The project aims at achieving a better understanding of the processes that drive or limit the response of grassland systems in a world of increasing atmospheric pCO2. We will test the hypothesis that the previously shown increase in below-ground allocation of C under elevated pCO2 provides the necessary energy excess and will stimulate free-living N2 fixers in a low N grassland environment. The project thus aims at assessing the occurrence and importance of free-living N2 fixers under elevated pCO2 and identify the associated microbial communities involved in order to better understand ecosystems response and sustainability of grassland systems. This project had the last opportunity to obtain soil samples from a grassland ecosystem adapted to long-term (10 year) elevated atmospheric pCO2 as the Swiss FACE experiment. The project aims to identify the relevant components of free-living diazotrophs of the microbial community using 15N stable isotope - DNA probing.
MAI-TAI deals with integrated water resources management. It is designed as a coordination action of leading research and innovation operators, aiming at developing a coherent set of innovative, relevant and cooperative policy options and management strategies. Regionally it works with partners from China and India, and the work will focus around two lead river basins: The Hai river basin in North-East China and the Yamuna river basin in North India, both in arid and/or semi arid regions. The proposal features the following core coordination activities: 1. Enabling a dialogue between researchers and practitioners promoting state of the art and indigenous technologies and practices: The consortium believes that modern systems alone are not capable of solving the water needs of the people in many developing countries, and there is a strong need of generating innovative options through cross fertilization between both worlds. This cross-fertilization will be enabled by methods and rich experiences of user innovations research. 2. Based on (1), innovative policy options and management strategies will be compiled. Then, a multi-stakeholder interaction in order to evaluate these options and strategies will be carried out, supported by intelligent knowledge management tools: In the presence of a variety of actors (institutions, organisations, individuals) each with specific forms of knowledge with respect to scale, topic, reasoning processes, and a large number of information expected to be generated through the multi-stakeholder interaction, the issue of learning and knowledge management is of paramount importance. A strong impact of the coordination action is ensured by a highly inter- and transdisciplinary team, encompassing internationally reputable scientific institutions as well as strong governmental partners and NGOs. The latter two will considerable facilitate a wide and in particular meaningful stakeholder dialogue throughout the project.
Climate change over the next 100 years will likely have a range of direct and indirect effects on the natural and material environment, including the historic built environment. Important changes will include alterations in temperature, precipitation, extreme climatic events, soil conditions, groundwater and sea level. Some processes of building decay will be accelerated or worsened by climate change, while others will be delayed. The impacts on individual processes can be described, but it is difficult to assess the overall risk posed by climate change using currently available data . Linking global changes to the response of material surfaces of archaeological and historic structures remains a challenge. The objectives of the NOAH'S ARK Project are: - To determine the meteorological parameters and changes most critical to the built cultural heritage. - To research, predict and describe the effects of climate change on Europe's built cultural heritage over the next 100 years. - To develop mitigation and adaptation strategies for historic buildings, sites, monuments and materials that are likely to be worst affected by climate change effects and associated disasters. - To disseminate information on climate change effects and the optimum adaptation strategies for adoption by Europe's cultural heritage managers through a conference and guidelines. - To provide electronic information sources and tools, including web-based Climate Risk Maps and a Vulnerability Atlas for heritage managers to assess the threats of climate change in order to visualize the built heritage and cultural landscape under future climate scenarios and model the effects of different adaptation strategies. - To advise policy-makers and legislators through the project's Policy Advisory Panel. The results will allow the prediction of the impact of climate and pollution on cultural heritage and investigation of future climate scenarios on a European scale.
Context: With increasing global change pressures, and due to existing limitations, and un-sustainability factors and risks of conventional urban water management (UWM), cities experience difficulties in efficiently managing the ever scarcer water resources, their uses/services, and their after-use disposal, without creating environmental, social and/or economic damage. In order to meet these challenges, SWITCH calls for a paradigm shift in UWM. There is a need to convert adhoc actions (problem/incident driven) into a coherent and consolidated approach (sustainability driven). This calls for an IP Approach. Research conceptSWITCH therefore proposes an action research project which has as a main objective: The development, application and demonstration of a range of tested scientific, technological and socio-economic solutions and approaches that contribute to the achievement of sustainable and effective UWM schemes in 'The City of the future'.The project will be implemented by different combinations of consortium partners, along the lines of seven complementary and interactive themes. The research approach is innovative for the combination of: action research: address problems through innovation based upon involvement of users.learning alliances: to link up stakeholders to interact productively and to create win-win solutions along the water chain; multiple-way learning: European cities learn from each other and from developing countries, and vice versa.multiple-level or integrated approach: to consider the urban water system and its components (city level) in relation to its impacts on, and dependency of, the natural environment in the river basin (river basin level), and in relation to Global Change pressures (global level).Instruments and scopeAn IP with 30 partners, their resources, and a total budget of 25,191,396 EURO including budget for demonstration activities in 9 Cities in Europe and developing countries. Prime Contractor: UNESCO - Institute for Water Education, Delf, Netherlands.
The main objective of the project is to investigate, assess and enhance the potentiality of promising technological options (i.e., technologies, processes and concepts) for the treatment of industrial wastewater with the specific aim to provide tailor-mad e solutions to end-users for a wide range of wastewaters. Such solutions will be essentially based on the optimised integration of the investigated options and on technological improvements with respect to treatment system components, operation and control. Referring to the investigated options and the envisaged technological solutions, the project's goals are: -Investigating and enhancing the performances of promising wastewater treatment options such as aerobic granulation, integrated advanced oxidation processes (AOP) and membrane-based hybrid processes -Achieving fundamental and technological knowledge advancements necessary for advanced wastewater treatment application in different industrial sectors -Assessing the economic and environmental sustainability of promising wastewater treatment options -Developing integrated tailor-made solutions for end-users in different industrial sectors -Transferring the developed know-how to potential end-users inside and outside the project -Favouring their actual implementation for enhancing the EU Water Industry competitiveness. In order to achieve such goals, coordinated research activities will be carried out on selected options treating different wastewater. The experiences from such activities will be merged to define tailor-made solutions for end-users in different industrial sectors. A major goal will be the definition of treatment needs and framework conditions for a wide range of wastewaters based on the specific features of the options investigate d (i.e., aerobic granulation, AOP combined processes, membrane contactors, membrane chemical reactors). Prime Contractor: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Department of Bari, Water Research Institute, Roma, Italien.
The organ belongs to the core of European culture reflecting its diverse histories, traditions and stylistic periods. The European heritage of the organ is preserved in more than 10 000 historical instruments. A major threat to this heritage is indoor harmful environments. Organic acids, also in combination with condensation phenomena, create pipe corrosion causing serious damages to the pipes. Harmful humidity conditions often create cracks in the wooden vital parts of the organ making the instrument unplayable. The project, SENSORGAN, objectives are to make available new instrumentation for monitoring and detection of harmful environments for organs through development of sensors for real time measurement including (1) sensor for detection of organic acids, (2) sensor for indication of risk of damage to wooden parts of organs, (3) sensor for detection of dew formation inside organ pipes. The developed sensors will also constitute a powerful tool for assessment when taking measures in order to improve harmful environments. The developed sensor system will be applied in the historical organ from 1611 in the Minor Basilica of St. Andrew the Apostle, Olkusz in Poland. The data collected from all the sensors will be analysed, microclimatic factors creating harmful environments will be studied, and conclusions will be drawn for publications, mitigative strategies and support to CEN Standardisation. The project objectives thereby address the objectives of the Priority 8.1 Policy-oriented research - Scientific support to policies - SSP - FP6-2004-SSP-4, Call 4, B3.6, Task 4 through making available new instrumentation for monitoring crucial parameters deteriorating the organ heritage, to identify responses of organ heritage materials to indoor and outdoor environmental changes and to develop innovative mitigation strategies.
Waterborne sewage system has proven to be inappropriate to solve sanitation needs in developing countries. Approximately 90 percentt of city sewage in developing countries today is discharged untreated, polluting rivers, lakes and coastal areas (Winblad, 1997). With increasing population density and the resultant groundwater pollution, conventional decentralized disposal systems such as latrines and seepage pits are not viable alternatives either. Many cities are short of water and subject to critical environmental degradation (Niemczynowicz, 1996). Conventional sanitation technologies based on flush toilets, sewers, treatment and discharge cannot solve the problems in urban areas anymore. A sustainable sanitation and wastewater management system is urgently needed in order to address these issues. Ecological sanitation (Ecosan) is proposed as an alternative system to solve the following problems: lack of sanitation and water body contamination by pathogens from human waste. Ecosan does not only provide sanitation facilities for the people, but also seeks to protect public health, prevents water pollution and at the same time returns valuable nutrients to the soil so that it also helps to ensure food security and contributes to the objectives of sustainable development. The objective of this research is to search for a sustainable sanitation and human waste management system that is appropriate to be applied in poor income people living in densely populated urban areas in Indonesia. As Ecological Sanitation has not been applied in Indonesia before, this dissertation also aims to investigate its effectiveness and community acceptance in Indonesia. Two other existing systems are also studied as the comparison, which are the conventional septic tank system and the decentralized wastewater system (Dewats). All of these sanitation systems are assessed based on three sustainability criteria: economical, environmental and social.
Communications, data and information exchange are the key elements of the operational ocean monitoring and forecasting networks, defined in the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). Development of observing and closely related operational forecasting system in the Black Sea region requires the exchange of significant data and information volumes. ASCABOS is designed to strengthen the communication system ensuring flexible and operative infrastructure for data and information exchange between partners and end users. ASCABOS aims to increase public awareness and to stimulate and motivate the utilization of operational oceanographic information in management and decision-making practices. In the same time, high level of the operational services must be built and retained. ASCABOS will support achievement of these crucial objectives by initiating an educational and training programme designed for young scientists and wide spectrum of end users. Considerable work has been performed on compiling meta-databases on the Black Sea environmental data, information and research within previous international initiatives and projects. To support and to strengthen the exchange between scientists, governmental managers and other users ASCABOS is planning to combine experiences and instruments in order to develop a Black Sea information system, containing all available metadata, validated and efficiently updated through the Internet. ASCABOS plans to organize and realize a cost-effective VOS pilot programme, applying modern technologies and developments for data collection, transmission, storage, use and dissemination. The VOS programme will provide data for model assimilation and respond to the GOOS demand for long-term monitoring of the marine ecosystems. Prime Contractor: Institute of Oceanology - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; Varna, Bulgaria.
Alum-rosin sizing for paper, which came into commercial use in 1835 caused a shift of pH of paper from pseudo-neutral to acidic regions, which dramatically decreased permanence of paper. As a result, decay of library and archival holdings are reaching catastrophic proportions, with about 25 percent of the books in the general library collections brittle while additional 60 percent are endangered. In order to prevent the decay of paper induced by acids, a variety of mass deacidification techniques are available on the market. While a number of comparative evaluations of the treatments were performed in the past, the processes are continuously changing, while additional three were developed in recently. The proposed project aims to: - develop standard model materials and evaluation criteria, in order to enable superior evaluation of existing processes and ease in assessment of emerging ones - comparatively evaluate immediate and long term effects of treatments - develop quality control criteria and evaluation techniques - address environmental and health aspects The objective of extensive dissemination is to incorporate the most suitable mass treatment into the preservation policy of European libraries and archives.
Objectives: The PASAD project aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of sustainable rural development. Its major objective is to draw a more comprehensive picture of the rural economy through integrating various determinants of rural development and several methodologies, which allows the evaluation of linkages and interaction effects. Decreasing soil fertility implies decreasing yields over time and hence lowers the real incomes of already poor farmers even further. Sustainability in agricultural production depends on various interdependent aspects that require integrated analytical approaches to address the complexity involved. Smallholder production of food crops in poor countries is particularly vulnerable to hazards that are related to (i) production technologies as well as (ii) factor and commodity markets. The former aspect includes appropriate input use and land management, while the latter particularly considers rural labor markets, intermediate input markets, and commercial output markets. In this context, the project focuses on three crucial aspects, namely (i) institutional and other determinants to foster the degree of commercialization of agricultural small-scale produce, (ii) alternative occupational choices in rural labor markets with respect to agricultural and non-agricultural employment, and (iii) biophysical aspects concerning soil-conserving production technologies. The main hypothesis is that all three aspects need to be addressed sufficiently and simultaneously in order to promote sustainable smallholder agricultural production that is able to contribute to overall economic growth and development and, consequently, to food security. Methodology: The project follows an interdisciplinary approach, which combines several methodologies within economic and social sciences: Computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling, Bio-economic household modelling, Household and labor force survey analysis, Institutional analysis, GIS-based spatial econometrics.
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