Filtering by Subject: Sustainability
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 [...]
Published: 2022-06-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Sustainability
As anthropogenic activities continue to 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 local adaptive capacity is exceeded. Thus, there is emerging interest in solar radiation management, which is the process of deliberately increasing Earth's albedo to cool the [...]
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 [...]
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 health of ecosystems and humans. As such, determining the composition of river sediments throughout drainage basins is an essential aspect of environmental monitoring. Well characterised natural baseline concentrations are important information with which observations can be compared [...]
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 [...]
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 is embedded in social and ecological systems but the complexity of these interactions is not well represented in conventional approaches to study and promote groundwater sustainability. We argue an important shift is necessary in groundwater sustainability thinking: towards prioritizing the functions of groundwater, and the services that make it a critical resource, and away from [...]
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 difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at the local scale, we co-designed a systems model of the SDGs [...]
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 [...]
Published: 2022-01-07
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Published: 2021-11-22
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Dynamic Systems, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the first goal being targeted by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Poverty eradication is a long-term process that faces the challenges of many uncertainties and complex interactions with other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to better understand poverty and contribute to addressing poverty in a sustainable [...]
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability
The magnitude and distribution of physical and societal impacts from long-lived greenhouse gases are insensitive to the emission source location; the same is not true for major co-emitted short-lived pollutants like aerosols. Here we combine novel global climate model simulations with established response functions to show that identical aerosols emitted from different regions (Brazil, China, [...]
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Cosmochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Mineral Physics, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Speleology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology, Water Resource Management
Reproducibility, the extent to which consistent results are obtained when an experiment or study is repeated, sits at the foundation of science. The aim of this process is to produce robust findings and knowledge, with reproducibility being the screening tool to benchmark how well we are implementing the scientific method. However, the re-examination of results from many disciplines has caused [...]