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A global collaborative accounting network to calculate the resource use of products and services
(2015)
National policies for resource efficiency and waste management : structures, impacts, and deficits
(2015)
Technical summary
(2015)
Water is a basis for life and ecosystem health. And water, especially in regions affected by water scarcity, is a highly contested and politicised natural resource. The state-of-the-art in sustainable water resources management requires collaborative approaches that foster the integration of conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders. Achieving integration in complex and contested real life situations however remains a major challenge. Boundary work can facilitate this ambitious goal. This study evolves boundary work science to improve collaboration in the water sector. It develops a framework for boundary work that enables understanding, structuring and approaching barriers for collaborative water resources management. A case study from the Garden Route region, South Africa gives a grounded basis for the conceptual developments and further provides in-depth insights into reasons and obstacles for collaborative water resources management in a contested local case. The case study serves both: An intrinsic analysis of a conflictive case, and conceptual developments to the boundary work framework - tested against local realities.
The rising global demand for metals in a context of declining ore grades is driving the opening of new mines and the expansion of existing ones, disturbing substantial land areas (especially by open pits). However, how much land is currently disturbed globally? How much land could be disturbed by metal mining in 2050? This study investigates the global area disturbed by mining of iron, bauxite, copper, gold, and silver for the first time. The first part consists of the calculation of the specific land requirements, i.e. the area newly disturbed caused by the ore extraction at the mine site. The second part addresses the global area disturbed in the year 2011 whereas the third presents scenarios of how such area might evolve until 2050. The last part addresses the current and future pressures on global biodiversity by metal mines and shows possibilities for the future opening of new mines in low biodiversity areas, alleviating pressures in high biodiversity ones. This study presents the findings of the author´s dissertation hoping they are used as a frame to develop policies and incentives to reduce the amount of area directly disturbed by mines and their pressures on biodiversity.
Achieving a truly sustainable energy transition requires progress across multiple dimensions beyond climate change mitigation goals. This article reviews and synthesizes results from disparate strands of literature on the coeffects of mitigation to inform climate policy choices at different governance levels. The literature documents many potential cobenefits of mitigation for nonclimate objectives, such as human health and energy security, but little is known about their overall welfare implications. Integrated model studies highlight that climate policies as part of well-designed policy packages reduce the overall cost of achieving multiple sustainability objectives. The incommensurability and uncertainties around the quantification of coeffects become, however, increasingly pervasive the more the perspective shifts from sectoral and local to economy wide and global, the more objectives are analyzed, and the more the results are expressed in economic rather than nonmonetary terms. Different strings of evidence highlight the role and importance of energy efficiency for realizing synergies across multiple sustainability objectives.
Decoupling resource consumption and economic growth : insights into an unsolved global challenge
(2015)
Consumption-based CO2 emissions, which are commonly calculated by means of environmentally extended input-output analysis, are gaining wider recognition as a way to complement territorial emission inventories. Although their use has increased significantly in the last years, insufficient attention has been paid to the methodological soundness of the underlying environmental extension. This should follow the internationally agreed accounting rules of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, which addresses the activities undertaken by the residents of a country, independent from where these take place. Nonetheless, some footprint calculations use extensions that account for all the activities within the territory, which leads to methodological inconsistencies. Thus, this article introduces the most relevant conceptual differences between these accounting frameworks and shows the magnitude of the gap between them building on the data generated for the EXIOBASE model. It concludes that the differences are high for many countries and their magnitude is increasing over time.
For a long time, water shortages and flooding have been challenges in many parts of China. Meanwhile, the Chinese government announced the change of water management from engineering-oriented approach towards integrated approach in the last decades. However, the announced changes in management approach does not necessarily lead to the wide implementation of institutions, infrastructures and practice. They can be confronted by a strong resistance from the existing management approach. In fact, the development of water resources management is a complex process. Such a complexity raise the following questions: did fundamental changes really take place in the structure of water supply and demand management and flood management in China? If yes, how? In order to answer this question, the author (1) developed conceptual frameworks to enable a detailed and precise analysis of regime development; (2)applied the elaborated conceptual frameworks to explore the development of the water resources management regime in China, at the example of three case studies. These three case studies were: - Flood Management (IFM) took place in the Dongting Lake Area in the middle Yangtze River, - Water allocation in the Yellow River Basin, - The experimentation period of Water Saving Society in China. With the support of the developed framework, the case studies show that fundamental changes, i.e. transitions, have taken place in flood management regime and water supply-demand regime in China, but transitions have not yet completed, due to, namely, the lack of reconfiguration of other regime components and other relevant regimes. In addition, the case studies also depict how the start of transitions were triggered and how informal learning processes influenced regime development. The thesis contributed to sustainability transitions research by developing an operational approach to analyze transitions of water resource management regime and by expanding the empirical basis for transitions research to natural resources management regime in emerging economies.
Economics beats politics
(2015)
The role of gender concerns in the planning of small-scale energy projects in developing countries
(2015)
In 2009, the German government launched its "National Development Plan for Electric Mobility" which set the concrete target of having 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020. However, there have been hypes around e-mobility before and even if this goal were to be reached, a merely quantitative aim of a certain number of electric vehicles will not suffice to contribute to a more sustainable development in transport. This requires a more comprehensive vision of sustainable e-mobility as a system innovation. Thus, the question addressed in this thesis is: How can we assess - at this critical early stage - whether there is potential for e-mobility developing as a sustainable system innovation? A theoretical framework will be developed for assessing the potential of a wider transition at an early stage by analyzing current patterns of socio-technical co-evolution and embedding these in a wider framework of the structural dynamics involved in transitions. The aim of the analysis is to identify whether 'system-innovative' projects do emerge in the case of Germany/Baden-Württemberg and what patterns (e.g. in terms of specific actor constellations, institutional adjustments etc.) can explain this. It will be shown that the system-innovative potential of this e-mobility niche remains limited, due to the powerful influence of incumbents, conflicting political goals and traditional science approaches. A few more system-innovative activities emerge where powerful actors from outside are involved, who are capable of viewing mobility in a more systemic way (e.g. actors from the public transport or housing sector). It is argued that the role of large demonstration projects is important, but they need to be designed as transdisciplinary research projects from the beginning.
Although a substantial economic energy saving potential exists in the residential sector of the European Union, the energy efficiency service (EES) market is much less developed in this market segment than in other demand sectors (e.g. the industry or the public/service sector).
This paper presents an analysis of the current situation and existing potentials for future expansion. A specific analysis methodology has been developed and applied by a research consortium in 18 EU countries. This methodology has mostly built upon an extensive review of the existing literature and on interviews of a large number of acknowledged experts. Its application has allowed identifying encouraging development trends in specific market segments where the possibility of aggregating the EES demand or of exploiting good relationships with customers have created interesting investment opportunities. These trends have been observed in particular in Germany, Denmark, France, Flanders (BE), Hungary, Romania and UK. The assessment performed has also allowed discussing a series of strategies and policy measures that can be adopted to overcome existing barriers to market development. The general conclusion drawn in the paper is that energy efficiency policies supporting EES markets in the residential sector are highly needed. Although EU policies have typically a limited direct impact, they can increase trust into EESs and EES providers. At the national level, a stronger collaboration of governments or local administrations with banks to finance EESs is still very necessary in many EU countries.
How can renewable energy sources be efficiently integrated into the North African electricity systems? By using techno-economic modeling methods, this book explores optimized electricity system expansion pathways until the year 2030 for the five North African countries - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. The results indicate that renewable energy integration is actually a viable business case for the entire region, if wind and solar capacities are properly planned in conjunction with the conventional generation system and under consideration of the country-specific electricity supply-/demand patterns. Further aspects featured in this publication are the impact of renewable power on the transnational electricity transmission system and the question how decision making processes about renewable energy strategies can be improved in the North African context. The book is a contribution to the scientific literature about energy issues in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but also seeks to address political and industrial practitioners concerned with the development of the region's renewable energy future.
The transformation of energy systems is influencing economic policy agendas all over the world, particularly in industrialized countries. In this process, Germany has taken a pioneering role, and hence the technical innovations, legal frameworks, and business models established there are also of interest for other countries trying to achieve broader use of renewable energies. Energy cooperatives have been an important building block in the energy transition in Germany, although their practical importance is neither quantitatively nor qualitatively reflected in the academic literature. Drawing on recently collected data, this paper presents an overview of German energy cooperatives in terms of organization, financing, and membership. We then review literature from economics and the social sciences that has been used to analyze cooperatives on various levels in other fields. We discuss how these theories could be applied to create a better understanding of energy cooperatives, and we derive a preliminary research agenda for their analysis. We also assess the scope for interdisciplinary work among economists, sociologists, and other disciplines.