projects should focus on ways of promoting pro-environmental behaviour in relation to one or more of the following pro-environmental behavioural themes:
· Energy efficiency/ usage in the home
· Waste and recycling · Water efficiency/ usage in the home
· Personal transport (including tourism)
· Purchase of eco-friendly products
For more information visit the funding site.
The deadline for applications is 9th September 2009.
Tags: behaviour change, innovation, seeking, UK
No Comments » |
Email This Post
Water Labels on Food
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 19th, 2009
Source: Cleanfood, the Future Climate newsletter
Table from “Water labels on food – Issues and recommendations” Ruth Segal & Tom MacMillan (July 2009)
“A new label proposed in the UK will ask consumers to consider the efficiency and impact of water use on the food products they buy. But rather than detailing figures on the actual amount of water used in production, it will indicate how responsible the company has been in using water. Tom MacMillan, the executive director for UK think tank and advisory body, the Food Ethics Council, admits labels aren’t the answer to everything. “One of the reasons labels can be useful is that actually companies clean their act up before they even stick the label on,” he says. “So it’s not just about giving shoppers information. It’s also about making companies think very seriously about what their impacts are on the environment.”" ABC Rural News.
Tags: behaviour shift, education, Water
No Comments » |
Email This Post
San Francisco Peak Oil Report
Posted in Movements, Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 10th, 2009
Source: PostCarbon Institute
Image: Dustin Jensen via SFGate
“…And most importantly, with all of these policies, start now. Conditions will be far better in the long run if the City begins addressing this unfolding challenge immediately. The transition cannot be done quickly; the City faces a limited window of opportunity to begin, after which adaptation will become enormously difficult, painful, and expensive. There is no time to lose.”
Extract from the report on Energy Bulletin, here.
In March 2009 the the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force published its report on the city’s vulnerability to peak oil and gas. The report acknowledges the threat to San Francisco from peak oil and gas and includes a raft of recommendations. On 23 July the report was slated to be presented to the Board of Supervisors at the Government Audit Committee meeting.
San Francisco was born at the beginning of the oil age, and the city has flourished during an era in which fossil fuels became the foundation of our economy and society. Petroleum and natural gas heat our homes and light our offices; they fuel the trucks that bring us our food and the cars and buses that move us around; they drive our industries and power the information technologies that marvel the world. Today, the City and its inhabitants are utterly reliant on fossil fuel energy: 84% of the energy consumed in San Francisco comes from oil and natural gas.
Because petroleum and natural gas are finite resources, this situation cannot last. If San Francisco is to thrive in the 21st century and remain a world-class city, it must begin planning today for how to maintain itself in a postfossil fuel age….
Tags: behaviour change, governance, peak oil
3 Comments » |
Email This Post