Crop Biotechnology could help achieve a more food-secure world. However, the strong opposition to GM food, particularly in Europe, will undoubtedly affect the diffusion of GM crops worldwide, delaying or preventing the world from realizing the potential benefits of GM crops in terms of food security. This braking effect could deprive the world of a potential tool to increase or stabilize the future worldwide availability of food under a changing or more volatile climate. It is therefore essential to understand how the opposition to GM food has and will affect the diffusion of biotechnological innovations worldwide in order to estimate the effect of this opposition on global food security. <p> The main objective of the thesis is to estimate the loss in global food security if the EU does not relax their opposition to GM food. To meet this objective a market model is combined with a GM diffusion model to create a global food security (GFS) model. The focus of the model is GM wheat, due to the vital importance of conventional wheat to global food security. This approach allows us to evaluate dynamic economic responses to food production shocks, such as climate change. The GFS model is calibrated using production, consumption and price data for wheat. A number of scenarios are analyzed to consider the range of potential effects of the EU opposition on global food security. The results of the analyses will better inform the ongoing GM policy debates, which often ignore food security impacts.

Crop Biotechnology could help achieve a more food-secure world. However, the strong opposition to GM food, particularly in Europe, will undoubtedly affect the diffusion of GM crops worldwide, delaying or preventing the world from realizing the potential benefits of GM crops in terms of food security. This braking effect could deprive the world of a potential tool to increase or stabilize the future worldwide availability of food under a changing or more volatile climate. It is therefore essential to understand how the opposition to GM food has and will affect the diffusion of biotechnological innovations worldwide in order to estimate the effect of this opposition on global food security. <p> The main objective of the thesis is to estimate the loss in global food security if the EU does not relax their opposition to GM food. To meet this objective a market model is combined with a GM diffusion model to create a global food security (GFS) model. The focus of the model is GM wheat, due to the vital importance of conventional wheat to global food security. This approach allows us to evaluate dynamic economic responses to food production shocks, such as climate change. The GFS model is calibrated using production, consumption and price data for wheat. A number of scenarios are analyzed to consider the range of potential effects of the EU opposition on global food security. The results of the analyses will better inform the ongoing GM policy debates, which often ignore food security impacts.

<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>

Purpose: This study examines how hotels manage digitization within the industry. Specifically it seeks to examine how managers view decisions and strategies for implementing SST in relation to hotel guest’s acceptance. Design/methodology/approach: This study has assumed a mixed methods methodology. The method has been carried out through an abductive approach between theoretical and empirical material. The study is based on a combined research design of qualitative and quantitative nature and is grounded on the empirical evidence that consists of three semi-structured interviews and surveys. The qualitative part leads to analysis according to the theoretical structure and is then combined with statistical analysis of the survey responses. Findings: This study confirms a few elements of previous literature: implementations require considerable investments and costs; SST on offer in the hotel industry are found lacking; guests prefer technologies they have experience with; and managers have a wait-and-see attitude to SST. The study also shows that people used to technology are proportionately big and have a positive attitude towards SST. Further, the study presents new theoretical insights: high-end hotels are expected to offer technology; SST is perceived to reduce hotels security; attitude towards SST does not differ between genders; and SST is perceived to affect aesthetics. / Syfte: Denna studie undersöker hur hotell hanterar digitalisering av branschen. Mer specifikt undersöker denna studie hur managers betraktar beslut och strategier för implementering av SST i relation till hotellgästers acceptans. Design/metod/tillvägagångssätt: Denna studie har utgått från metodkombination. Metoden behandlas genom ett abduktivt tillvägagångssätt mellan det teoretiska och empiriska materialet. Studien baseras på en kombinerad forskningsdesign av kvalitativ och kvantitativ natur som består av tre semistrukturerade intervjuer samt efterföljande enkät. Den kvalitativa delen utmynnar i en analys enligt den teoretiska strukturen och kombineras sedan med statistiska analyser av enkätsvaren. Bidrag: Ett antal faktorer som resultatet påvisar bekräftar tidigare forskning: implementationer innebär höga kostnader och investeringar; utbudet av SST inom hotellbranschen är dåligt; gäster föredrar de tekniker de är vana vid; samt att managers har en vänta-och-se attityd till SST. Samtidigt visar studien på att andelen teknologivana människor är stor och att dessa är positivt inställda till SST. Studien bidrar även med nya teoretiska insikter såsom: att premiumhotell förväntas kombinera high-touch med high-tech; att SST upplevs minska hotellens upplevda säkerhet; att inställning till SST inte skiljer sig mellan kön; samt att viss SST upplevs påverka estetiken.

The uptake of residential photovoltaic systems is essential for energy system transformation towards carbon neutrality and decentralization. However, despite numerous campaigns to incentivize their uptake, adoption by residential homeowners is lacking behind. While countless drivers and barriers have been identified, the decision process is not fully understood. To address this gap, we developed an agent-based residential rooftop photovoltaic adoption model called PVact. Our model analyzes the interactions of potential household adopters based on their utility functions and social network, with a focus on the role of monetary evaluation and social pressure in adoption behavior. In this paper, we aim to assess the influence of monetary evaluation and social pressure in an abstract case study based on real-world data from the municipality of Leipzig, Germany. We consider stochastic dynamics through scenario analysis to investigate the influence of these factors on adoption behavior. Our results show that monetary evaluation and social pressure have a significant impact on adoption behavior. Specifically, we find shifting adoption patterns with an increased requirement for monetary returns and higher level of normative pressure required for households to act. Higher resistance against these pressure shows more stochastic variations,