Search results for "consumption"
showing 10 items of 1796 documents
The role of the building sector for reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gases: An Italian case study
2013
The paper presents one of the first Italian experiences assessing the effectiveness of sustainable production and consumption strategies. The authors developed an energy and environmental extended input–output model, combined with the life cycle assessment, to analyse the role of the building sector in the reduction of Italian energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In detail, the model allows to assess the energy and environmental benefits arising from the Italian tax deduction policy for energy retrofit actions of buildings. Moreover, the authors defined an original model to assess the indirect rebound effect caused by the energy retrofit actions. The outcomes of the research point out that…
Application of the Structural Decomposition Analysis to assess the indirect energy consumption and air emission changes related to Italian households…
2012
Abstract The design of sustainable production and consumption strategies and the assessment of implemented actions require to identify the driving forces that influence the trend of energy consumption and environmental impacts. For this purpose, the Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) was developed as a suitable methodology to analyse the driving forces of the changes in economic, energy and environmental indicators. The paper presents one of the first Italian studies that apply an energy and environmental extended input–output model, opportunely shaped to the examined context, combined with SDA. In detail, it aims at: (1) investigating the energy use and the air emissions arisen from t…
A Case-Study of Green Roof Monitoring: The Building of Council for Agricultural Research and Economics in Bagheria, (Italy)
2018
The energy saving in building goes on as an important challenge in the policy of Developed Countries. While the issue of energy building efficiency in heating season has deeply been investigated for a long time, the issue of energy building efficiency in cooling season is relatively recent. Moreover, considering the increase of electric consumption for air-conditioning in summer, mainly due to the growing quality of life, the research of technologies for reducing energy building consumption during this season becomes essential. The green roof represents a technology useful to reduce the energy consumption during the cooling season. In this work the authors report the results of a monitoring…
Perceived-Value-driven Optimization of Energy Consumption in Smart Homes
2020
Residential energy consumption has been rising rapidly during the last few decades. Several research efforts have been made to reduce residential energy consumption, including demand response and smart residential environments. However, recent research has shown that these approaches may actually cause an increase in the overall consumption, due to the complex psychological processes that occur when human users interact with these energy management systems. In this article, using an interdisciplinary approach, we introduce a perceived-value driven framework for energy management in smart residential environments that considers how users perceive values of different appliances and how the us…
A Hierarchical Model for Analysing Consumption Patterns in Italy Before and During the Great Recession
2016
The paper aims to explore how the Great Recession of the twenty-first century has impacted on the consumption behaviour of Italian households. Following a hierarchical approach, the study investigates differences in consumption behaviour at both household and regional levels. Using micro data on Italian Household Expenditure for the years 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2012, multilevel and two-step regression models have been estimated. The analysis has been performed for four different consumption categories: food, housing, work-related and leisure. The analysis reveals that the economic crisis led to increasing income elasticity for each category of consumption, especially for food, the most essent…
Green and Greenback
2003
The low-cost hypothesis predicts that the strength of effects of environmental concern on environmental behavior diminishes with increasing behavioral costs. Thus, environmental concern influences environmental behavior primarily in situations and under conditions connected with low costs and little inconvenience for individual actors. In a first step, we develop and specify this hypothesis. Referring to two procedures, we then test it on the basis of an environmental survey of a random sample of 2307 respondents from the German population. The empirical evidence is positive. The low-cost hypothesis is not confined to the area of environmental research. It points to general limits of attit…
Quality of life ranking of Spanish cities: A non-compensatory approach
2021
Abstract Urban areas are hubs of economic activity, but also consumption centers where a high quality of life may attract human capital and increase prospects of economic growth and well-being. We rank 73 Spanish cities on the basis of 35 individual indicators covering three basic facets of quality of life: socio-economic performance, general livability conditions, and residents' health status. We reject the conventional approach of compensability among different quality of life dimensions in favor of a Condorcet-inspired non-compensability approach. We obtain three partial composite indicators, one for each of the aforementioned dimensions, and a global indicator that synthesizes the three…
Alcohol consumption in Spain and its economic cost: A mathematical modeling approach
2010
In this paper, a mathematical model for alcohol consumption in Spanish population is proposed. Its parameters are estimated by fitting the model to real data from Spanish Ministry of Health. Predictions about the future behavior of the alcohol consumption in Spain are presented using this model. Results are applied to estimate the economic costs (sanitary and non-sanitary) assumed by Spanish society that are derived from this consumption.
Risky consumption of alcohol in nursing students
2019
BACKGROUND: abuse of alcohol among students is a problem that has not to be undervalued because it can damage mental and global health and, as a consequence, it can negatively influence the academic and training performance roping at the end on patients’ health. Our study focused particularly on nursing students of the University of Palermo of the three years of course with the aim to estimate the prevalence of risky alcohol consumption and to analyze the associated factors. MethODs: in april 2019 a questionnaire was administered to all the nursing students of University of Palermo of the three years of course, accompanied by informed consent. Multivariable logistic regression was performed…
Consumption and Production Patterns for Agricultural Sustainable Development
2021
Agriculture has always played a key role in feeding the world population and ensuring the development of sustainable food production systems. However, over recent decades, many farmers have over-exploited agricultural ecosystems in order to increase their production and incomes. This has caused a reduction or degradation of environmental sustainability, reducing farmers’ profitability and leading many producers to abandon rural areas. Moreover, currently, over 820 million people in the world are hungry, while a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, with negative implications on economic, social and environmental conditions at a global level, highlighting how different production, ed…