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Objective: Integrated assessment and energy-economy models have become central tools for informing long-term global and regional climate mitigation strategies. There is a large demand for improved representations of complex system interactions and thorough validation of model behaviour in order to increase user confidence in climate policy assessments. ADVANCE aims to respond to this demand by facilitating the development of a new generation of integrated assessment models. This will be achieved by substantial progress in key areas where model improvements are greatly needed: end use and energy service demand; representation of heterogeneity, behaviour, innovation and consumer choices; technical change and uncertainty; system integration, path dependencies and resource constraints; and economic impacts of mitigation policies. In the past, methodological innovations and improvements were hindered by the unavailability of suitable input data. The ADVANCE project will make a large and coordinated effort to generate relevant datasets. These datasets, along with newly developed methodologies, will be made available to the broader scientific community as open-access resources. ADVANCE will also put a focus on improved model transparency, model validation, and data handling. A central objective of ADVANCE is to evaluate and to improve the suitability of models for climate policy impact assessments. The improved models will be applied to an assessment of long-term EU climate policy in a global context, and disseminated to the wider community. The ADVANCE consortium brings together long-standing expertise in integrated assessment and energy-economy modelling with a strong expertise in material flows, energy system integration, and energy service demand.
Objective: INNOBITE project will transform urban and agricultural residues into high performing resource efficient products for the construction sector. The project finds support in two innovative ideas: (1) adding value to the inorganic fraction of wheat straw and (2) obtaining cellulose nanofibres out of highly recycled paper. Once isolated via environmentally friendly processes, these two renewable compounds will be used as high-performance additives for the development of a new series of bio-composites The incorporation of those natural components will improve current solutions in two construction applications: panels for indoor structures (interior walls, ceiling, flooring) and profiles (decking, fencing) by, respectively, increasing the resistance-to-weight ratio and improving the surface hardness and water absorbency. Other commercial bio-plastics as well as the two major fractions of what straw, cellulose and lignin, will be also incorporated into such materials (cellulose after chemical modification and lignin after being polymerised into both thermosetting and thermoplastic resins), and the resulting products will be finally tested for biodegradability. In the same way as wood, which is at the same time biodegradable and exceptional building material, the use of plant-derived products will increase the biodegradability of the biomaterials without compromising their structural quality. The project will destine more than 10Prozent of the total budget to maximize the effectiveness of the exploitation activities, which will include thorough analysis of the cost effectiveness and environmental credentials of the products/processes developed and of new possible business lines and new business models. Also, the validation of developed technologies under the Environmental Technology Verification programme is expected to have a big impact on the exploitation.
Objective: Despite improved understanding of the links between ecosystem health, provision of ecosystem services and human well-being, further conceptual and empirical work is needed to make the ideas of ecosystem services (ESS) and natural capital (NC) operational. OpenNESS will therefore develop innovative and practical ways of applying them in land, water and urban management: it will identify how, where and when the concepts can most effectively be applied to solve problems. To do this, it will work with public and private decision makers and stakeholders to better understand the range of policy and management problems faced in different case study contexts (ranging across locales, sectors, scales and time). OpenNESS will consolidate, refine and develop a range of spatially-explicit methods to identify, quantify and value ecosystem services, and will develop hybrid assessment methods. It will also explore the effectiveness of financial and governance mechanisms, such as payments for ecosystem services, habitat banking, biodiversity offsetting and land and ecosystem accounting. These types of interventions have potential for sustaining ESS and NC, and for the design of new economic and social investment opportunities. Finally, OpenNESS will assess how current regulatory frameworks and other institutional factors at EU and national levels enable or constrain consideration of ESS and NC, and identify the implications for issues related to well-being, governance and competitiveness. OpenNESS will analyse the knowledge that is needed to define ESS and NC in the legal, administrative and political contexts that are relevant to the EU. The work will deliver a menu of multi-scale solutions to be used in real life situations by stakeholders, practitioners, and decision makers in public and business organizations, by providing new frameworks, data-sets, methods and tools that are fit-for-purpose and sensitive to the plurality of decision-making contexts.
Objective: The main objective of the NAWADES project is to study, design, produce, and test new water desalination filter technology from four points of view: 1. the structure of multi-layer membrane filter, including UV light distributed by glass fibres inside the membrane stack; 2. the materials used to build the filter, including fouling and scaling monitoring; 3. the coating treatments applied to the surface of the filter using plasma and nano-TiO2 fibres; 4. the filtration process with integrated removal of bio-fouling. The new filter technology shall provide long-life and antifouling filters to be used in Reverse Osmosis (RO) water desalinisation processes with a higher efficiency and life-time, less energy consumption (lower pressure), and less maintenance (lower cost).
Objective: The science of complex systems distinguishes linear from non-linear dynamics. Simpler systems can often be satisfactory described by linear models, but complex systems require non-linear models that can capture more of the characteristics of such systems, such as thresholds, feedback loops, avalanche effects, and irreversibility. Linear systems can be validated by aligning models to the past and using the model to predict the future. Non-linear systems, however, are often time-asymmetric - they can be explained with the wisdom of hindsight, but are not always predictable. For example, systems may respond sharply to minor perturbations, and the quality of this response is a measure of the system resilience. In practice, non-linear dynamics are significant both at the micro-scale of small history and at the macro-scale of deep time. The brilliant young scientist, for example, may experience a series of epiphanies that change his/her understanding and behaviour in an unpredictable and irreversible way. The scientific community as a whole may experience an innovation-cascade that has a similar effect on a much larger scale. Current models of climate change and carbon emission assume the immediate past is a reasonable guide to the future. They struggle to represent the complex causal structures and time-asymmetries of many socio-natural systems. COMPLEX will integrate the quasi-classic models of meso-scale processes with our best understanding of fine-grained space-time patterns and the system-flips that are likely to occur in the long interval between now and 2050. We believe the sub-national region is the key point of entry for studying climate change and its cause-effect interrelations. It is small enough to be sensitive to local factors, large enough to interact with supra-national agencies and stable enough to be historically and culturally distinctive. In addition to undertaking case studies in Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain and Italy, We will develop a suite of modelling tools and decision-support systems to inform national and supra-national policy and support communities across Europe working to make the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Objective: COBWEB will leverage the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR). Concentrating initially on the Welsh Dyfi Biosphere Reserve, we will develop a citizens observatory framework, and then validate the work within the context of the UK National Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and internationally, within the WNBR; specifically, within Greek and German Reserves. The infrastructure we develop will exploit technological developments in ubiquitous mobile devices, crowd-sourcing of geographic information and the operationalising of standards based SDI such as the UK Location Information Infrastructure. It will enable citizens living within Biosphere Reserves to collect environmental information on a range of parameters including species distribution, flooding and land cover/use. A main driver will be the opportunity to participate in environmental governance. Data quality issues will be addressed by using networks of people as sensors and by analysing observations and measurements in real-time combination with authoritative models and datasets. The citizens observatory framework will integrate with evolving INSPIRE compliant national SDIs and allow the fusion of citizen sourced data with reference data from public authorities in support of policy objectives. To maximise impact, COBWEB will work within the processes of the standards defining organisations. Specifically, we will aim to improve the usability of Sensor Web Enablement standards with mobile devices, develop widespread acceptance of the data quality measures we develop and maximise the commercial appeal of COBWEB outputs. The end result we are aiming for is a toolkit and a set of models that demonstrably works in different European countries and which is accepted as a core information system component of the WNBR. Implementations of COBWEB will act as models for how technology may be used to empower citizens associations in environmental decision making.
Objective: WeSenseIt will develop a citizen-based observatory of water, which will allow citizens and communities to become active stakeholders in information capturing, evaluation and communication. We propose: (i) data collection: (a) a first hard layer consisting of low-cost, static and portable devices that sense and transfer water information when automatically monitored or when initiated by citizens from their mobile devices; (b) a second soft layer consisting of techniques to harness citizens Collective Intelligence, i.e. the information, experience and knowledge embodied within individuals and communities, both in terms of enabling direct messages to the authorities (with mobile-phone pictures, messages, etc.) and in terms of crowd-sourcing (e.g. by mining social networks like Twitter and Facebook, as well as bulletin boards, RSS feeds, etc.). (ii) the development of descriptive and predictive models and decision-making tools integrating sensor and citizen-based data; the data suppliers (physical sensors or people) are seen as nodes of an integrated heterogeneous data collection network which undergoes progressive multi-objective optimization and tuning. (iii) two-way feedback and exchange of environmental knowledge/experience between citizens and authorities for decision-making and governance within an e-collaboration framework, enabling improved transparency, knowledge management, accountability and responsiveness, as well as facilitating participation in water management. We will test, experiment and demonstrate the citizen observatory of water in three different case studies in water management with civil protection agencies in UK, NL and Italy. The topic is the entire hydrologic cycle with a major focus on variables responsible for floods and drought occurrences. The project results have the potential to fundamentally change the traditional concept of environmental monitoring and forecasting, as well as models of governance.
Objective: NET-HERITAGE is the first significant initiative ever attempting to coordinate national RTD programmes of European countries and support European RTD Programmes in the field of research applied to Protection for Tangible Cultural Heritage. It aims to exert a massive, positive impact through the following objectives: - provide an integrated picture of the state of the art of cultural heritage research in EUMember States and at the European level; -overcome the lack of a coordinated research structure in this specific and multidisciplinary sector, with programmes fostering integration between art-history-conservation-maintenance-restoration areas and architectural-chemical-physics-engineering areas; - limit fragmentation within and among national research programmes, identifying common strategic priorities for research and programmes; - create effective actions to stimulate the exploitation of research results, and underpin cooperation between researchers and cultural heritage institutions for the application of identified solutions; - face problems due to insufficient and dispersed funding, in terms of local level and size of funding, compared to other research sectors; - favour exchange between national and European work programmes, to avoid a single top-down approach. NET-HERITAGE intends to achieve the following main outcomes: - coordinating actions within the EU partnership; - favouring protection of moveable and immoveable tangible cultural heritage; - expanding the potential of the cultural heritage research sector; - enhancing dissemination of research results and news in the field of protection of tangible cultural heritage; - increasing the visibility of the socio-economic importance of this sector; - supporting educational and training programmes and activities in the sector; - developing a common framework of policies for improving cultural heritage protection; - favouring common actions to promote Cultural Heritage research outside EU.
MODELKEY comprises a mulitdisciplinary approach aiming at developing interlinked and verified predictive modelling tools as well as state-of-the-art effect-assessment and analytical methods generally applicable to European freshwater and marine ecosystems: 1) to assess, forecast, and mitigate the risks of traditional and recently evolving pollutants on fresh water and marine ecosystems and their biodiversity at a river basin and adjacent marine environment scale, 2) to provide early warning strategies on the basis of sub-lethal effects in vitro and in vivo, 3) to provide a better understanding of cause-effect-relationships between changes in biodiversity and the ecological status, as addressed by the Water Framework Directive, and the impact of environmental pollution as causative factor, 4) to provide methods for state-of-the-art risk assessment and decision support systems for the selection of the most efficient management options to prevent effects on biodiversity and to prioritise contamination sources and contaminated sites, 5) to strengthen the scientific knowledge on an European level in the field of impact assessment of environmental pollution on aquatic eco-systems and their biodiversity by extensive training activities and knowledge dissemination to stakeholders and the scientific community. This goal shall be achieved by combining innovative predictive tools for modelling exposure on a river basin scale including the estuary and the coastal zone, for modelling effects on higher levels of biological organisation with powerful assessment tools for the identification of key modes of action, key toxicants and key parameters determining exposure. The developed tools will be verified in case studies representing European key areas including Mediterranean, Western and Central European river basins. An end-user-directed decision support system will be provided for cost-effective tool selection and appropriate risk and site prioritisation.
In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten konnten große Fortschritte im Bereich der Bewertung von Umweltauswirkungen von Produkten und Dienstleistungen entlang des Lebenszyklus (Ökobilanzierung) erreicht werden. In der Praxis zeigen sich jedoch Probleme aufgrund inkonsistenter, z. B. veralteter, Datenquellen und Daternerhebungsmethoden. MyEcoCost will eine Lösung für die Problematik der inkonsistenten Bewertung entwickeln, basierend auf einem globalen, wissenschaftlich fundierten und automatisierten Ansatz. Das zu entwicklende 'myEco-Cost'-System soll in der Lage sein, den Ressourcenverbrauch unterschiedlicher Produkte, Dienstleistungen und Technologien konsistent zu berechnen. Das Projekt wird Konzepte, Methoden und technische Lösungen innerhalb von allgemeinen Geschäftsprozessen (Produktentwicklung, Produktion, Verkauf, Administration, Entsorgung/Recycling/Wiederverwendung) erforschen, weiterentwickeln und testen. Jede dieser Produktlebenszyklen soll in die Berechnung der ökologischen Kosten (EcoCost) integriert werden. Darüber hinaus sollen durch die rekursive Methodik auch komplexere Wertschöpfungsketten und Elemente des Wirtschaftssystems präziser abgebildet werden. Das Projekt myEcoCost trägt dazu bei, wirtschaftlichen Akteuren, inklusive kleiner und mittlerer Unternehmen sowie Konsumenten, einen Zugang zu verbesserten Informationen des Ressourcenverbrauches von Geschäftsprozessen zu ermöglichen. Eine internet-basierte, anwendungsorientierte Architektur des Informationssystems soll so konzipiert werden, dass die Ressourceneffizienz erfasst und eine Verbesserung der Entscheidungsgrundlagen ermöglicht wird. Das Projekt ist in sieben Arbeitspakete (AP) gegliedert: Beschreibung der Anforderungen und der Architektur des Systems (AP 1), Methodik der Ressourcenkostenrechnung (AP 2), Entwicklung des MyEcoCost Systems (AP 3), Entwicklung einer Kommunikations- und Netzwerk-Infrastruktur (AP 4), Validierung des Konzepts und Systems (AP 5), Dissemination und Nutzung (AP 6) und Projektmanagement und Koordination (AP 7). Das Wuppertal Institut leitet die Arbeiten in Arbeitspaket 2, bei dem Richtlinien für die Berechnungsmethodologie des Ressourcenverbrauchs entwickelt werden sollen. Darüber hinaus koordiniert es die Arbeit im Beirat sowie im Bereich der Öffentlichkeitsarbeit. Dadurch wird ein wesentlicher Beitrag zur Verbreitung der Projektergebnisse in der Wissenschaft und der Ergebnisprüfung im Rahmen eines Stakeholderdialoges, geleistet.
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