Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Sustainability
Standardized Benchmark of Historical Compound Wind and Solar Energy Droughts Across the Continental United States
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Statistical Methodology, Sustainability
As we move towards a decarbonized grid, reliance on weather-dependent energy increases as does exposure to prolonged natural resource shortages known as energy droughts. Compound energy droughts occur when two or more predominant renewable energy sources simultaneously are in drought conditions. In this study we present a methodology and dataset for examining compound wind and solar energy [...]
Improving the relevance of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for sustainability science
Published: 2023-06-20
Subjects: Sustainability
Sustainability science is a discipline which is strongly concerned with exploring the achievement of sustainable futures. One way in which this is done is through scenarios. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), developed for climate science, have been widely adopted by modellers to analyse sustainable futures. We question whether the SSPs are fit-for-purpose for examining sustainable [...]
A paradigm shift towards decentralized cloud-integrated spatial data infrastructures: Lessons learned and solutions provided for public authorities
Published: 2023-06-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer and Systems Architecture, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Sustainability
Digital transformation is a key to turn public authorities into organisations that make decisions based on data-driven insights. The use of big geodata can enable public authorities to tackle complex sustainability issues. However, the efficient management of large amounts of geodata through implementing viable data infrastructures represents a major challenge for public authorities. In this [...]
The Future in Anthropocene Science
Published: 2023-05-23
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
The Anthropocene is the present time of human-caused accelerating global change, and new forms of Anthropocene risk are emerging that society has hitherto never experienced. Science and policy are grappling with the temporal and spatial magnitude of these changes, as well as the diminishing margin between science and policy itself. However, there is a gap in the transparency — and perhaps even in [...]
Limitations in the Landsat satellite archive bias SDG monitoring
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
Satellite remote sensing is vital for monitoring, research, and policy addressing sustainability challenges from climate and ecosystem changes to food and water security. Here, Landsat satellite data play a crucial role, thanks to their unique global, long-term, and high-resolution coverage. Yet, gaps and quality limitations in the Landsat data archive may propagate into derived remote-sensing [...]
Ecological Flows in Southern Europe: status and trends in non-perennial rivers
Published: 2023-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The concept of environmental flows (E-Flows) describes the streamflow that is necessary to maintain river ecosystems. Although a large number of methods have been developed, a delay was recorded in implementing E–Flows in non-perennial rivers. The general aim of the paper was to analyse the criticalities and the current state of implementation of the E-Flows in non-perennial rivers of southern [...]
Assessing the potential of low transmissivity aquifers for ATES systems: a case study in Flanders (Belgium)
Published: 2023-04-21
Subjects: Geology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The Member States of the European Union pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% by 2050. Shallow geothermal systems might substantially contribute by providing heating and cooling in a sustainable way through seasonally storing heat and cold in the shallow ground (<200m). When the minimum yield to install a cost-effective aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) system cannot be met, [...]
Matrix-based Methods for Regionalized Life Cycle Assessment
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Sustainability
We develop a comprehensive computational framework for matrix-based regionalized life cycle assessment (LCA). When life cycle inventories and impact assessment methods have different spatial scales, spatial allocation is needed to map inventory locations to impact assessment spatial units. We review spatial allocation based on intersected areas and existing background emissions, and propose using [...]
Revisiting the Climate Narrative
Published: 2023-04-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Forest Management, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Environmental Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is chiefly tied to land stewardship. Farmers and loggers have removed the plants that, until the industrial era, kept the soil fungi alive, kept soil emissions nearby by breaking the wind, and soaked those up. The result is plumes of carbon dioxide. Putting plants back in would curb these emissions. Farmers and loggers could address biodiversity loss [...]
Mitigating risk of exceeding environmental limits requires ambitious food system interventions
Published: 2023-04-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Transforming the global food system is necessary to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries. A robust evidence base is crucial to assess the scale and combination of interventions required for a sustainable transformation. We developed a risk assessment framework, underpinned by a meta-regression of 60 global food system modeling studies, to quantify the potential of individual and combined [...]
Data, knowledge and modeling challenges for science-informed management of river deltas
Published: 2023-03-16
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
450 million people live on river deltas and thus on land that is precariously low above the sea level and sinking because of human activities and natural processes. Although global debates around coastal risk typically focus on sea level rise, it is sinking lands and rising seas that together endanger lives and livelihoods in river deltas. However, the ability to quantify and address those risks [...]
The Digital Environmental Footprint - a holistic framework of Digital Sustainability
Published: 2023-03-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
This paper examines the different ways in which the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector negatively affects the environment. To capture environmental externalities beyond the common but limited carbon footprint, a novel holistic framework of digital sustainability was created - the Digital Environmental Footprint (DEF). To apply and test the DEF, the ICT sector was evaluated [...]
Rapid seaward expansion of seaport footprints worldwide
Published: 2023-02-25
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
As global maritime traffic increases, seaports grow to accommodate and compete for higher volumes of trade throughput. However, growth trajectories of seaport footprints around the world have gone unmeasured, likely because of a lack of readily available spatio-temporal data. Here, we use geospatial analysis of global satellite imagery from 1990–2020 to show that 65 seaports among the world's top [...]
Considerable gaps in our global knowledge of potential groundwater accessibility
Published: 2023-02-11
Subjects: Geology, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
At what depth groundwater can be found below the land surface is key to understanding whether it is potentially accessible to ecosystems and humans, or what role it plays in the water cycle. Knowledge of ground-water table depth (WTD) exists at regional scales in many places, but a bottom-up knowledge aggregation to obtain a coherent global picture is exceptionally challenging. Uncertainty in [...]
Uncertainties in Water Scarcity Index due to water use and climate changes: Case of two Legal Amazon watersheds
Published: 2022-12-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water scarcity is a major global problem with the potential to impact socioeconomic development and the environment. Currently, mitigating issues related to the lack of water has become an aim for the public and private sectors. Water scarcity can be estimated by the ratio between water use (withdrawal or consumption) and water availability (a minimum discharge), named Water Stress Index (WSI). [...]