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BACKGROUND: The Kingdom of Jordan belongs to the ten water scarcest countries in the world, and climate change is likely to increase the frequency of future droughts. Jordan is considered among the 10 most water impoverished countries in the world, with per capita water availability estimated at 170 m per annum, compared to an average of 1,000 m per annum in other countries. Jordan Government has taken the strategic decision to develop a conveyor system including a 325 km pipe to pump 100 million cubic meters per year of potable water from Disi-Mudawwara close to the Saudi Border in the south, to the Greater Amman area in the north. The construction of the water pipeline has started end of 2009 and shall be finished in 2013. Later on, the pipeline could serve as a major part of a national water carrier in order to convey desalinated water from the Red Sea to the economically most important central region of the country. The conveyor project will not only significantly increase water supplies to the capital, but also provide for the re-allocation of current supplies to other governorates, and for the conservation of aquifers. In the context of the Disi project that is co-funded by EIB two Environmental and Social Management Plans have been prepared: one for the private project partners and one for the Jordan Government. The latter includes the Governments obligation to re-balance water allocations to irrigation and to gradually restore the protected wetlands of Azraq (Ramsar site) east of Amman that has been depleted due to over-abstraction by re-directing discharge of highland aquifers after the Disi pipeline becomes operational. The Water Strategy recognizes that groundwater extraction for irrigation is beyond acceptable limits. Since the source is finite and priority should be given to human consumption it proposes to tackle the demand for irrigation through tariff adjustments, improved irrigation technology and disincentive to water intensive crops. The Disi aquifer is currently used for irrigation by farms producing all kinds of fruits and vegetables on a large scale and exporting most of their products to the Saudi and European markets and it is almost a third of Jordan's total consumption. The licenses for that commercial irrigation were finished by 2011/12. Whilst the licenses will be not renewed the difficulty will be the enforcement and satellite based information become an important supporting tool for monitoring. OUTLOOK: The ESA funded project Water management had the objective to support the South-North conveyor project and the activities of EIB together with the MWI in Jordan to ensure the supply of water for the increasing demand. EO Information provides a baseline for land cover and elevation and support the monitoring of further stages. usw.
Globalization raised the importance of food safety and quality concerns. Developed countries implement precautionary food regulation policies to protect their affluent consumers from unsafe food imported from developing and transition countries. However, the alarming number of trade disputes at WTO evidences cases of abuse of such policies. While claims on protectionist nature of food regulations are valid in principle, yet there is little empirical evidence about their economic effects. The questions of 1) quantification of trade impact of food standards and 2) investigation of national food regulation systems are absolutely essential for the new trade agenda. These problems for developing countries are on the focus of trade policy debate, whereas for transition countries are not considered seriously. Such a research for these recently liberalized markets gains a special significance. - The proposed research will employ Gravity Model for quantitative estimation of impact of EU aflatoxin standards on transition countries- exports.- Russian food regulations for cereal value chain, their enforcement and monitoring mechanisms will be investigated through value chain and cost-benefit analysis.- Compliance of Russian norms with EU standards will be estimated applying comparative advantage analysis.The study area is Stavropol region of the Russian Federation. Local experts will contribute to the construction of the research data set and analysis. The results of the research will assist 1) international policy makers in designing new global trade agenda and 2) Russian producers, exporters and decision makers in improving cereal value chain.
The Municipalities of Stara Zagora and Varna will be the targets for a 2,5 year project by WECF and its NGO partners from Bulgaria and the Netherlands; the Earth Forever Foundation, the Institute of Ecological Modernization and WASTE and IRC Netherlands. The project receives financial support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs MATRA programme. The Institute of Wastewater Management (TUHH) is supporting this project with respect to the introduction of ecological sanitation and extensive wastewater treatment technologies like planted soil filters. Workshops are given and technical knowledge regarding the design, construction and operation of these facilities is provided. This will help to improve the current situation in the villages and will provide an example for further distribution of appropriate wastewater management in Bulgarian villages. Currently, only a very small part of the population is connected to a central sewer system, which discharges the wastewater without any further treatment into the environment. The remaining families are depending on outdoor pit latrines, soakaways and septic tanks which are very often subject to clogging. Thus, overflowing and discharging of wastewater onto streets is a very common problem.
NANOINSULATE will develop durable, robust, cost-effective opaque and transparent vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) incorporating new nanotechnology-based core materials (nanofoams, aerogels, aerogel composites) and high-barrier films that are up to four times more energy efficient than current solutions. These new systems will provide product lifetimes in excess of 50 years suitable for a variety of new-build and retrofit building applications. Initial building simulations based on the anticipated final properties of the VIPs indicate reductions in heating demand of up to 74Prozent and CO2 emissions of up to 46Prozent for Madrid, Spain and up to 61Prozent and 55Prozent respectively for Stuttgart, Germany for a building renovation which reduces the U-value of the walls and roof from 2.0 W m-2 K-1 to 0.2 W m-2 K-1. This reduction could be achieved with NANOINSULATE products that are only 25 mm thick, giving a cost-effective renovation without the need of changing all the reveals and ledges. Similarly, significant reductions in U-values of transparent VIPs (3 W m-2 K-1 to 0.5 W m-2 K-1) are shown by substituting double glazed units in existing building stock. Six industrial & four research based partners from seven EU countries will come together to engineer novel solutions capable of being mass produced. Target final manufacturing costs for insulation board (production rates above 5 million m2/year) are less than 7 m-2 for a U-value of 0.2 W m-2 K-1. NANOINSULATE will demonstrate its developments at construction sites across Europe. A Lifecycle Assessment, together with a safety and service-life costing analysis, will be undertaken to prove economic viability. NANOINSULATE demonstrates strong relevance to the objectives and expected impacts of both the specific call text of the Public-Private Partnership Energy-efficient Buildings topic New nanotechnology-based high performance insulation systems for energy efficiency within the 2010 NMP Work Programme and the wider NMP & Energy Thematic Priorities. Prime Contractor: Kingsplan Research and Developments Ltd.; Kingscourt; Irland.
This SNF proposal seeks funding for the continuation of the Swiss contribution to the Lake Van Drilling Project executed by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP). Among other previous Swiss ICDP engagements, the Lake Van Drilling project was pivotal in triggering the newly established SNF-supported Swiss membership in ICDP. Further, the SNF Swiss contribution is a central building block of the entire ICDP PaleoVan initiative. Lake Van is the fourth-largest terminal lake in the world, extending 130 km WSW-ENE 1674 m above sea level on a high plateau in eastern Anatolia, Turkey. The lake is surrounded by active volcanoes within a tectonically active area and it is known to accumulate fluids emanating from the Earths mantle. The partly annually-laminated sedimentary record down to 220 m depth recovered from Lake Van during the ICDP PaleoVan drilling operations in 2010 has been shown to be an excellent palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironment archive. The continuous, high-resolution continental sequence, which covers several glacial-interglacial cycles (greater than 500 kyr), represents a unique possibility to investigate in detail the climatic, environmental, and volcanic changes that occurred in the Near East, the cradle of human civilization, during much of the Quaternary Period. Furthermore, the sediments contain an invaluable record of past earthquake activities, allowing the construction of a catalogue of prehistoric earthquakes and making it possible to study fluid transport in the continental crust that was triggered by seismic events. In this context, the societal vulnerability of the area to seismic hazards was dramatically documented by the occurrence of the devastating earthquake of magnitude 7.2 close to the city of Van on 23 October 2011 (hereafter referred to as the VE11 earthquake). This unfortunate and tragic event offers a unique opportunity to calibrate the past seismic events recorded in the sediments of Lake Van and the related emission of fluids from the solid earth to a modern seismic analogue. Sediment and fluid transport triggered by this major seismic event need to be quantified in order to calibrate the sedimentological record, which is targeted by the follow-up field campaign proposed within this project extension. The continuation of the Swiss initiative, embedded in the overarching ICDP drilling project on Lake Van, encompasses all the 5 initial research modules (A-E) of the ongoing SNF project (200021-124981). Within this proposal extension, the extended modules (A*-E*) will focus on key issues and new developments that expand the initial topics, with a special emphasis on the recent major earthquake VE11 and its biogeochemical and sedimentological implications. At the same time, this extension will also allow the results that have already been acquired to be further analysed and written up for publication by the project team. A large number of publications is foreseen. (...)
The goal of this study was to enable a prognosis on the future rainfall conditions of the Nile Equatorial Lakes regions by delivering time-series of monthly rainfall sums for the time-period from 2021 to 2050 that can be used for all kinds of applications. One example might be the dimensioning of hydraulic structures. In these very long lasting investments, future climatic conditions have to be considered during present planning and construction.The principal sources of information on future climate conditions are General Circulation Models (GCMs). These are physically based atmospheric models that resemble a numerical weather prediction system but on a much coarser scale. This forecast cannot be perfect. Especially, it cannot predict single values, e. g. if January 2050 will be rather wet or dry, but only climatic references, i.e. state, if Januaries in general will become wetter or dryer in the future. Even if the predictions of a GCM were perfect, its output could not be used directly for hydrological purposes, due to its coarse resolution. The monthly precipitation values that are provided by the GCM present the spatially averaged precipitation over a grid cell of several thousand square kilometres. This 'block rainfall' can differ significantly from rainfall measured at the ground. Rain gauges are influenced by local effects like micro climatic conditions or orographic effects of mountain ranges that GCMs are not able to resolve.This study combined the information from different data sources. As global trend information, monthly precipitation values from two GCMs (ECHAM5 and HadCM3) were used. Three CO2-emission scenarios (A1b, A2 and B1) were considered in this data. As local ground reference observed monthly rainfall sums from several rain gauges in East Africa as well as from three reanalysis projects (Climate Research Unit, University of Delaware and GPCC) were used.At each rain gauge or observation point in the reanalysis a technique called 'Quantile-Quantile-Transformation' was applied to establish a relationship between the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the GCMs and that of the ground references during the calibration period from 1961-1990. The CDFs were fitted by non-parametric Kernel-Smoothing. To account for potential shifts in the annual cycles of GCMs and ground references, the transformations was done separately for each month.Assuming that the relation between Global Model and local response will be constant in the future, the global predictions of the GCM can be downscaled to local scale, leading to future rainfall scenarios that are coherent with observed past rainfall.Combining the data from three CO2-emission scenarios of two GCM with three reanalysis data sets, an ensemble of 18 different rainfall time-series was created for each observation point. The range of this ensemble helps to estimate the possible uncertainties in the prognosis of future monthly precipitation sums from 2021 to 2050.
Objective: Hydrogen storage is a key enabling technology for the extensive use of H2 as energy carrier. In fact, one of the greatest technological barriers to the widespread introduction of hydrogen in vehicles is an efficient and safe storage method. Providing economically and environmentally attractive solutions for these three storage options for transport applications and reinforcing the competitiveness of the European car industry are indeed the main STORHY objectives. This IP is a European initiative on automobile H2 storage driven by major European car manufacturers and covering the full spectrum of currently qualified technologies. Although the primary target of STORHY is the automobile industry, the preparation of spin-offs for stationary systems is also considered. In the three vertical SPs, viable solutions will be developed based on the defined requirements. SP Pressure Vessel concentrates on developing a 700 bar storage technology including production technologies for composite vessels. SP Cryogenic Storage will develop free form lightweight tanks manufactured from composites as well as adequate production technologies. SP Solid Storage assesses current progress in the storage of solid materials and will focus its primary research activities on alienates. Furthermore, up scaling of the material production process will be considered resulting in the construction and testing of prototype tanks. These developments are accompanied by safety studies and pre-normative research within SP SAR. The three storage technologies will be evaluated applying technical, economic, social and environmental criteria in SP Evaluation. The final outcome of the project is to identify the most promising storage solution for different vehicle applications. Such results should illuminate the future perspectives of H2 storage for transport and stationary applications and assist decision makers and stakeholders on the road to an H2 economy.
Aufgrund der Zunahme der erfassten Abwassermengen bzw. durch die Intensivierung des Reinigungsprozesses ist es in den letzten Jahren ein starker Anstieg des Klärschlammvolumens zu verzeichnen. Die zunehmende Schwierigkeit, die auf Kläranlagen anfallenden Schlämme zu entsorgen, lässt nach neuen Abwasserreinigungsverfahren mit verringertem Klärschlammanfall bzw. neuen Verwertungsmöglichkeiten suchen. Dieses Problem stellt sich nicht nur in Europa sondern in verstärktem Ausmaß auch in den Entwicklungsländern. In China wurde in den letzten Jahren mit Unterstützung der Weltbank ein massives Investitionsprogramm zum Ausbau der Abwasserreinigung initiiert. In diesem Zusammenhang wird innovativen Verfahren zur Klärschlammreduktion eine hohe Bedeutung beigemessen. Im Rahmen einer Studie wurden unterschiedliche innovative Verfahrensweisen untersucht und bewertet. Als vielversprechende Möglichkeit wurde die Intensivierung der Klärschlammfaulung durch Schlammdesintegration identifiziert. Mittels Aufschlussverfahren, wie z.B. Ozonierung, wird der biologische Abbauprozess unterstützt und dadurch ein erhöhter Anteil der organischen Inhaltsstoffe des Klärschlamms in Biogas umgewandelt. Das entstehende Biogas wird zur Strom- und Wärmerzeugung genutzt. Diese neuartige Technologie wird derzeit in einer Versuchsanlage an der Kläranlage Tulln intensiv untersucht. In einem weiteren Schritt werden parallel Pilotversuche in China (Shanghai) aufgenommen um das Verfahren weiter zu optimieren.
Das Vorhaben wurde im Rahmen der deutsch-indonesischen Kooperation auf dem Gebiet der wissenschaftlichen Forschung und technologischen Entwicklung durchgeführt. Hierbei sollte der indonesische Partner kurzfristig in den Bau moderner Windkraftanlagen eingearbeitet werden. Bei der Lieferung der beiden Anlagen stand die Nutzung der erzeugten Energie mit im Vordergrund. Es wurde ein Konzept für den Betrieb von Eiserzeugungsanlagen ohne Zwischenspeicherung der elektrischen Energie erstellt. Die Ergebnisse aus dem Testbetrieb zeigten, dass die realisierte Betriebskonzeption voll funktionstüchtig ist. Nach entsprechender Ausbildung war der indonesische Partner in der Lage, die Windkraftanlagen selbständig zu installieren.
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