Search results for "Ecological Footprint"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
Comparative study of the environmental footprints of marinas on European Islands
2021
AbstractPorts have been key elements in Europe's economic development. This situation is even more relevant on islands, which are highly dependent on the maritime sector. Consequently, over the years, ports with diverse functionalities have been established both in mainland Europe and on its outlying islands. This article discusses the environmental impact of leisure marinas on European islands, especially as they are closely linked to economic development through tourism. The aim is to study the environmental impact of these infrastructures by determining the carbon and water footprints of marinas on European islands in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The results obtained enable the au…
The role of the transportation phase for a green management of municipal solid waste
2017
Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) constitutes a high challenging issue to cope with to move towards sustainability of the urban policies. Despite new standards call for recycling and reusing materials contained in the city waste, several municipalities still use extensive landfills. Other than the environmental pressure exerted by these plants, the waste transportation from the recovery points of towns to landfills needs consideration to correctly assess the whole burden of the waste management. In this paper, the Ecological Footprint indicator is applied to the MSWM of the town of Palermo (Sicily). Results show that the effects produced by the involved transportation vehicles, both i…
Eco-efficiency assessment of wastewater treatment plants using a weighted Russell directional distance model
2016
Abstract Improving the performance of wastewater treatment plants is essential to ensuring their long-term sustainability. Most of the previous studies on this topic have assessed the techno-economic efficiency of wastewater treatment plants and ignored the emission of greenhouse gases. For the first time, the weighted Russell directional distance model was applied to estimate the eco-efficiency of a sample of real wastewater treatment plants. Moreover, this approach allowed an inefficiency score to be obtained for each variable (cost factors, pollutant removal and greenhouse gases) involved in the model. Subsequently, a second stage of analysis was applied to identify factors influencing t…
Assessing the Ecological Footprint of an Urban Transportation System
2003
The ecological footprint methodology is here applied to the urban transport system of the Italian town of Palermo (Sicily). By only using the current running fleet, a synthetic indicator represented by the "equivalent bio-productive" land, corresponding to the actual transport configuration, will be built up. This indicator can be usefully adopted for ranking various options in the urban context referring, for example, to different arrangements of the transportation demand between private and public means. This could allow local administrations to environmentally hierarchizing alternative plans concerning the urban transportation
Ecological footprint decomposition analyses: the case of Latvia
2012
This paper presents results from empirical decomposition analyses of Latvia’s national Ecological Footprint in the housing, transport and food consumption sectors. It draws attention to growth, structural and intensity effects causing changes in the ecological footprint and presents the strategies to be employed by policy makers to overcome these effects.
Sustainable development as a challenge for a society and an economy
2017
During the political process leading up to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 it was decided that the concept which will be used to coordinate spontaneous development processes will be the concept of sustainable development. Since that time, efforts are made to implement this concept through inclusion in the legal regulations and by modelling the development objectives of societies. This process should be accompanied by: 1) a reflection over a direction in which we should go and 2) a question whether actions, carried out in the spirit of sustainable development, really bring us closer to the realisation of this concept. The proposed paper will develop these last two questions focusi…
Integrated Methods for Establishing the Sustainability of Urban Policies: Applying Ecological Footprint to the Municipal Solid Waste Management
2018
The Ecological Footprint (EF) method is applied here to assess alternative policies regarding the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management. This approach arises from two considerations. First, the MSW management certainly requires a great attention by politicians and technicians, due to its importance for effectively administrating and environmentally controlling urban contexts. On the other hand, the EF method, thanks to its holistic structure of analysis, supposedly provides a synthetic and effective measure of the sustainability of waste management systems, so allowing public administrations to prioritizing policies aimed at implementing environmental actions. Here the EF method is used fo…
A Cooperative Multi-Agent System for Crowd Sensing Based Estimation in Smart Cities
2020
The concept of Smart City has spread as a solution to ensure better access to information and services to citizens, but also as a means to reduce the environmental footprint of cities. To this end, a continuous and wide observation of the environment is necessary to analyze information that enables government bodies to act on the environment appropriately. Moreover, a diffused acquisition of information requires adequate infrastructure and proper devices, which results in relevant installation and maintenance costs. Our proposal enables reducing the number of necessary sensors to be deployed while ensuring that information is available at any time and anywhere. We present the HybridIoT syst…
The Landfilling of Municipal Solid Waste and the Sustainability of the Related Transportation Activities
2022
The management of municipal solid waste is a crucial issue to address as we move toward the decarbonization of urban contexts. Not by chance, this sector plays a relevant role in the Covenant of Mayors program, whereby municipalities are called to design their own Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SECAPs). However, despite new regulations strongly pushing the recycling and reuse of materials contained in municipal waste, many cities still use large landfills. As part of the overall environmental pressure exerted by these urban systems, the transport of waste from collection points to landfills or treatment facilities must be considered in order to correctly assess the full environmental burd…
Ecological assessment of developing carbon sequestration in Shenyang, China
2012
Carbon sequestration in urban ecosystems is becoming an international climate change initiative for sustainable development. Drawing upon field work undertaken in the author's native Shenyang, China, this research reports upon the natural process of carbon sequestration from the atmosphere into urban ecosystems. The risks associated within carbon sequestration in urban ecosystems are investigated and utilised the analysis of ecological carbon cycle status and integrated climate policy with reference to the sustainable development of urban planning. The primary method of this paper is the ecologically–based life assessment of urban ecosystems relevant to tackling barriers for developing carb…