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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Sustainability

Majority of 21st century global irrigation expansion has been in water stressed regions

Piyush Mehta, Stefan Siebert, Matti Kummu, et al.

Published: 2022-08-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Spatial Science, Sustainability

The expansion of irrigated agriculture has increased global crop production but resulted in widespread stress to freshwater resources. Ensuring that increases in irrigated production only occur in places where water is relatively abundant is a key objective of sustainable agriculture, and knowledge of how irrigated land has evolved is important for measuring progress towards water sustainability. [...]

Field’s Spatial Variation Influenced Outcomes more so than N-fertiliser, FYM, Cover Crops or Their Legacy Effects Following Conversion to a No-till Arable System

Ana I.M. Natalio, Andrew Richards

Published: 2022-08-05
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Soil Science, Sustainability

No-till in agricultural arable systems is a practice that offers benefits to soil health. Combined with methods such as the incorporation of crop residues and manures, no-till can influence the dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) and organic matter (SOM), crop productivity and nutrient status. These turnovers are shaped by spatial and temporal factors and associated microbial mineralisation [...]

A new consistent framework for assignment of safe operating space to B2C and B2B industries for use in Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessments

Hendrik Oosterhoff, Laura Golsteijn, Alexis Laurent, et al.

Published: 2022-07-25
Subjects: Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Sustainability

The planetary boundaries define a safe operating space for humanity to act within without potentially destabilizing the planet. The safe operating space is often used a sustainability reference in Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessments (AESAs) where a share of the safe operating space (SoSOS) is assigned to the assessed activity. An identified challenge, is that current methods are [...]

Groundwater resource allocation in British Columbia: challenges and ways forward

Tom Gleeson, Diana M Allen

Published: 2022-06-24
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

Groundwater allocation in British Columbia is facing a number of important challenges as groundwater is licensed under the Water Sustainability Act and potentially included in modern treaties. These challenges include acknowledging the importance of groundwater in supporting environmental flow needs and human water use, the uncertainty and irrelevance of annual recharge estimates, and the [...]

Potential for Perceived Failure of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Deployment

Patrick W Keys, Elizabeth A Barnes, Noah S Diffenbaugh, et al.

Published: 2022-06-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Sustainability

As anthropogenic activities warm the Earth, the fundamental solution of reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains elusive. Given this mitigation gap, global warming may lead to intolerable climate changes as adaptive capacity is exceeded. Thus, there is emerging interest in solar radiation modification, which is the process of deliberately increasing Earth's albedo to cool the planet. [...]

Exploration of urban sustainability of India through the lens of sustainable development goals

Ajishnu Roy, Nandini Garai, Jayanta Kumar Biswas

Published: 2022-05-23
Subjects: Sustainability

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) index is a recognized metric for measuring progress in the UN SDGs. However, national or multinational-level analyses are more prevalent than sub-national types. We analysed the performance of 14 SDGs for 56 Indian cities (grouped into 6 regions) with available 77 indicators (2020-2021). Pearson’s correlation, hierarchical clustering, data envelopment analysis [...]

Quantifying excess heavy metal concentrations in drainage basins using conservative mixing models

Jonas Alexander Eschenfelder, Alex G. Lipp, Gareth G Roberts

Published: 2022-05-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

High concentrations of heavy metals and other pollutants in river sediments can have detrimental effects on the ecosystem and humans. The composition of river sediments throughout drainage basins therefore provides important information for environmental monitoring. An obvious first step for using river sediment compositions for monitoring is to quantify natural baseline concentrations. Once [...]

Pipeline availability limits on the feasibility of global coal-to-gas switching in the power sector

Shuting Yang, Sara Hastings Simon, Arvind Ravikumar

Published: 2022-05-02
Subjects: Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability

Coal-to-gas switching in the power sector, as happened in the US, has been a key driver of near-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Can this success be replicated around the world? Here, we explore the limits of a global, plant-level, coal-to-gas transition arising from pipeline availability constraints. Globally, only 43% of coal capacity is within 14 km of a nearby pipeline, the median [...]

Groundwater connections and sustainability in social-ecological systems

Xander Huggins, Tom Gleeson, Juan Castilla-Rho, et al.

Published: 2022-04-09
Subjects: Dynamical Systems, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

Groundwater resources are connected with social, economic, ecological, and Earth systems. We introduce the framing of groundwater-connected systems to better represent the nature and complexity of these connections in data collection, scientific investigations, governance and management approaches, and groundwater education. Groundwater-connected systems are social, economic, ecological, or Earth [...]

Knowledge co-production reveals nuanced societal dynamics and sectoral connections in mapping sustainable human-natural systems

Katrina Szetey, Enayat A. Moallemi, Brett A. Bryan

Published: 2022-04-08
Subjects: Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass environmental, social, and economic dimensions which are linked to the characteristics of place and have a strong local dimension. They are interconnected at local scales in complex ways which makes progress towards them difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at the local scale, we used knowledge co-production [...]

Economic and biophysical limits to seaweed-based climate solutions

Julianne DeAngelo, Benjamin Saenz, Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, et al.

Published: 2022-02-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability

Net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets are driving interest in opportunities for biomass-based negative emissions and bioenergy, including from marine sources such as seaweed. Yet the biophysical and economic limits to farming seaweed at scales relevant to the global carbon budget have not been assessed in detail. We use coupled seaweed growth and technoeconomic models to estimate the costs of [...]

Quantifying Streamflow Depletion from Groundwater Pumping: A Practical Review of Past and Emerging Approaches for Water Management

Sam Zipper, William H Farmer, Andrea Brookfield, et al.

Published: 2022-01-08
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

Groundwater pumping can cause reductions in streamflow (“streamflow depletion”) that must be quantified for conjunctive management of groundwater and surface water resources. However, streamflow depletion cannot be measured directly and is challenging to estimate because pumping impacts are masked by streamflow variability due to other factors. Here, we conduct a management-focused review of [...]

Evaluating essential features of proppant transport at engineering scales combining field measurements with machine learning algorithms

Xiaoyu Wang, Lei Hou, Xueyu Geng, et al.

Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydraulic Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability

The characterization of the proppant transport at a field-engineering scale is still challenging due to the lack of direct subsurface measurements. Features that control the proppant transport may link the experimental and numerical observations to the practical operations at a field scale. To improve the numerical and laboratory simulations, we propose a machine-learning-based workflow to [...]

Thresholds in road network functioning on US Atlantic and Gulf barrier islands

Sofia Aldabet, Evan B Goldstein, Eli Lazarus

Published: 2021-12-04
Subjects: Analysis, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability

Barrier islands predominate the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines of the USA, where development exceeds national trends. Forward-looking models of barrier island dynamics often include feedbacks with management practices – particularly those aimed at mitigating damage to buildings from natural hazards – and how real estate markets may be linked to barrier island dynamics. However, models thus far do [...]

Can machine learning improve carbon storage? Synergies of deep learning, uncertainty quantification and intelligent process control

Thilo Wrona, Indranil Pan

Published: 2021-12-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Sustainability

As we transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy, negative emission technologies, such ascarbon capture and storage (CCS), can help us reduce CO2 emissions. Effective CO2 storage requires: (1) detailed site characterization, (2) regular, integrated risk assessment, and (3) flexible design and operation. We believe that recent advances in machine learning coupled with uncertainty [...]

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