Search

Environmental problems like climate change, loss of bio-productive land or loss of biodiversity are very likely to become the main drivers for environmental protection and are "strategic" by themselves, as they cannot be examined and solved on single use cases applying location and technical alternatives of projects – as normally applied for projects subject to environmental impact assessment. These "strategic" environmental problems have to be addressed by strategic plans, defining general planning principles and taking system alternatives into account, which calls for a certain type of "strategic" planning and assessment methods building on "strategic" databases. Therefore, I argue that we urgently need a co-evolution of the planning system and the accompanying environmental assessments in order to fill the gaps in strategic planning and strategic environmental assessment, to address environmental issues at the level of system alternatives and to allow for double loop learning in integrated strategic planning and assessment processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores opportunities for universities to contribute to local and regional development processes, apart from classical knowledge transfer within education and lifelong learning. In order to draft an analytical framework for the university-society relationship in regional development processes, we introduce three theoretical frameworks: planning, learning, and implementation theory, as well as shift the research perspective from university to regional development processes. The elaborated framework is applied to two case studies in Austria: the Montagsakademie, an initiative of the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, and PlanVision, an energy research project between the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna and the Town of Freistadt. From the analysis can be concluded that knowledge provision is not enough to establish the university as a change agent. In order to reach this effect, “ownership” of knowledge within local and regional communities has to be achieved. This ownership affects the level of values (shared visions and objectives concerning sustainable development) and the level of facts (addressing the skills for implementation and action) and can best be attained through joint knowledge generation. Universities that want to act as change agents have to thoroughly consider collaborative ways of research and education in informal learning environments so that knowledge demand, knowledge transfer and knowledge generation can be negotiated and jointly determined between local and regional societies and universities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper introduces a new methodological approach of the ecological footprint explicitly addressing the sustainability of water supplies, which we call the water supply footprint (WSF). The WSF calculates the catchment area or water supply hinterland of a certain society and can serve as a strategic planning tool for local or regional water supplies linking the water demand with the water supply in a water supply footprint matrix. Based on regional water balances it estimates how much water can be appropriated for human use in an environmentally sustainable way. The proposed method is tested on the South East Queensland water supply in Australia, an area where water use restrictions are regularly imposed on the population. Applying the proposed method indicates that supply shortages may be avoided by considerably changing the organisation of water supply, thereby reducing and possibly even avoiding the necessity for large-scale supply side measures like additional sweet water reservoirs or desalination plants. In that way it is demonstrated that the WSF method is applicable at an early and strategic stage of water supply planning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The aim of this article is to discuss direct effectiveness of SEA following the framework of the SEA Directive of the European Union in order to recommend measures to increase it. In the article an analytical framework for analysing SEA effectiveness is developed taking aspects of planning theory and social learning, strategicness, integratedness and timing of SEA into account. The framework is applied on the SEA concept of the European Union and put in the context of SEA and spatial planning in Austria. Finally, recommendations are made to enhance SEA effectiveness by different measures addressing different aspects of the SEA system and the SEA implementation in planning processes, such as the abandonment of screening, the advancement of SEA 'ownership' by planners and the reflection of a rational-collaborative SEA and planning model, as well as the ways environmental objectives and the appraisal of alternatives are implemented in a planning and SEA process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using biofuels bioproductive land is devoted to supply energy. As the bioproductive land area on our planet is confined and actually decreasing, biofuels compete against other demands like the production of food, industrial resources, nature conservation etc. This not only results in higher prices for agricultural and forestry products, but also increases environmental pressures. The aim of this paper is to clarify if and to which extent biofuels might be sustainable by applying modified calculation methods of the ecological footprint. It can be concluded that biofuels can offer huge environmental benefits compared to fossil fuels. Yet, if and to which extent biofuel production is sustainable depends on the amount of land available and, therefore, can only be decided in a regional context. Ecological footprinting can significantly support these regional decision making processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

As the field of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) has matured, the focus has moved from the development of legislation, guidelines and methodologies towards improving the effectiveness of SEA. Measuring and of course achieving effectiveness is both complex and challenging. This paper suggests that SEA professionals need to consider 'democratic effectiveness' as well as 'environmental effectiveness' in both 'direct' and 'indirect' outputs. The effectiveness of SEA depends critically on the context within which SEA legislation and guidelines are understood and implemented, and the relationship of the SEA to the planning activity itself. This paper focuses on the influence that planners have in these implementation processes, postulating the hypothesis that these are key players in achieving effectiveness in SEA. Based upon implementation theory and empirical experience, the paper discusses the role of the planners in SEA implementation, concluding that their 'ownership' of SEA is crucial for both democratic and environmental effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience in the light of an energy crisis is the capacity to successfully deal with energy related disruptions while continuing to deliver affordable energy services to society. A resilient energy system can rapidly recover from a shock as it is able to reinvent itself. But what happens if an energy crisis hits us? Which functions and structures will be affected? Shall we protect something in particular? Do we need to consider further aspects concerning the energy system? And how can we address and operationalise these complex considerations? These are the questions to be answered within this paper. By identifying types of energy crises, protective commodities, and framework conditions, a proposal is introduced to systematically deal with this topic. A new approach for assessing the community resilience in case of a fossil energy crisis is originated and presented: the regional energy resilience assessment (RERA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secure and affordable provision of energy considering social and climate goals poses a major challenge as studies confirm that global energy consumption and the dependency on fossil fuels increase annually. This leads to unwanted global uncertainties, interdependencies and environmental impacts due to the limitedness and unevenly distributed fossil energy carriers, accompanied by carbon based emissions due to fossil fuel combustion. To ensure the viability of our energy system, we need to increase resilience of our energy services: the protection and preservation of energy and infrastructure dependent basic needs of living within an energy region despite an irreversible decline in fossil energy. For this purpose, a novel step-by-step resilience assessment (RERA) is introduced, aiming to operationalise and promote regional energy resilience. First, we examine sectors and energy services being affected by fossil energy constraints and their need for improvements (factual level assessment). Secondly, attitudes and risk sensitivity referring to energy crises are surveyed to reveal community awareness and the acceptance of needed improvement measures (value level assessment). Thirdly, both levels are compared to identify key aspects for planning a resilient energy system. Finally, policy implications on how to integrate resilience-thinking into development efforts of our energy system will be derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of advancing global warming, climate change adaptation and mitigation measures for buildings are becoming increasingly important. The following article discusses the question of whether current urban planning principles still provide a suitable framework for this purpose. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify and quantify the main parameters of the urban planning framework regarding energy demand and energy generation of buildings. In a novel, holistic approach, passive design measures were evaluated in a joint analysis based on a case study in the city of Vienna (Austria) with respect to their impact on heating and cooling energy demand, overheating potential, daylight availability, and solar potential of new buildings. The results show that by improving the thermal insulation of the building envelope, the importance of a high compactness of the buildings to lower the heating energy demand is decreased. In addition, moderate compactness can help reduce the energy demand for space cooling and artificial lighting and increase the solar potential of the buildings. Accordingly, the results question the dogma of a high degree of compactness that still exists to some extent and indicate that changing climatic conditions also require new approaches in the urban planning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, most cities have experienced rapid population growth. Concurrently, international policies have called for substantial reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the resilience of energy-supply systems has become more important. Consequently, solutions to exhaust locally-available sources must be developed to minimize the fraction of fossil fuels for heating, cooling and electricity. This article shows an example of designing a low-temperature heating and cooling grid based on locally-available renewables and waste heat and introduces general hypotheses concerning smart energy planning in urban development zones. Taking an urban development area in Vienna, Austria, as example, it is shown that wastewater, geothermal and (office) waste heat, solar energy, and the heat content of ambient air can play an important role within a climate-friendly urban energy concept and that heating and cooling demand can be covered completely on-site. From an environmental point of view, the concept is promising, as greenhouse gas emissions and the non-renewable primary energy consumption can be reduced by over 70% compared to conventional gas heating, while, based on current (fossil) energy prices, it is economically not fully competitive. The gap could be closed e.g. by CO2 taxes on fossil energy sources or (temporal) subsidies for renewables. Additionally, reservations of stakeholders in the energy sector against this innovative approach must be dismantled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While climate agreements are made on an international level, the measures for mitigating climate change must be executed on a local scale. Designing energy and climate related strategies on the level of municipalities has been hampered by the lack of comprehensive data on the current status of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions on the local level. A novel approach based on the so-called spatial turn in energy and climate policies has now been established in the form of the Energy Mosaic Austria, which represents a comprehensive energy and greenhouse gas inventory for all Austrian municipalities considering different purposes of energy consumption and different energy sources. The inventory is based on the linkage of bottom-up and top-down operations, utilizing data on land use and mobility structures on the municipal level. The outcomes provide a detailed insight into the pattern of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions that are resolved on the municipal level. A spatially differentiated analysis of the inventory yields dependencies of the energy consumption and the greenhouse gas emissions on spatial structures particularly due to the fractions of different types of land use including mobility. With the energy mosaic Austria, local policy makers are given an inventory with unprecedented spatial and contentual resolution, which is fully coherent with more coarse-grained provincial and nationwide compilations of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and elucidates the scope of action in energy and climate policy from the municipal to the nationwide level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is one of the great challenges of our times. In the search for renewable energy sources, wastewater has received increasing attention in recent years. This is due to the fact that it can serve as a source of electricity and heat supply, as well as a substitute for natural gas. The current literature frequently addresses more technical aspects from a mostly sanitary engineering-orientated perspective. Social aspects related to the energetic use of wastewater still appear to be underrepresented. To support the closure of existing knowledge gaps and to contribute to the development in this field, this article addresses two issues: it defines and characterises key stakeholder groups required to catalyse broader energetic usage of wastewater, and it proposes a participatory approach to support successfully establishing wastewater as a commonly accepted source of renewable energy to best support the ongoing energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of wastewater treatment plants concerns water pollution control. However, recent research has shown, that wastewater treatment plants also seem to be interesting from an energetic point of view, as they have high potentials for heat generation beyond common digester gas combustion. Focusing on a case study we intend to feed the available surplus energy of the wastewater treatment plant into public energy distribution grids to supply external consumers. Different software tools are applied to support optimised integration: a central role plays the Geographical Information System based Energy Zone Mapping to analyse existing and future energy demands of different spatial units. Process Network Synthesis is applied to perform optimisation on an economical level. With the Sustainable Process Index the ecological footprint of the regarded technologies is assessed. Besides describing the theoretical background and the practical application of the tools, the paper presents the results obtained from the case study. The investigations give clear evidence, that significant amounts of heat could be supplied to the adjacent consumers at competitive costs and with considerable ecological benefit. Consequently, the wastewater treatment plant analysed provides local energy planners with an “unexpected” and locally available renewable source of energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated spatial and energy planning has become a major field of interest to meet the current renewable energy share expansion and CO 2 emissions reduction targets. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a considerable role in supporting decision making in this field. Solar potential maps are a popular strategy to promote renewable energy generation through photovoltaic (PV) panel installations at city and municipal scales. They indicate the areas of roofs that would provide the maximum amount of energy in kW h per year. These are often used to suggest “optimal locations” for PV-panels and/or recommend system sizes to achieve a certain level of yearly autarchy. This approach is acceptable if PVs have only a minor share in the local energy supply system. However, increased PV-penetration can lead to instability of the local grid, create hazards for the security of the supply, and considerably escalate the storage and system back-up requirements. To obtain a proper understanding of the consequences for the local energy balance when selecting or rejecting a certain installation, examining the hourly and intra-hourly time series of the potential energy generation from PVs is necessary. This paper introduces a GIS-based procedure to estimate the potential PV-electricity generation time series for every roof-top section within a study area using open source software. This procedure is complemented by a series of strategies to select suitable PV-installations considering the time series analysis of supply and demand. Furthermore, thirteen technical indicators are considered to evaluate the PV-installation sets selected with every strategy. The capabilities of the procedure are tested using data from a German rural municipality. The proposed procedure constitutes an efficient and accessible way to assess solar potentials at the municipal scale and to design roof-top PV exploitation plans, which are more appropriate to fulfill the local energy requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comprehensive review covers currently applied concepts and related spatio-temporal energy modeling tools for integrated demand–supply analyses of urban energy systems at district and city scales. The review introduces an assessment method that aims to determine the suitability of selected concepts and tools to provide decision support regarding the transformation of urban energy systems towards sustainable and low-carbon systems. Acknowledging the requirements on urban energy system modeling, including the building and mobility sectors, and considering the main spatio-temporal characteristics of urban energy systems, a systematic novel screening and evaluation approach is presented and applied. 10 modeling dimensions are identified based on literature review and serve as assessment criteria in the evaluation of 20 urban energy system modeling frameworks falling within the scope of this work. The evaluation results reveal a varying coverage of the identified modeling dimensions, with the aspects mobility and energy system flexibilization showing a notable underrepresentation. Research gaps are concluded and suggestions for further developments in the field of urban energy system modeling frameworks are provided. • Identification of modeling requirements for urban energy system analysis. • Semi-quantitative assessment of current urban energy system modeling frameworks against modeling requirements. • Identification of research gaps towards decision support for urban decarbonization strategy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The government has implemented a land titling program by the name of women and men. • Land titling contributes positively to reduce gender disparities in access to land and natural resources. • Women are highly aware of their land rights after land titling program. • Civil servants behavior and customary/patriarchic ideologies of the local people hinder the effective implementation of land titling program. • To empower women's access to land and natural resources, customary/traditional land tenure systems should be changed by formal land laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of global warming and the energy turn, sector coupling has gained increasing interest in recent years, from both the scientific community and politics. In the following article it is hypothesized that efficient multifaceted sector coupling solutions depend on detailed spatial and temporal characteristics of energy demand and supply. Hence, spatiotemporal modelling is used as a methodology of integrated spatial and energy planning, in order to determine favourable sector coupling strategies at the local level. A case study evaluation was carried out for both central and decentral renewable energy sources. Considering the high temporal resolutions of energy demand and supply, the results revealed a feasible operation of a district heating network in the central areas of the case study municipalities. Additionally, building integrated solar energy technologies are capable of providing large amount of excess energy that could serve other demand sectors, such as the mobility sector, or could be used for Power-to-X solutions. It is suggested that sector coupling strategies require spatial considerations and high temporal comparisons, in order to be reasonably integrated in spatial and urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2018, wastewater was officially recognized by the European Union as a renewable source of energy, thus wastewater heat recovery can be included in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Given the fact that wastewater treatment plants can generate enormous heat surpluses, this decision gives leeway to couple the wastewater infrastructure with the energy system in order to increase energy efficiency at the system level, allow for power to heat solutions in order to integrate volatile renewable electricity generation and, thus, foster a sustainable energy transition and cleaner production. Yet, the success of these system integrations depends on the availability of energy consumers in proximity of the wastewater treatment plants, and the temporal patterns of energy supply and energy demand. So far, the importance of both temporal and spatial variations in performance of wastewater heat recovery systems have been discussed in literature, but only as separate considerations to date. In order to exhaust the potential of wastewater energy, the combination of both aspects still has to be studied sufficiently, and this paper aims at filling that gap. A three-step methodology is proposed, including an energetic analysis at the wastewater treatment plant, a spatio-temporal analysis of supply and demand in potential supply areas, and an integrated analysis, overlaying the supply and demand profiles. This allows to account for both the proximity of consumers and potential temporal mismatches between supply and demand. The methodology was applied on a case study in Ireland, being able to clearly identify potentials and pitfalls for laying out grids and dimensioning the energy generation systems. It can be concluded, that wastewater energy is a well-suited source of energy to supply baseloads, but the spatio-temporal patterns reveal that both periods of excess wastewater heat potentials as well as additional heating in bivalent systems is required. Therefore, the spatial – urban and regional – fabric, the mix of land uses and their density, largely determine the layout and the useable amount of this renewable energy source. Finally, it can be concluded, that the use of wastewater energy provides feasible and valuable contributions for sustainable urban energy supply systems and cleaner production if the electricity sources for the respective heat pump systems are renewable guaranteeing low-to zero-emission operation. Image 10 • An integrated spatio-temporal analysis of wastewater heat recovery is proposed. • 5 zones, within 2 km of the plant, were considered as a heat consumer. • On 21–136 days, the heat supply was insufficient to meet demand. • 58 % to 93 % of all demand can be supplied by the heat recovery system. • The recovered heat did not reach its full potential, due to temporal mismatches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]