Domestic energy consumption has increasingly become a cause for concern for governments, energy suppliers, and individual householders. Issues surrounding gas and electricity used in the home relate to the increasing cost of fuel, the rise in the incidence of fuel poverty, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels contributing to climate change, security of supply due to geo-political disagreement and the age and condition of the existing energy infrastructure. While buildings and appliances have become more energy-efficient, usually driven by legislation, the energy-consuming behaviour of individuals is very difficult to change. Domestic energy monitoring has so far only been carried out at a household level, while the behaviour of individuals within households has remained ambiguous. There is a gap in current knowledge about how people use energy at home, mainly because it is very difficult to capture everyday behaviour without influencing the behaviour being observed. Initiatives and campaigns targeting domestic energy-consuming behaviour have been based on assumptions of how people use energy in their homes, and have been found to be ineffective. There is a need for an unobtrusive method of capturing domestic energy behaviour. This research presents a technique to deliver this requirement by enabling the tracking of people in their homes with a small number of cost-effective RFID (Radio Frequency ID) devices. Using this technique the location of multiple individuals wearing RFID tags can be determined, thereby creating an unobtrusive RTLS (Real Time Location System). This technique has been extensively evaluated through a series of tests within a typical 1940’s semi-detached house in North West England, and has been found to be able to successfully locate individuals to room level. If this RTLS data is matched with appliance level energy data, energy-consumption can be attributed to the individuals responsible, and personalised everyday energy-consuming behaviour can be established.

Background: Phase Three of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) measured the global prevalence of symptoms of asthma in children. We undertook comprehensive analyses addressing risk factors for asthma symptoms in combination, at both the individual and the school level, to explore the potential role of reverse causation due to selective avoidance or confounding by indication. Objective: To explore the role of reverse causation in risk factors of asthma symptoms. Methods: We compared two sets of multilevel logistic regression analyses, using (a) individual level exposure data and (b) school level average exposure (ie prevalence), in two different age groups. In individual level analyses, reverse causation is a possible concern if individual level exposure statuses were changed as a result of asthma symptoms or diagnosis. School level analyses may suffer from ecologic confounding, but reverse causation is less of a concern because individual changes in exposure status as a result of asthma symptoms would only have a small effect on overall school exposure levels. Results: There were 131 924 children aged 6-7 years (2428 schools, 25 countries) with complete exposure, outcome and confounder data. The strongest associations in individual level analyses (fully adjusted) were for current paracetamol use (odds ratio = 2.06; 95% confidence interval 1.97-2.16), early life antibiotic use (1.65; 1.58-1.73) and open fire cooking (1.44; 1.26-1.65). In school level analyses, these risk factors again showed increased risks. There were 238 586 adolescents aged 13-14 years (2072 schools, 42 countries) with complete exposure, outcome and confounder data. The strongest associations in individual level analyses (fully adjusted) were for current paracetamol use (1.80; 1.75-1.86), cooking on an open fire (1.32; 1.22-1.43) and maternal tobacco use (1.23; 1.18-1.27). In school level analyses, these risk factors again showed increased risks. Conclusions & clinical relevance: These analyses strengthen the potentially causal interpretation of previously reported individual level findings, by providing evidence against reverse causation. / Revisión por pares

não há resumo em português / This is a study of the analysis of the concept of sustainable development. The linkages between environment and development, the meaning of sustainability and a critique of the decision making process are analysed through the comparison of two case studies the Aral Sea and the Billings reservoir. The rst study case is the Aral Sea. During the last thirty years the development of crop production was the goal of regional strategy of the Aral region countries. Wirhdrawls from the rivers caused inows to the Aral to fall at an average of over 50 km3 annually to 1-5 km3 in the 80´s. There have been observed accute environmental, health and social problems attributed to the development process. The Billings reservoir is located at the Southeastern region of the city of São Paulo, and was constructed in I937 with the objective of energy generation. During the years it was turned into a multiple-use reservoir including domestic and industrial water uses, as well as well as domestic and industrial deject reception. The accelerated development of the city and the lack of basic infrastructure projects such as sewage treatment have led to the advanced degradation of the reservoir. and to negative impacts and conicts for the entities and communities involved in the system. The study has shown that integration of environmental and developmental issues is very important for a balanced and efficient decisionmaking. This can be achieved through thorough studies of ervironmental, economic and social factors of the system under analysis. The meaning of sustainability has different dimensions for each system. Also a reformulation of the decisionmaking process is essential for the concept become operational.

Thesis. 1975. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. / Bibliography: leaves 111-112. / M.S.

Thesis. 1978. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 38-39. / by Christopher D. Janney. / M.S.

Presented work analyzes the business environment of the Republic of Argentina. It focuses on the economic, political and legislative, cultural and social, and institutional environment. It evaluates the mutual commercial relations between the Czech and Argentinian Republic and suggests possible business opportunities for their commercial exchange.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / John A. Harrington, Jr. / Clearly, the character of the relationship between humans and their environment has changed over time. Scholars have developed a geologic timeline and a timeline for life, but there is not a human-environment timeline. The proposed new geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is inadequate for encapsulating the diversity of the human-environment relationship throughout history and prehistory. This dissertation initiates conversation about developing an official human-environment timeline. Oriented from the perspective of a geographer, this exploratory research involved the qualitative analysis of human-environment events and ideas from a series of four geographic encyclopedias. A human-environment timeline emerged from this research, as well as a hierarchical typology of time periods: durations, duration revolutions, scenes, scene transitions, and intervals. The timeline was then interpreted according to four “ways of knowing”: normal science, cultural ecology, political ecology, and humanistic geography. This research supports inquiry into how time periods can be employed to better understand and communicate the human-environment relationship through time.

Biochar has often been described as a "win-win" technology for soil fertility, agronomic yields, carbon sequestration and poverty reduction. However, despite a growing body of physical research evidence to support these claims, there is much less socio-economic evidence for biochar's potential to achieve these "winwin" outcomes in real-world systems. Consequently, debates about biochar and its potential to contribute to sustainable development have often been polarised between extremes of opinion, with some claiming it is a key technology for mitigating climate change, and others warning of potentially dire effects for ecosystems and vulnerable populations. This inspired the objective for this PhD, which is to generate research that can inform and moderate the debate on biochar's win-win potential. Guided by the theory of ecological modernisation, this PhD aimed to generate a body of applied, policy-relevant research on the economic and environmental potential of biochar as a win-win use of biomass resources. It was important to adopt geographical and biomass boundaries for the research to provide a meaningful and focused contribution, therefore the research is focused on China and its agricultural straw residues. One of the central claims for biochar is that it can improve crop yields and, consequently, reduce poverty for smallholder farmers. This thesis investigated this from a socio-economic perspective using farm-scale linear programming models with primary data from interviews conducted across four contrasting Chinese agricultural systems. The results suggest that biochar is unlikely to provide even minor economic gains, let alone poverty-reducing change, to smallholder farmers in these systems. If biochar is not economic for farmers, there is a possibility that economies of scale made possible by business ventures could reduce the marginal costs per unit of biochar product and/or that governments/climate finance institutions may be interested in subsidising this technology where it has significant carbon mitigation impacts. Thus the next research question was whether biochar might be a profitable investment for businesses in China, and further whether businesses might also profit from carbon credits/subsidies where biochar's carbon sequestration potential is valued either by carbon markets or by climate conscious governments willing to provide appropriate incentives. Life-cycle and cost-benefit analyses demonstrated that, when compared to the main competing uses for straw feedstocks (briquetting for combustion in boilers, and gasification for electricity generation), pyrolysis of straw to produce biochar makes a financial loss under all subsidy scenarios considered, and is the least cost-effective technology for carbon sequestration. Overall it seems biochar made from China's straw feedstocks is not currently a win-win option for smallholder farmers, business investors or national/international climate mitigation strategies. In light of the relative dominance of bioenergy over biochar production as a financial and climate mitigating option for China's straw, the focus of the thesis shifts to explore win-win scenarios in this domain. Here the results are more promising. Combining a unique geographical dataset of China's coal fired powerstations and straw location with data on energy economics, the model suggests a small tweak to China's bioenergy subsidy system (an extension of the existing feed-in-tariff to include low energy replacement ratio cofiring) could contribute 42-62% of China's 2020 target to install 30GW of renewable energy generation capacity: a classic win-win scenario for the Chinese government's bioenergy targets, bioenergy investors and global climate change. Overall this thesis offers two main findings to the literature. Firstly it demonstrates that, within its current high application rate model, biochar will struggle to compete as a win-win strategy when viewed through financial and carbon sequestration lenses. However, secondly, it suggests that win-win strategies are available for China's straw resources under cofiring bioenergy applications. The thesis concludes with a critical discussion of these results in relation to the theory of ecological modernisation and the concept of win-wins.

Great swaths of Southeastern Louisiana are drowning, land giving way to water at an alarming rate. Since the 1920s, Louisiana has lost more than 1,800 square miles of wetlands to open water, an area about the size of the state of Delaware. In the same amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Breaking Bad, our state loses the equivalent of a football field’s-worth of solid ground to the rising seas. My thesis is the first part of an accessible creative nonfiction book that tells the story of what’s happening in my home state. To what extent is it feasible to engineer ourselves out of harm’s way? What communities get relocated, and on whose terms? Most centrally, how will we address the troubling gulf between what we know to be true about our changing climate and what we are willing to do about it?

Privately owned lands often undersupply environmental benefits and oversupply environmental costs through land use and management decisions. Insights into human behavior suggest a range of cognitive biases and nonstandard preferences that offer alternative explanations for and, perhaps, strategies to influence landowner behavior. People respond to simple changes in context and framing, make inconsistent choices over time, and respond to social influence—the opinions and behavior of peers. This dissertation applies insights from behavioral science to strategies that seek to influence individual decisions that impact the environment, especially related to land management. First, I review existing experimental research on behavioral insights to influence decisions in six domains that have large environmental externalities. Behavioral interventions, including changing the status quo and leveraging social influence, are often more effective than simply providing information, but there are few applications to land management. Chapter Two maps behavioral insights onto farmers’ plot-level conservation decisions that benefit biodiversity. Using a case study from California, USA, I find farmers who receive information from their peers are three times more likely to adopt practices that support biodiversity than those who do not. Chapter Three tests the causal effect of social influence on engaging Vermont forest owners in bird habitat conservation. Contrary to results from similar studies in other domains, information about peer participation reduced interest in the conservation program. Chapter Four presents results from another large-scale field experiment that tested the effect of message framing on contributions to water quality in a polluted urban watershed. Participants who read an emotional, personal narrative with tenuous connections to nutrient pollution were willing to pay more for nutrient runoff-reducing landscaping products than those who read a scientific description of nutrient pollution's impacts on ecosystems and surrounding communities. The findings from these four studies contribute to our understanding of environmentally relevant behavior, with implications for privately managed land and the environmental benefits it provides.