Egypt passed a revolution and changed its political system, but many problems are still lacking a solution. Especially in the field of water the North African country has to face many challenges. Most urgent are strategies to manage the limited water resources. About 80% of the available water resources are consumed for agriculture and the rest are for domestic and industrial activities. The management of these resources is inefficient and a huge amount of fresh water is discarded. The shortage of water supply will definitely influence the economic and cultural development of Egypt. In 2010, Egypt was ranked number 8 out of 165 nations reviewed in the so-called Water Security Risk Index published by Maplecroft. The ranking of each country in the index depends mainly on four key factors, i.e. access to improved drinking water and sanitation, the availability of renewable water and the reliance on external supplies, the relationship between available water and supply demands, and the water dependency of each countrys economy. Based on this study, the situation of water in Egypt was identified as extremely risky. A number of programs and developed strategies aiming to efficiently manage the usage of water resources have been carried out in the last few years by the Egyptian Government. But all these activities, however, require the availability of trained and well-educated individuals in water technology fields. Unfortunately, the number of water science graduates are decreasing and also there are few teaching and training courses for water science offered in Egypt. However, there is still a demand for several well-structured and international programs to fill the gap and provide the Egyptian fresh graduates with the adequate and up-to-date theoretical and practical knowledge available for water technology. IWaTec is designed to fill parts of this gap.
Wälder sind für die Bekämpfung des Klimawandels und die Erhaltung unseres Planeten von entscheidender Bedeutung. Forstwirtschaftliche Unternehmen und Organisationen überwachen die Wälder und unterstützen deren Wachstum, Holzproduktion und Pflege. Leider kann die Überwachung großer Waldflächen schwierig und ungenau sein, was für die ordnungsgemäße Erhaltung der Waldgesundheit gefährlich ist. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt DIGIFOREST stellt eine innovative Lösung vor, die die Überwachung und das Datenmanagement für Wälder mithilfe von Robotern und künstlicher Intelligenz verbessert. Durch den Einsatz verschiedener Roboter zur Erfassung von 3D-Raumdaten über Wälder und einzelne Bäume und die anschließende KI-Dokumentation und KI-Darstellung bietet es Forstunternehmen und Verantwortlichen der Politik ein unvergleichliches Instrument.
The amount of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in the EU28 reached 245 million tons in 2012. Nowadays, Europe directives for waste management are more restrictive each year (e.g Landfill Directive 1999/31/EC), but unfortunately, landfill disposal still represents 34% of total MSW generated. On the other hand, citizen awareness as well as the high fees operators pay for landfill disposal, have helped to greatly increase the percentage for recycling from 18% in 1995, to 42% in 2012. However, 40% of all the glass waste ends up in mixed MSW plants (which typically contain 7% of glass). Instead of being disposed of in selective-waste collection, it ends up in landfills or is composted/incinerated with the remnant waste. We have developed SEEGLASS, a high performance optical sorter based on computer vision and a pneumatic rejection system. Our aim is to solve this non-environmentally friendly problem, while also offering our end-users additional revenues with this recovered material, which is not being exploited now (49€/tn glass). In addition, extracting this glass, will allow the treatment plants to significantly reduce costs from waste disposal fees (50€/Tonne EU average and rising). Payback for customers is estimated in only 19 months. With this project we will (i) construct pre-conditioning process line, (ii) optimise our current SEEGLASS computer vision system as well as its mechanical and pneumatic design, to reach 80% glass recovery, with 99% purity, (iii) integrate both, the process line and the glass sorter solution into a demonstrator system, and (iv) validate its feasibility in-house with real MSW coming from different countries, as well as carry-out an 24/7 end-user validation. We, PICVISA, will be the first company to recover the glass fraction in refined MSW worldwide (the niche market exists worldwide) selling Turn-key installations or only SEEGLASS units, contributing to a disruptive change in the sector.
Ein Verständnis der Klimavariabilität während der letzten drei Millionen Jahre bleibt eine große wissenschaftliche Herausforderung. Paläoklima-Archive liefern vielfältige Information über quartäre Klimazyklen und geben etliche ausgeprägte Regimeänderungen in der Klimavariabilität preis. Die Mechanismen dieser Übergänge sind noch immer nicht voll verstanden. Obwohl eine Anzahl von Hypothesen aufgestellt wurde, wird das Austesten dieser durch das Fehlen geeigneter Modelle erschwert. Wir schlagen vor die Natur dieser Regimeänderungen mit einem neuen Erdsystemmodell intermediärer Komplexität, welches auf dem vorhanden und umfassend getesteten Modell CLIMBER-2 aufbauen wird, zu studieren. Obwohl das neue Modell eine höhere räumliche Auflösung als CLIMBER-2 haben wird, wird es noch immer schnell genug sein, um Rechnungen auf Zeitskalen von Millionen von Jahren zu ermöglichen. Mit einem Ensemble von Modellrealisierungen gewonnen aus der Variation relevanter Modellparameter werden wir eine Reihe von transienten Rechnungen durchführen, um existierenden Hypothesen zum Pliozän-Pleistozän-Übergang (ca. 2,7 Ma vor heute, v.h.), zur Revolution des mittleren Pleistozäns (zwischen 1,2 und 0,8 Ma v.h.) und zum mittleren Brunhes-Ereignis (ca. 430 ka v.h.) auszutesten. Letztendliche Zielsetzung ist es diese Übergänge mit dem orbitalen Forcing als den einzigen vorgegebenen Antrieb wiedergeben, wobei die Zusammensetzung der Atmosphäre, die Evolution der terrestrischen Sedimentschicht und der äolische Staubtransport sowie dessen Deposition mit dem Modell dargestellt werden. Wir erwarten von diesem Vorhaben einen erheblichen Fortschritt im Verständnis der nicht-linearen Dynamik der wichtigsten Komponenten des Erdsystems, wie den Eisschilden, der ozeanischen Zirkulation und dem Kohlenstoffzyklus sowie der Rolle verschiedener Feedbacks im Klimasystem. Wir werden auch die Möglichkeit einer Verwendung der reichhaltigen Paläoklima-Infomationen über die Klimavariabilität der letzten 3 Millionen Jahre als Mittel zur besseren Eingrenzung der Sensitivität des Erdsystems sowie dessen externe Antriebe und interne Störungen bewerten
Die Energiewende wird unter anderem durch die Verknappung fossiler Energie getrieben, zugleich stellt dies das Energiesystem vor eine große Herausforderung. Um Maßnahmen zur Erhöhung der Resilienz des Energiesystems zu ermöglichen wird ein Index der regionalen Verwundbarkeit der österreichischen Energiewende bis 2020/2050 angesichts von Energiekrisen und anderen Stressoren auf Basis der KLIEN-Projekte 'Powerdown', 'Save our Surface', 'Feasible Futures', 'Zersiedelt', 'PlanVision', 'KlimAdapt'und 'PRESENCE'erstellt. Der Index setzt sich aus Resilienz-Indikatoren zusammen und integriert technische, ökonomische, ökologische und soziale Faktoren. Die Energieresilienz wird regionalisiert für ganz Österreich kartographisch dargestellt und in zwei Fallstudien zu Klima- und Energiemodellregionen exemplarisch analysiert und validiert. Regionale Energiewendepfade werden mit Fokus auf Klima- und Energiemodellregionen des KLIEN in SWOT-Analysen auf ihre Resilienz hin bewertet.
In recent years, costs of both LED lighting diodes and photovoltaic (PV) systems have decreased substantially. In widely non-electrified rural Africa, this has induced a silent revolution, the market based dissemination of dry-cell battery or solar driven small LED lanterns in rural areas. These devices are in many cases of a very low quality, which might threat the sustainability of these new markets by a loss of trust among customers. The international community has responded to this development by promoting so-called Pico-PV systems that meet sufficient quality standards. Supported by the Dutch Daey Ouwens Fund, the British company ToughStuff Ltd. has recently started to market such Pico-PV-Systems in Rwanda. The ToughStuff systems include a 1 Watt panel, a small lantern, a mobile phone charger, and a radio. Together with ISS, RWI has been assigned by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to evaluate the impacts these systems have on households in rural areas. For this purpose, a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) is conducted in 15 remote communities in which households do not have access to electricity and rely on candles and kerosene for lighting and dry-cell batteries for radio usage. Mobile phones can only be charged in the next grid connected area or against charging fees in shops that have a generator or a car battery. After a baseline survey, for which 300 households are interviewed, 150 of them are selected randomly to receive a ToughStuff Pico-PV system for free. The baseline data is used to randomize within similar strata or pairs of households. The 'winners' also receive the same short training on how to use the Pico-PV system as ordinary ToughStuff customers who buy the solar system on the market. A follow-up survey will be conducted 6-12 months after the randomization of the Pico-PV systems. This research set-up allows for two principal research questions to be addressed: First, since the capacity of the Pico-PV system will in most cases not be sufficient to allow full usage of all three energy services - lighting, radio, mobile phone charging - we investigate how people living in absolute energy poverty decide between these three services. Second, the unbiased impact of using a Pico-PV system can be estimated due to the RCT approach. Indicators we examine are energy expenditures, lighting usage, mobile phone usage, and radio usage as well as the knowledge about contraceptive usage, family planning, and malaria prevention, which might be affected through radio information campaigns. In addition to the RCT, a small survey of around 100-150 households in regions in which ToughStuff is already promoting its products on the market is conducted in parallel to the follow-up survey. The purpose is to check the extent to which the usage and impact results in the RCT can be transferred to 'real-world' users.
The investigation of sediment cores from two of the largest freshwater lakes from Western Europe (lakes Geneva and Lucerne) demonstrated that natural sources of trace elements dominated before the European industrial revolution. The heavy metal pollution (e.g. lead, mercury) highly increased following the industrialization of Switzerland after 1850. The implementation of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in the 1960s significantly decreased the metal pollution at the deepwater sites. By contrast, the Vidy Bay of Lake Geneva where are released the WWTP of the city of Lausanne since 1964 was highly contaminated by heavy metals due to the WWTP emissions. Lead isotopic composition furthermore highlighted the industrial pollution sources over the last 200 years. During the twentieth century, industrial releases multiplied by 10 times heavy metal fluxes to hydrological systems located on both sides of the Alps. The remote and small high altitude lake Meidsee (2661 m a.s.l. in the Southwestern Alps) revealed the strong increase in anthropogenic trace metal deposition during the Greek and Roman Empires (ca 300 BC to AD 400), the Late Middle Ages (ca AD 1400), and the Early Modern Europe (after ca AD 1600). The greatest increases in anthropogenic metal pollution were evidenced after the industrial revolution of ca AD 1850, especially in Lake Lucerne where industrial activities and the steamboat navigation released high amounts of fossil fuel combustion residues and heavy metals. The elemental and isotopic composition of sedimentary organic matter from the high-altitude Lake Meidsee provided additional information about the high-altitude Alpine landscape evolution since the Late Pleistocene/Holocene deglaciation in the Swiss Southwestern Alps; and indicated the predominant deposition of algal-derived organic matter with limited input of terrestrial organic matter before the Holocene Climatic Optimum (between 7.0 and 5.5 years ago). This research also investigated faecal indicator bacteria (Escherichia coli and Enterococcus), multiple antibiotic resistant and antibiotic resistance genes, in sediment profiles from different parts of Lake Geneva (Switzerland) over the last decades. Results showed that the WWTP input constituted the main source of pollution for several contaminants, including heavy metals, antibiotics, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Bay of Vidy of Lake Geneva can therefore be considered as a reservoir of bacteria multiple resistance genes. Hence, the human-induced eutrophication in the 1970s highly enhanced the sediment microbial activity, and therein the spreading of antibiotic resistant bacteria and genes in this aquatic environment used to supply drinking water in a highly populated area.
Objective: InfraGuidER Coordinated Action primary objective is to define the guidelines for developing an effective European method/tool for the environmental impact evaluation of the railway infrastructure (existing and new). Despite a similar process has been already provided for the rolling stock the railway infrastructure is a more complex system where in the last year a silent revolution has been performed in order to face the high performances of trains (high speed trains), to attract the freight transport, to reduce the maintenance and operational costs, to comply with the local, regional regulation in terms of environmental impact. To avoid that this revolution will create a great unbalance among regions and to support the know-how and best practices transfer it is important to assess by a consensus process at European level the following items: the current state of environmental performance within the railway sector, and to highlight the criticalities to become effective and practical for the internal Environmental Management system implemented by railway companies and suppliers; the infrastructure functional subsystems and interfaces from the environment point of view; balance of goods in terms of material flow, environmental performance indicators EPIs and relevant ranking. Finally, as result of the three steps, the specification for the environmental part of a sustainability management system is provided and disseminated to end users (railway infrastructure managers and international organisations), to suppliers and academia (through EURNEX poles of excellence). According to this description InfraGuidER will be delivered in four main work packages. Other two work packages related to the management and communication/dissemination of the project are included in order to guarantee and to monitor the quality and effectiveness of the coordination mechanism. InfraGuidER fits with SST.2007.1.2.1 The greening of transport-specific industrial processes. Prime Contractor: Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per i Transporti e la Logistica; Genova; Italia.
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