A rapid development of wind energy has been approved globally within the last few years due to the common recognition of this renewable energy technology. It is seen as one of the most promising substitutions to fossil fuels which have been exploited for over one century but were proved to be a crucial factor of human-induced climate change. However, even though wind energy has been regarded to be clean, resource saving and environmentally friendly, it still poses special problems and concerns to the surrounding social-ecological system. Thereby it requires careful selection of sites of installation. This paper provides an overview of wind energy and its development in the recent decade and focus on elaborating different issues involved in wind energy development. This is done through a case study of applying GIS tools in selecting suitable locations for onshore wind power plants in Västmanland County of Sweden.

At present, an important task for Chinese governments at all levels is to save energy and reduce pollutant emissions. The task of buildings energy efficiency accounts for 21% in the 12th Five Year Plan which from 2011 to 2015. With the development of social economy，the energy shortage is serious day by day．The energy-conservation of buildings is a high relevant issue in China．There are a large capacity and a wide range of existing buildings in Qingdao among which the overwhelming majority is the non-energy-efficient buildings and the operate energy consumption are enormous．At Present, according to the related statistic，the energy efficient building area only accounts for 3% to 5% of the total building area newly increased in our country every year, while in such existing buildings in Qingdao ，most of them are highly energy-consuming, the energy consumption in buildings is about 100-350 kWh for each floor area of the whole year，which is 2 to 3 times of the energy consumption of the same area of energy efficient buildings．So we can say that whether could we promote the effective use of resources and energy in buildings is very important，which will finally determine whether could we and take the road to sustainable development． In respect of the application of the complicated systematic scientific conclusions，the thesis carries out the analysis of geographic and climate characteristics in Qingdao area and the research of current energy consumption． Based on the quantitative model analysis of environmental and economic benefits of implementation of energy efficient buildings in Qingdao in scenario k, promotion and implementation of energy efficient buildings can substantially reduce the current high environmental cost associated with energy consumption for heating and cooling in buildings in Qingdao. Emission including carbon dioxides, sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxides and ash can be reduced, it means that under the scenario k energy efficient buildings has an idea performance on reducing pollutant gas. At the same time, companied by the great environmental benefits, there are also substantial economic benefits. Barriers to energy efficiency in buildings in Qingdao, including political, economic, social and technological barriers are discussed in this thesis. According to the investigation and analysis about the present situation and factors affecting the implementation of energy efficient buildings in Qingdao, this thesis put forward recommendations from the aspects of environment, politics, economy, society and technology to improving energy efficient buildings in Qingdao.

The aim of this report is to provide an analysis of potential benefits of a fleet of Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAV) providing a taxi service to replace private car commuter trips in a metropolitan area. We develop a framework for dynamic allocation of SAVs to passenger trips, empty-vehicle routing and multi-criteria evaluation with regard to passenger waiting time, trip time and fleet size. Using a representation of current private trip demand for the Stockholm metropolitan area and a detailed road network representation, different scenarios (varying levels of accepted passenger waiting time at origin and accepted increase in travel time) are compared with respect to passenger travel time, number of vehicles needed and vehicle mileage. In a second step the environmental impacts of the different scenarios are assessed and compared using a life cycle approach. The assessment includes both a fleet consisting of currently in use gasoline and diesel cars as well as electrical cars. The results show that an SAV-based personal transport system has the potential to provide an on-demand door-to-door transport with a high level of service, using less than 10 % of today's private cars and parking places. In order to provide an environmental benefit and lower congestion an SAV-based personal transport system requires users to accept ride-sharing, allowing a maximum 30% increase of their travel time (15% on average) and a start time window of 10 minutes. In a scenario where users are not inclined to accept any reduced level of service, i.e. no ride-sharing and no delay, empty vehicle drive of an SAV-based personal transport system will lead to increased road traffic increasing environmental impacts and congestion. Envisioning a future using electrical cars a SAV-based system and electrical vehicle technology seems to be a “perfect” match that could definitely contribute to a sustainable transport system in Stockholm.

Concrete structures represent a huge investment in terms of materials and energy and they lead to significant environmental impacts. Thus, there is a need to choose the most sustainable and eco-friendly alternative. From this perspective, this report aims to evaluate the environmental impacts associated with the construction of two fictitious structures: a bridge and a tunnel. To fully assess and fairly compare the environmental burdens of those two structures, the life cycle assessment (LCA) has been chosen. Prior to the case studies, the LCA process is described and a literature review related to LCAs of road structures is performed thus revealing the key facts and key figures of such studies. Based on this literature review, a simplified LCA is performed; it relies on public databases and only takes into account the construction phase. Because of data constraints, the indicators that are considered are NOx, SO2 and CO2 emissions, and the categories that are taken into account are energy consumption, global warming potential and photochemical oxidant formation. Characterization factors come from the REciPE method. Three different stages are considered and compared during this LCA study; the production of materials, the construction processes and the transportation phase. Results show that the environmental impacts of the bridge are higher than the ones of the tunnel and that the amount of concrete has a strong influence on the final results and consequently on the interpretation phase. This study also emphasizes the importance of assumptions and describes their potential influence on the final results by considering two different alternatives related to the concrete’s manufacturing. Making the concrete directly on site instead of bringing it by truck significantly decreases the environmental impacts of both structures; indeed, for the bridge structure, it leads to a diminution in CO2 emissions, global warming potential and energy consumption by more than 60%. The main constraint of this study has been the data collection for the life cycle inventory; indeed, many data were missing or coming from different public databases which result in a lack of thoroughness and precision (e.g. different geographical representativeness). Results of this study strongly depend on the various assumptions and on the data that have been collected, and technical choices, methodologies of construction or structural design mainly depend on the project’s location; consequently, results and conclusions cannot be generalized and should be handled carefully.

<p>  </p> <p>The transportation sector is witnessing rapid development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. While an AV can be more energy efficient than a conventional human-driven vehicle, their environmental impacts at the fleet and city level could be either significantly better or worse than the traditional systems, depending on how people use them – adopting AVs as privately-owned AVs (PAV) or centrally-managed shared AVs (SAV) will result in very different fleet size, vehicle-miles-travelled (VMT), and carbon emissions. To understand the environmental impacts of AVs at the city level, it is critical to consider who are likely to adopt which types of AVs, their travel demands, and the associated AV operation. Previous studies evaluating the potential impacts of AVs on the environment are limited by the existing travel demand models, which do not have sociodemographic information linked to the travel demands to support modeling of AV adoption or only generate trip origin and destination at the zonal level that is insufficient to support modeling of shared AV use. Additionally, existing research mainly focused on SAV systems and did not consider the potential competition between SAV and PAV. It is necessary to compare the system performance between the privately-owned AV system and the centrally-managed shared AV system and under the scenarios that both systems co-exist to inform AV system development. Furthermore, although AVs can help reduce fleet size through shared use, each vehicle will be used more intensively due to empty VMT, resulting in acceleration of vehicle replacement and increased need for vehicle production. To fully quantify the environmental impacts of a city’s AV system, it is also important to take a life-cycle perspective, considering not only vehicle use but also upstream vehicle manufacturing and downstream vehicle disposal with fleet replacement. </p> <p>To address these gaps, this work proposed an integrated agent-based model to quantify the environmental impacts of PAV and SAV. The integrated model includes four key components: 1) a travel demand generation model that links high resolution individual and household travel demand with socio-demographics information, 2) an AV adoption model that evaluates individual’s and household’s likelihood to accept AV and preference to use PAV, SAV or conventional vehicle, 3) an AV operation model to simulate the system performance of different AV fleets, and 4) an AV life cycle model that assesses different AV systems’ emissions considering vehicle replacement. Applying the proposed integrated model to a case study of Miami, the results have presented that the existing studies may overestimate AV systems’ environmental benefits, due to lack of travel demand data that can support the proposed integrated modeling, inconsideration of individual and household AV adoption decisions, and/or biased evaluation that does not account for all phases in AV system’s life-cycle. Case study results have showed that SAVs are more environmentally beneficial than PAVs but are less likely to be adopted by travelers and households, due to low cost of PAV use based on existing AV survey findings and current AV pricing knowledge. To promote SAV adoption to gain more positive environmental impacts, it is crucial to optimize SAV’s vehicle and system design to reduce service fee, waiting time, and in-vehicle value of time. The case study also found that due to more frequent vehicle replacement resulted from more intensively vehicle utilization, an AV systems’ environmental benefits from the operation phase can be counterbalanced by the impacts from other life-cycle phases. To achieve a life-cycle emission breakeven point, SAVs and PAVs need to improve fuel efficiency during the operation phase by 5% and 16% or reduce per-vehicle manufacture and disposal emissions by 36% and 5%. The proposed models and findings of this work can inform decision making for SAV operators, policy makers, and transportation planners. </p>

As the construction sector has caused significant environmental impacts, Sweden has made efforts to develop prefabricated buildings by increasing their prefabricated rates. In a life cycle perspective, this thesis examines how the overall environmental impacts during the construction processes are influenced when the prefabricated rate increases. By modelling in SimaPro version 9, this thesis conducts a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a concrete framed reference building with a prefabricated rate of 26% located in Stockholm Royal Seaport. Nine scenarios with increasing prefabricated rates varying from 6% to 96% are compared in the thesis. The results show that when the prefabricated rate increases, the total water consumption of the building is optimized, while the overall energy consumption and GHG emissions have increased. For other environmental impacts, the thesis finds the terrestrial ecotoxicity is the most affected impact category when the prefabricated rate rises. The thesis indicates that water consumption of the building is mainly influenced by material extraction and processing stage, and the transport is the dominating factor to energy consumption, GHG emissions and terrestrial ecotoxicity as the prefabricated rate rises. The sensitivity analysis in the thesis also reveals that the energy consumption and GHG emissions of the prefabricated building are sensitive to transport scheme, such as transport distance and vehicle types. / För att optimera miljöproblem som orsakas av byggsektorn gör Sverige ansträngningar för att främja prefabricerade byggnader och stödjer också ökad andel prefabricerade komponenter i byggnader. Med fokus på byggverksamheten undersöker denna studie hur en ökad andel prefabricering kan påverka miljöpåverkan från byggsektorn. Denna studie genomför en Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) på en referensbyggnad med en prefabriceringsgrad på 26% i Stockholm Royal Seaport, och studerar nio scenarier med en prefabricerad andel från 6% till 96%. Resultaten indikerar att den totala vattenförbrukningen förbättras, men den totala energiförbrukningen och växthusgasutsläppen försämras när andelen prefabricering ökar. Av de undersökta effekterna har den markbundna ekotoxiciteten den högsta ökningen vid ökad prefabriceringsgrad. Rapporten visar att materialutvinning och -bearbetning är den dominerande påverkande faktorn som orsakar vattenförbrukning när prefabriceringsgraden ökar. Förändringarna i energiförbrukning, växthusgasutsläpp och markekotoxicitet påverkas främst av transporter. Energiförbrukningen och växthusgasutsläppen från den prefabricerade byggnaden är känsliga för transportavstånd och fordonstyper.

The global construction industry accounts for more than 30% of the energy consumption and 40% of the carbon dioxide emissions, and roughly 60% of raw material extraction. A cross laminated timber building system is one solution to reduce the construction industry's environmental impact, particularly carbon footprint. Evaluating the potentials to reduce the environmental impacts of such a building system is the aim of this study. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive method to evaluate the environmental impact of buildings and is applied in the thesis. The environmental impacts analyzed in this thesis comprise global warming potential, acidification, ozone layer depletion, eutrophication, formation potential of tropospheric, and abiotic depletion potential. Firstly, the environmental impacts of the reference building are calculated based on environmental product declaration (EPD) through production and construction phases (A1-A5 module) of LCA; next, the transportation phase (A4) modified, and finally, the environmental impacts are analyzed based on the lowest available global warming potential figures. Reference building results show that global-warming potential, eutrophication, and abiotic depletion potential accounted for 182kgCO2-eqv / m2, 0.169 PO4 3-eqv / m2, and 0.003 kg Sb-eqv / m2, respectively, and figures decreased on an average of 40% for improved building. According to the outcomes, decision-makers should regulate material selection based on the lowest possible carbon footprint and energy consumption for the construction permission of the buildings that will be built in the future. / no

Microplastics (MPs) pollution is a global ongoing issue in freshwater ecosystems. The threat of MPs has only recently been recognized and research is needed to better understand how widespread this threat is. Plastic litter is the ultimate source of MPs and we might therefore expect MPs to be a greater threat in areas of high human use. To improve our understanding of how MPs pollution might vary with human land use, we will survey for MPs in freshwater streams. To find the variation of land use this study would be sampling three major types of streams: forested, urban, and agricultural. MPs will be sampled from three streams in each landscape using 1 L grab samples. The freshwater will be filtered and MPs in each landscape will be compared using ANOVA. Each stream site will be sampled five times for a total of forty-five grab samples. The samples will take place in early spring, and sampling after a storm will be avoided to prevent bias data. The results of the project will improve our understanding of where MPs are a potential threat in East Tennessee, as well as our broader understanding of how human activity influences the distribution of this threat.

Thesis ( M.Dev.) -- University of Limpopo, 2013 / Environmental impacts from a land claim-discarded settlement development are positive, negative and cumulative by nature, within the broad scope of environmental impacts there has been much focus on the physical environment neglecting the socio economic and other political factors of the environment. This study presents from a total environmental perspective the investigation of the environmental impacts of land claim-discarded settlement development in Mamahule ga-Matsaung. Both primary and secondary sources of data were used for the purposes of this study. The study used the non-probability purposive sampling for the entire targeted population. The study used both thick descriptions and qualitative techniques to analyse the collected data. Thick descriptions were used to explain the environmental impacts of various temporal phases as well as processes settlement development and land claim, while quantitative (Leopold matrix and Cost Benefit Analysis) were used to evaluate environmental impacts and economic valuations of the land claim and the settlement development. The study shows that the Environmental Impact Assessment should be conducted prior the development of any settlement to avoid multiple negative environmental impacts on the environment. The study also highlights the impact that land claim has on development activities and the way in which settlement development can delay the process of a land claim. The study arrived to a conclusions that both settlement development and land claim impacted differently on the environment. / National Research Foundation (NRF) Scholarship

Transport is one of the most carbon-intensive sectors in the world today. With increasing global population and economy, the share of emissions is expected to rise. Electric vehicle is one of promising technology that helps address this challenge. The electric vehicle segments of companies have broadened, and their sales have increased in the past decade. The electric motorcycle sector is growing fast, with the development of improved technology on electric powertrains, increased ranges, charging speeds and infrastructure. Parallel to the sales of these vehicles, the electric battery sector is advancing rapidly, thereby lowering the environmental impacts of these vehicles. The competitive adventure sport sector also benefits from using electric powertrains by taking advantage of their power-to-weight ratio and instant torque. The benefits of using electric vehicles can be seen during the use phase with zero tailpipe emissions and clean, silent riding. But with the expansion of the electric motorcycle sector rolling out new technologies and models, there are uncertainties as to whether the overall lifecycle of the vehicles have reduced impacts on the environment. To make improvements and to find the most sustainable models or solutions, it is important to analyse the impacts of the electric bikes on the environment.A case study has been performed at CAKE 0 Emission AB, in Stockholm, Sweden for the purpose of evaluating potential environmental impacts of KALK OR, an off-road electric two wheeler. This is achieved by carrying out a stand-alone assessment of KALK OR, to identify potential environmental hotspots. The study investigated the potential of manufacturing the motorcycle fossil-free. Attributional life cycle assessment was employed as a methodology with an explicit focus on nine impact categories at midpoint level. The results of the study indicated Suspensions, Frame, and battery to be the highest contributor of environmental impact. The common among them is one material, Aluminium. Battery on the other hand contributes highly on mineral resource scarcity, 26%. Other aspects and assumptions are also analyzed further using a sensitivity analysis, which shows the scope for decreasing KALK OR’s environmental footprint. Using this findings, three companies were selected to help reduce the environmental impact and their emission reduction potential was evaluated. It was found that using recycled aluminium could significantly reduce the global warming impact by 15% and the overall reduction from the Cleanest dirt bike ever project at the time of study could be 29.06%. Based on the results, it is recommended to use recycled aluminium. Additionally, from the various transport scenarios, it is recommended to avoid flight as that could lead to massive environmental impact. / Transportsektorn är idag en av världens mest utsläppstyngda branscher, med förväntad ökning av utsläppen i takt med växande befolkning. Elektrifiering av fordon ses som en av lösningarna för att hantera branschens problem. Det senaste decenniet har utbudet av elektriska fordon breddats och företag inom segmentet har sett stigande försäljningssiffror. Marknaden för elektriska motorcyklar växer snabbt, i takt med att både infrastruktur och den tekniska utvecklingen av elektriska drivlinor förbättras, med längre räckvidd och snabbare uppladdning som resultat. Även utvecklingen av batterier avancerar i raketfart, med möjlighet att minska klimatavtrycket för elfordon som kategori. Äventyrssport är ännu ett område där elektriska drivlinor kan konkurrera med sina fördelar genom fördelaktig effekt till-vikt förhållande och snabba vridmoment, utöver tyst och utsläppsfri körning i naturen. Trots de uppenbara fördelarna under körning råder det osäkerhet kring de elektriska elmotorcyklarnas miljöpåverkan ur ett livscykelperspektiv. För att styra utvecklingen av miljövänliga elmotorcyklar åt rätt håll är det helt centralt att analysera fordonets miljöpåverkan under hela livscykeln. I syfte att utvärdera miljöpåverkan under hela livscykeln för den elektriska off-road motorcykeln Kalk OR, har en studie genomförts hos CAKE 0 emission AB i Stockholm, Sverige. Studien har genomförts med utförandet av en fristående livscykelanalys på modellen Kalk OR, med målet att identifiera potentiell negativ miljöpåverkan, under samtliga faser av motorcykelns livscykel. Fallstudien undersökte möjligheterna för helt eliminera koldioxidutsläppen under produktionsfasen.En attributiv livscykelanalys utfördes med särskilt fokus på nio karakteriseringsfaktorer i mittpunkt. Resultatet indikerade att ram, stötdämpare och batteri var de delar med störst negativt avtryck på miljön. En gemensam nämnare för dessa delar är materialet aluminium. Batteri bidrar även till avtryck på knappa fossila resursers 26%. Fler aspekter och antaganden analyserades med hjälp av en känslighetsanalys för att påvisa möjligheterna för att minska fotavtrycket på miljön för modellen Kalk OR. Baserat på livscykelanalysen valdes tre leverantörer ut med potential att reducera fotavtrycket för Kalk OR. Företagens potential och lösningar utvärderades med insikten att återvunnen aluminium kan reducera Kalk OR:s bidrag till den globala uppvärmningen med 15%. Den totala reduceringen av koldioxidutsläpp för the Cleanest Dirt Bike Ever vid tiden för studien uppskattades till 29.06%.