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As global population and urbanization increase, so do the direct and indirect environmental impacts of construction around the world. Low-impact products, buildings, precincts and cities are needed to mitigate the effects of building construction and use. Analysis of embodied energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across these scales is becoming more important to support this direction. The calculation of embodied impacts requires rigorous, flexible and comprehensive assessment tools. Firstly, we present the Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) as one such tool discussing its structure, function and wide scope of application. Secondly, we demonstrate its potential high level of resolution in a case study: assessing embodied GHG emissions in an aluminium-framed window by combining product-specific life-cycle inventory data. The input-output analysis at the core of the IELab is mathematically comprehensive in the assessment of direct and indirect impacts and the tool can be applied at a range of scales from building component, to precincts and cities, or to the entire construction industry. IELab uses a flexible formalism that enables consistent harmonisation of diverse datasets and tractable updating of input data. The emissions and energy database supporting IELab has detailed data, aligning with economic accounts and data on labour, water, materials and waste that enrich assessment across other dimensions of sustainability. IELab is a comprehensive, flexible and robust assessment tool well positioned to respond to the challenge of assessing and aiding the design of a low-impact built environment.

City carbon footprints have become an important tool for monitoring the progress of cities towards lowering their greenhouse gas emissions and contribution to climate change. Cities usually source a major part of their natural resource demand from their local, national and global hinterland, and cause emissions across the whole global supply chain of a city's final demand. It is important that the data underlying carbon footprint assessments of cities capture these supply chains adequately and comprehensively. In this research, we determine the carbon footprints of four Chinese cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Tianjin based on different levels of data availability. Using these case studies, we show conclusively that city carbon footprint analyses must include input-output databases and associated calculus in order to avoid severe errors that arise from unacceptable scope limitations caused by the truncation of the footprint assessment boundary. We also show that city input-output databases must fulfil a number of requirements for city comparisons and for informed decision-making to be feasible. Our findings suggest that investment into multi-layered national input-output tables and datasets will be necessary to monitor progress of cities reducing their greenhouse emissions across the whole supply chain and to inform evidence based policy making that guides greenhouse abatement.

Achieving sustainable development requires the decoupling of natural resource use and environmental pressures from economic growth and improvements in living standards. G7 leaders and others have called for improved resource efficiency, along with inclusive economic growth and deep cuts in global greenhouse emissions. However, the outlooks for and interactions between global natural resource use, resource efficiency, economic growth and greenhouse emissions are not well understood. We use a novel multi-regional modeling framework to develop projections to 2050 under existing trends and three policy scenarios. We find that resource efficiency could provide pro-growth pro-environment policies with global benefits of USD $2.4 trillion in 2050, and ease the politics of shifting towards sustainability. Under existing trends, resource extraction is projected to increase 119% from 2015 to 2050, from 84 to 184 billion tonnes per annum, while greenhouse gas emissions increase 41%, both driven by the value of global economic activity more than doubling. Resource efficiency and greenhouse abatement slow the growth of global resource extraction, so that in 2050 it is up to 28% lower than in existing trends. Resource efficiency reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 15–20% in 2050, with global emissions falling to 63% below 2015 levels when combined with a 2 °C emissions pathway. In contrast to greenhouse abatement, resource efficiency boosts near-term economic growth. These economic gains more than offset the near-term costs of shifting to a 2 °C emissions pathway, resulting in emissions in 2050 well below current levels, slower growth in resource extractions, and faster economic growth.

Aims: The treatment of prostate cancer has evolved markedly over the last 40 years, including radiotherapy, notably with escalated dose and targeting. However, the optimal treatment for localised disease has not been established in comparative randomised trials. The aim of this article is to describe the history ofprostate radiotherapy trials, including their quality assurance processes, and to compare these with the ProtecT trial.Materials and methods: The UK ProtecT randomised trial compares external beam conformal radiotherapy, surgery and active monitoring for clinically localized prostate cancer and will report on the primary outcome (disease-specific mortality) in 2016 following recruitment between 1999 and 2009. The embedded quality assurance programme consists of on-site machine dosimetry at the nine trial centres, a retrospective review of outlining and adherence to dose constraints based on the trial protocol in 54 participants (randomly selected, around 10% of the total randomised to radiotherapy, n ¼ 545). These quality assurance processes and results were compared with prostate radiotherapy trials of a comparable era.Results: There has been an increasingly sophisticated quality assurance programme in UK prostate radiotherapy trials over the last 15 years, reflecting dose escalation and treatment complexity. In ProtecT, machine dosimetry results were comparable between trial centres and with the UK RT01 trial. The outliningreview showed that most deviations were clinically acceptable, although three (1.4%) may have been of clinical significance and were related to outlining of theprostate. Seminal vesicle outlining varied, possibly due to several prostate trials running concurrently with different protocols. Adherence to dose constraints inProtecT was considered acceptable, with 80% of randomised participants having two or less deviations and planning target volume coverage was excellent.Conclusion: The ProtecT trial quality assurance results were satisfactory and comparable with trials of its era. Future trials should aim to standardise treatment protocols and quality assurance programmes where possible to reduce complexities for centres involved in multiple trials. 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Royal College of Radiologists.

In recent decades economic growth and increased human wellbeing around the globe have come at the cost of fast growing natural resource use (including materials and energy) and carbon emissions, leading to converging pressures of declining resource security, rising and increasingly volatile natural resource prices, and climate change. We ask whether well-designed policies can reduce global material and energy use, and carbon emissions, with only minimal impacts on improvements in living standards. We use a novel approach of combined economic and environmental modelling to assess the potential for decoupling for 13 world regions and globally. We apply a production (territorial) and consumption approach to discuss regional differences in natural resource use and carbon emissions across three stylized policy outlooks: a reference case with no significant changes to environment and climate policies; a ‘high efficiency’ outlook involving a global carbon price rising from $50 to $236 (constant price) per tonne of CO2 between 2010 and 2050 and improvements in resource efficiency (rising from 1.5% historically to between 3.5% and 4.5% in the scenarios); and a ‘medium efficiency’ outlook midway between the ‘no change’ and ‘high’ outlooks. We find that global energy use will continue to grow rapidly under all three scenarios from 17 billion tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) in 2010 to between 30 and 36 billion toe. Carbon emissions would be considerably lower with a global carbon price, less than half the level of the reference case (29–37 billion tonnes of CO2 instead of 74 billion tonnes) and also material use would grow much more slowly under a carbon price and significant investment to increase resource efficiency (95 instead of 180 billion tonnes of materials). We find that OECD economies have significant potential to reduce their material throughput and carbon emissions with little impact on economic growth, and that developing economies such as China could expand their economies at much lower environmental cost. Globally, the effects of very strong abatement and resource efficiency policies on economic growth and employment until 2050 are negligible. Our study suggests that decarbonization and dematerialization are possible with well-designed policy settings and would not contradict efforts to raise human wellbeing and standards of living. The research demonstrates the usefulness of scenarios for unpacking environmental and economic outcomes of policy alternatives. The findings have important implications for future economic opportunities in a highly resource efficient and low carbon global economy to set human development and achieving the sustainable development goals on a more resilient path.

This paper provides spatial estimates of potentially available biomass for bioenergy in Australia in 2010, 2030 and 2050 (under clearly stated assumptions) for the following biomass sources: crop stubble, native grasses, pulpwood and residues (created either during forest harvesting or wood processing) from plantations and native forests, bagasse, organic municipal solid waste and new short-rotation tree crops. For each biomass type, we estimated annual potential availability at the finest scale possible with readily accessible data, and then aggregated to make estimates for each of 60 Statistical Divisions (administrative areas) across Australia. The potentially available lignocellulosic biomass is estimated at approximately 80 Mt per year, with the major contributors of crop stubble (27.7 Mt per year), grasses (19.7 Mt per year) and forest plantations (10.9 Mt per year). Over the next 20–40 years, total potentially available biomass could increase to 100–115 Mt per year, with new plantings of short-rotation trees being the major source of the increase (14.7 Mt per year by 2030 and 29.3 Mt per year by 2050). We exclude oilseeds, algae and ‘regrowth’, that is woody vegetation naturally regenerating on previously cleared land, which may be important in several regions of Australia (Australian Forestry 77, 2014, 1; Global Change Biology Bioenergy 7, 2015, 497). We briefly discuss some of the challenges to providing a reliable and sustainable supply of the large amounts of biomass required to build a bioenergy industry of significant scale. More detailed regional analyses, including of the costs of delivered biomass, logistics and economics of harvest, transport and storage, competing markets for biomass and a full assessment of the sustainability of production are needed to underpin investment in specific conversion facilities (e.g. Opportunities for forest bioenergy: An assessment of the environmental and economic opportunities and constraints associated with bioenergy production from biomass resources in two prospective regions of Australia, 2011a).

Decision makers, planners and actors in cities design policies, plan, invest money and build infrastructure, and consumers buy houses and use transport infrastructure without sound information about the environmental consequences of many of those decisions. Decisions, however, that have a lasting impact on sustainable development outcomes. In this study, we employ novel analytical techniques to align the spatial characteristics of the built urban environment with information for building materials and GHG embodiment to inform planning and investment decisions at the district, suburb and city scale. We represent a three-dimensional model of a suburb established from remotely sensed data and use algorithms to identify building types and align those with their typical material composition. We analyse the urban development of the modelled suburb in three historical time steps – 1955, 1981 and 2015 – and establish the consequence of urban planning decisions on material use and GHG embodiment. We test the new methodology for its applicability for a whole of city analysis and discuss the benefit for environmentally sustainable urban planning and design.

CITATION: Bergesen, J. D., et al. 2017. Environmental and natural resource implications of sustainable urban infrastructure systems. Environmental Research Letters, 12(12):1-13, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa98ca.

Over two centuries of economic growth have put undeniable pressure on the ecological systems that underpin human well-being. While it is agreed that these pressures are increasing, views divide on how they may be alleviated. Some suggest technological advances will automatically keep us from transgressing key environmental thresholds; others that policy reform can reconcile economic and ecological goals; while a third school argues that only a fundamental shift in societal values can keep human demands within the Earth's ecological limits. Here we use novel integrated analysis of the energy-water-food nexus, rural land use (including biodiversity), material flows and climate change to explore whether mounting ecological pressures in Australia can be reversed, while the population grows and living standards improve. We show that, in the right circumstances, economic and environmental outcomes can be decoupled. Although economic growth is strong across all scenarios, environmental performance varies widely: pressures are projected to more than double, stabilize or fall markedly by 2050. However, we find no evidence that decoupling will occur automatically. Nor do we find that a shift in societal values is required. Rather, extensions of current policies that mobilize technology and incentivize reduced pressure account for the majority of differences in environmental performance. Our results show that Australia can make great progress towards sustainable prosperity, if it chooses to do so.

In this work, a risk-based assessment method and benefit-cost analysis to support policy decisions for adapting Australian coastal residential buildings to future coastal inundation hazard is presented. Future coastal inundation is mainly influenced by storm surge and rising sea level. The sea level rises projected by the A1FI, A1B and B1 emissions scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are considered. The effects of economic and population growth are accounted for by three urban development scenarios: (a) business as usual, (b) urban consolidation and (c) regional development. The adaptation policy actions investigated include a ‘protect’ stance (involving the construction of seawalls), an ‘accommodate’ stance that mandates raising house floors to a certain height (e.g. at heights of 100-year events) and an ‘avoid’ stance that limits new developments in hazardous areas. Policy stances classified as reactive (i.e. action taken after damage being incurred) and anticipatory (i....

Compiling, deploying and utilising large-scale databases that integrate environmental and economic data have traditionally been labour- and cost-intensive processes, hindered by the large amount of disparate and misaligned data that must be collected and harmonised. The Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) is a novel, collaborative approach to compiling large-scale environmentally extended multi-region input-output (MRIO) models.The utility of the IELab product is greatly enhanced by avoiding the need to lock in an MRIO structure at the time the MRIO system is developed. The IELab advances the idea of the "mother-daughter" construction principle, whereby a regionally and sectorally very detailed "mother" table is set up, from which "daughter" tables are derived to suit specific research questions. By introducing a third tier - the "root classification" - IELab users are able to define their own mother-MRIO configuration, at no additional cost in terms of data handling. Customised mother-MRIOs can then be built, which maximise disaggregation in aspects that are useful to a family of research questions.The second innovation in the IELab system is to provide a highly automated collaborative research platform in a cloud-computing environment, greatly expediting workflows and making these computational benefits accessible to all users.Combining these two aspects realises many benefits. The collaborative nature of the IELab development project allows significant savings in resources. Timely deployment is possible by coupling automation procedures with the comprehensive input from multiple teams. User-defined MRIO tables, coupled with high performance computing, mean that MRIO analysis will be useful and accessible for a great many more research applications than would otherwise be possible. By ensuring that a common set of analytical tools such as for hybrid life-cycle assessment is adopted, the IELab will facilitate the harmonisation of fragmented, dispersed and misaligned raw data for the benefit of all interested parties. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

This paper quantifies the effect of three policy levels on the water and energy futures of Melbourne, Australia. During a time of severe water shortages attributed to climate change, water strategies lacked consideration of energy consequences. Modeling, guided by urban metabolism theory, demonstrated that a compact urban form, reduced water consumption by 90 GL/a, compared with a sprawling city, and had greater water conservation impact than simulated demand management measures. Household water conservation, coupled with increased use of solar hot water systems, reduced grid energy use by some 30 PJ/a. Desalination, tripled water supply energy demand, growing to a total of 4.5 PJ/a, by 2045. While the increase is less than 1% of total Melbourne urban energy use, it contributes to a substantial increase in the energy bill for urban water provision. Importantly, the energy impact could be offset through demand management measures. Recommendations for the combined management of water and energy include improving energy characterization of the urban water cycle; impact-evaluation of regional plans; using total urban water and energy balances in analysis to provide context; and developing reporting mechanisms and indicators to help improve baseline data across the water and energy systems.

Humanity faces three large challenges over the coming decades: urbanisation and industrialisation in developing countries at unprecedented levels; concurrently, we need to mitigate against dangerous climate change and we need to consider fi nite global boundaries regarding resource depletion. Responses to these challenges as well as models that inform strategies are fragmented. The current mainstream framework for measuring and modelling climate change mitigation focuses on the fl ows of energy and emissions and is insuffi cient for simultaneously addressing the material and infrastructure needs of development. The models’ inability to adequately represent the multiple interactions between infrastructure stocks, materials, energy and emissions results in notable limitations. They are inadequate: (1) to identify physically realistic (mass balance consistent) mitigation pathways, (2) to anticipate potentially relevant co-benefi ts and risks and thus (3) to identify the most effective strategies for linking targets for climate change mitigation with goals for sustainable development, including poverty eradication, infrastructure investment and mitigation of resource depletion. This chapter demonstrates that a metabolic approach has the potential to address urbanisation and infrastructure development and energy use and climate change, as well as resource use, and therefore to provide a framework for integrating climate change mitigation and sustainable development from a physical perspective. Metabolic approaches can represent the cross-sector coupling between material and energy use and waste (emissions) and also stocks in the anthroposphere (including fi xed assets, public and private infrastructure). Stocks moderate the supply of services such as shelter, communication, mobility, health and safety and employment opportunities. The development of anthropogenic stocks defi nes boundary conditions for industrial activity over time. By 2050 there will be an additional three billion urban dwellers, almost all of them in developing countries. If they are to receive the level of services converging on those currently experienced in developed nations, this will entail a massive investment in infrastructure and substantial quantities of steel, concrete and aluminium (materials that account for nearly half of industrial emissions). This scenario is confronted by the legacy of existing infrastructure and the limit of a cumulative carbon budget within which we could restrain global temperature rise to

Summary For informed decision making about the current state and near future of any city, it is important to consider the long-term resource use trajectory and legacy of its past. Such information is not always readily available. Urban metabolism analysis for any given time period can be challenging due to the lack of metropolitan- or city-level data, and reconstructing a time series of urban energy or material flows is seldom attempted. For the case of Melbourne, Australia, we demonstrate how time series operational energy demand and supply data can be reconstructed from original sources. Primary energy consumption is calculated based on direct and upstream energy use in common with “scope 2” standards for emissions reporting. This extends the usual treatment of energy in urban metabolism studies by (1) providing time series data and (2) attributing upstream primary energy consumption to sectors based on their direct secondary energy usage. Results indicate that the transport, commercial, manufacturing, and residential sectors have contributed most to the doubling of Melbourne's energy consumption over four decades. We discuss recent urban development history and its relation to energy consumption and briefly examine potential scenarios of and responses to future change.

Urban environmental sustainability assessment is increasingly a part of urban planning, from the perspective of mitigating local and global impacts and for adapting to regional and global resource constraints and anticipated climate events. We examine general techniques under three categories: consumption-based, metabolism-based and complex systems approaches. We sample recent and salient applications at spatial scales ranging from neighbourhoods to metropolitan regions. The scope and strengths of applications in these categories are complementary especially with regards to the attribution of impact. The first approach assesses environmental sustainability as a function of urban consumption, the second uses a more limited concept of consumption but better represents local and trans-boundary production activity and the third attributes cause and effect through quantifying relationships and feedbacks throughout the urban system.

Assessment of urban energy use may proceed by a number of methods. Here we derive an energy account from local statistics, and compare them with an input output (IO) analysis as applied to Melbourne, Australia. These approaches highlight different aspects of urban energy use and comparable outputs are presented together to assess consistency, to identify complementarities and discuss the insight each approach brings to understanding urban energy. The IO method captures the direct and embodied primary energy requirements of local household expenditure (235.8 GJ/capita/year) while the regional assessment more directly accounts for local production activity (258.1 GJ/capita/year). The parity of these results is unexpected for a developed city with a strong tertiary sector. Sectoral detail reveals differences between the primary energy required by Melbourne's economic structure and that ultimately required through the full supply chain relating to household expenditure. This is accompanied by an IO analysis of the geography of Melbourne's ‘energy catchment’. It is suggested that the IO consumption and regional production approaches have particular relevance to policies aimed at consumption behaviour and economic (re)structuring, respectively. Their complementarity further suggests that a combined analysis would be valuable in understanding urban energy futures and economic transitions elsewhere.

Models used for future based scenarios should be calibrated with historical water supply and use data. Historical water records in Australia are discontinuous, incomplete, and often incongruently disaggregated. We present a systematic method to produce a coherent reconstruction of the historical provision and consumption of water in catchments of the State of Victoria. This is demonstrated using water account system WAS: an accounting and simulation tool that tracks the stocks and flows of physical quantities relating to the water system. The WAS is part of, and informed by, an integrated framework of stocks and flows calculators for simulating long-term interactions between other sectors of the physical economy. Both the WAS and related frameworks consider a wide scope of inputs regarding population, land use, energy, and water. The physical history of the water sector is reconstructed by integrating water data with these information sources using a data modeling process that resolves conflicts and deduces missing information. The WAS outputs demonstrate the water and energy implications of the treatment, delivery, and end use of water cognizant of historical records. DOI: 10.1061/ASCEWR.1943-5452.0000090 CE Database subject headings: Water supply; Calibration; Data processing; History; Australia. Author keywords: Water accounting; Stocks and flows; Historical time series; Calibration; Data modeling.

Rather than attempting to create a single integrated economic–environment model of the Australian economy, this paper presents research on the linking or soft-coupling of separate environment and economic models. The model of the environment is provided by the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework (ASFF), used to identify the significant physical challenges facing Australia in the decades ahead. To address the perceived issue of missing prices in the ASFF this research explores how the link with economic models can be made, and demonstrates several advantages of taking this approach. This paper shows the results of coupling the ASFF with two different economic models, a partial equilibrium model and a dynamic monetary circuit model, which differ substantially in their fundamental assumptions and representation of the way national economies function. This demonstrates the flexibility inherent in soft-coupling separate models, as compared with the more common approach of using fully integrated models. We find coherence of the biophysical model with the partial equilibrium model is limited as the latter does not have a system-wide extent. The coupling between biophysical and dynamic economic models demonstrates the role of increasing efficiency as a driver of economic growth and subsequent environmental degradation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

CITATION: Baynes, T. M. & Musango, J. K. 2018. Estimating current and future global urban domestic material consumption. Environmental Research Letters, 13(6):1-13, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aac391.

Interconnected social and environmental systems are the domain of ecological economics, and models can be used to explore feedbacks and adaptations inherent in these systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM) represents autonomous entities, each with dynamic behavior and heterogeneous characteristics. Agents interact with each other and their environment, resulting in emergent outcomes at the macroscale that can be used to quantitatively analyze complex systems. ABM is contributing to research questions in ecological economics in the areas of natural resource management and land-use change, urban systems modeling, market dynamics, changes in consumer attitudes, innovation, and diffusion of technology and management practices, commons dilemmas and self-governance, and psychological aspects to human decision making and behavior change. Frontiers for ABM research in ecological economics involve advancing the empirical calibration and validation of models through mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, participatory modeling, and, notably, experimental economics to test specific decision-making hypotheses. Linking ABM with other modeling techniques at the level of emergent properties will further advance efforts to understand dynamics of social-environmental systems.

This paper explores the consequences of changes in a system’s resilience on the sustainability of resource allocation decisions, as measured by Inclusive Wealth (IW) (Arrow et al. in Environ Resour Econ 26:647–685, 2003). We incorporate an estimate of resilience in IW by taking account of known or suspected thresholds that can lead to irreversible (or practically irreversible) changes in the productivity and value of assets and hence social welfare. These thresholds allow us to identify policies or projects that may be leading to an increased risk of decline in capital stocks (the wealth of the region). Such risks are not reflected through usual measures of current system performance, e.g. agricultural production. We use the Goulburn-Broken Catchment in south-eastern Australia as a case study to explore the significance and practicality of including resilience in inclusive wealth estimates.

Summary Systems dynamics, cellular automata, agent-based modeling, and network analyses have been used in population, land use, and transport planning models. An overview of complex systems science as applied to urban development is presented, and examples are given of where the problems of housing people and anticipating their movements have been addressed with complex approaches, sometimes in concert with deterministic, large-scale urban models. Planning for cities today has additional environmental and social priorities in common with many topics that concern industrial ecology. The research agenda suggested here is that this, too, can be enriched with complex systems thinking and models to complement the often static assessment of environmental performance and better inform decision processes.

To demagnetize small-scale objects (dimensions less than 1 m) fabricated from ferromagnetic materials, it is standard practice to expose the object to a continuous AC applied magnetic field with a steadily decaying amplitude. For objects of dimensions greater than 10 m, there are problems of scale, and a stepwise procedure is preferred. We have simulated two different stepwise demagnetization techniques with a scaled model of a magnetic treatment facility regularly used in the deperming of military vessels. We used a steel tube as the model of a ship that was to be demagnetized. For each demagnetization method, we calculated the standard deviation in the final magnetization of the tube. This standard deviation provides a measure of how reproducible the results of the respective techniques are. We find that the standard deviation in final magnetization is improved by a stepwise anhysteretic demagnetization method over the conventional Flash D deperm procedure.

The gating of ryanodine receptor calcium release channels (RyRs) depends on myoplasmic Ca2+ and Mg2+ concentrations. RyRs from skeletal and cardiac muscle are activated by microm Ca2+ and inhibited by mm Ca2+ and Mg2+. 45Ca2+ release from skeletal SR vesicles suggests two mechanisms for Mg2+-inhibition (Meissner, Darling & Eveleth, 1986, Biochemistry 25:236-244). The present study investigates the nature of these mechanisms using measurements of single-channel activity from cardiac- and skeletal RyRs incorporated into planar lipid bilayers. Our measurements of Mg2+- and Ca2+-dependent gating kinetics confirm that there are two mechanisms for Mg2+ inhibition (Type I and II inhibition) in skeletal and cardiac RyRs. The mechanisms operate concurrently, are independent and are associated with different parts of the channel protein. Mg2+ reduces Po by competing with Ca2+ for the activation site (Type-I) or binding to more than one, and probably two low affinity inhibition sites which do not discriminate between Ca2+ and Mg2+ (Type-II). The relative contributions of the two inhibition mechanisms to the total Mg2+ effect depend on cytoplasmic [Ca2+] in such a way that Mg2+ inhibition has the properties of Types-I and II inhibition at low and high [Ca2+] respectively. Both mechanisms are equally important when [Ca2+] = 10 microm in cardiac RyRs or 1 microm in skeletal RyRs. We show that Type-I inhibition is not the sole mechanism responsible for Mg2+ inhibition, as is often assumed, and we discuss the physiological implications of this finding.

Interconnected social and environmental systems are the domain of ecological economics, and models can be used to explore feedbacks and adaptations inherent in these systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM) represents autonomous entities, each with dynamic behavior and heterogeneous characteristics. Agents interact with each other and their environment, resulting in emergent outcomes at the macroscale that can be used to quantitatively analyze complex systems. ABM is contributing to research questions in ecological economics in the areas of natural resource management and land-use change, urban systems modeling, market dynamics, changes in consumer attitudes, innovation, and diffusion of technology and management practices, commons dilemmas and self-governance, and psychological aspects to human decision making and behavior change. Frontiers for ABM research in ecological economics involve advancing the empirical calibration and validation of models through mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, participatory modeling, and, notably, experimental economics to test specific decision-making hypotheses. Linking ABM with other modeling techniques at the level of emergent properties will further advance efforts to understand dynamics of social-environmental systems.

Agent based models (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) micro-scale modeling have found abundant application in the area of urban land use and transport planning. These platforms enable a rich spatial representation of residential behavior. We present an urban ABM that deliberately emphasizes a sparse set of rules that influence agents' settlement decisions which interact with detailed spatial data on the geography and climate of a city region. Preliminary results are compared with historical data (1851 to 2001) of the urban growth of the City of Melbourne, the major urbanized area of the State of Victoria, Australia. We discuss potential extensions to the model and its value as an exploratory device for different transport and climate change scenarios.

This paper describes a water accounting system (WAS) that has been developed as an innovative new tool for strategic long-term water management. The WAS incorporates both disaggregated water use and availability, provides a comprehensive and consistent historical database, and can integrate climate and hydrological model outputs for the exploration of scenarios. It has been established and tested for the state of Victoria in Australia, and can be extended to cover other or all regions of Australia. The WAS is implemented using stock-and-flow dynamics, currently employing major river basins as the spatial units and a yearly time step. While this system shares features with system dynamics, learning is enhanced and strategic management of water resources is improved by application of a Design Approach and the structure of the WAS. We compare the WAS with other relevant accounting systems and outline its benefits, particularly the potential for resolving tensions between water supply and demand. Integrated management is facilitated by combination with other stocks and flows frameworks that provide data on key drivers such as demography, land-use and electricity production.