A European research roadmap for optimizing societal impact of big data on environment and energy efficiency

We present a roadmap to guide European research efforts towards a socially responsible big data economy that maximizes the positive impact of big data in environment and energy efficiency. The goal of the roadmap is to allow stakeholders and the big data community to identify and meet big data challenges, and to proceed with a shared understanding of the societal impact, positive and negative externalities, and concrete problems worth investigating. It builds upon a case study focused on the impact of big data practices in the context of Earth Observation that reveals both positive and negative effects in the areas of economy, society and ethics, legal frameworks and political issues. The roadmap identifies European technical and non-technical priorities in research and innovation to be addressed in the upcoming five years in order to deliver societal impact, develop skills and contribute to standardization.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent

The magnitude of the food waste problem is difficult to comprehend. The U.S. spends $218 billion a year -- 1.3% of GDP -- growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never eaten. The causes of food waste are diverse, ranging from crops that never get harvested, to food left on overfilled plates, to near-expired milk and stale bread. ReFED is a coalition of over 30 business, nonprofit, foundation, and government leaders committed to building a different future, where food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling are recognized as an untapped opportunity to create jobs, alleviate hunger, and protect the environment -- all while stimulating a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity. ReFED developed A Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste as a data-driven guide to collectively take action to reduce food waste at scale nationwide.This Roadmap report is a guide and a call to action for us to work together to solve this problem. Businesses can save money for themselves and their customers. Policymakers can unleash a new wave of local job creation. Foundations can take a major step in addressing environmental issues and hunger. And innovators across all sectors can launch new products, services, and business models. There will be no losers, only winners, as food finds its way to its highest and best use

Behind the definition of Industry 5.0: A systematic review of technologies, principles, components, and values

This study addresses the emerging concept of Industry 5.0, which aims to tackle societal concerns associated with the ongoing digital industrial transformation. However, there is still a lack of consensus on the definition and scope of Industry 5.0, as well as limited understanding of its technological components, design principles, and intended values. To bridge these knowledge gaps, the study conducts a content-centric review of relevant literature and synthesizes evidence to develop an architectural design for Industry 5.0. The findings reveal that Industry 5.0 represents the future of industrial transformation, offering potential solutions to socio-economic and environmental issues that were inadequately addressed or exacerbated by Industry 4.0. The study provides managers, industrialists, and policymakers with a comprehensive overview of Industry 5.0, including its technological constituents, design principles, and smart components, emphasizing the importance of stakeholder involvement and integration for effective governance of digital industrial transformation within this framework

Sustainable use and production of energy in the 21st century

It is foreseen that oil and gas will continue to be the key energy sources in the 21st century. Therefore, it is important that oil and gas be produced in a sustainable way during the next decades. This requires technology development to ensure that the environmental impact and pollution from these activities are minimal. The following aspects are being highlighted in this paper: • Development of projects with the minimum of impact on the environment and problems for local populations. • Sustainable drilling without the use of oil-based mud, and collection of all drilling waste during offshore drilling operations in the most environmentally sensitive areas. • Treatment of produced water, sand and minerals from the well stream to avoid pollution. • Limitation of flaring to be performed only when required for safety reasons. • Continuous checking of pipelines to ensure that gas pipelines are run within their actual pressure capacity and that oil pipelines are not leaking into rivers and lakes. • Provision of sufficient storage capacity for gas to ensure timely delivery of gas during high demand peaks. • Injection of CO2 into sealed underground formations where large quantities are produced, such as at LNG factories. • Optimization of production from existing fields to avoid huge amounts of oil and gas being left in place, following a ‘hit and run’ recovery plan. Furthermore, all primary energy sources need to be converted into end-user energy services known as mechanical work, electricity, heating and cooling. In the process of conversion, only a portion of the primary energy is transformed into the new form, while the rest remains unaltered and is lost. The various forms of energy services produced represent different values or qualities, e.g. heat holds an energy quality ranging from 0 and upwards, depending on the temperature difference which is utilized, as defined by the second law of thermodynamics. Energy efficiency in this context may also be defined as the ratio between energy quality output and input. Practically, all fossil fuels are converted into energy services via combustion and heat, i.e. the conversion efficiency is solely determined by temperatures, meaning that high-energy efficiency can only be obtained at large temperature differences, such as in power generation, while ordinary domestic heating will yield a very low efficiency. Given that some 30–40 % of all fossil fuels today are used for domestic heating, representing an end-user energy quality of (say) 1/10 of what is obtained in modern power generation, there is a large potential globally for energy efficiency improvements, not to mention the associated emission reductions. The obvious solution is to pay more attention to the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. to shift from direct combustion heating to thermodynamic principles, e.g. by the use of electrical-driven heat pumps and/or combined heat and power as another alternative. The objectives of this paper are to highlight how energy production could become more effective, thus leading to a reduction in pollution to land, sea and atmosphere and also to identify how energy production should be carried out to minimize the polluting effects. The goal is to provide a reminder that much can be gained with respect to the reduction of pollution by focusing on cleaner energy production

ARIES crowns two decades of particle accelerators infrastructure development in Europe

On 2-3 May 2022 ARIES – Accelerator Research and Innovation for European Science and Society held its last annual conference in CERN summarizing 6 year long effort on the smart development of particle accelerator infrastructures in Europe. The whole series of Integrating Activities on accelerator infrastructures started in 2003 with preparations of CARE, then followed by EuCARD, TIARA, EuCARD2 and culminating with ARIES

Editing Team: Markus Fiedler

and contributions of the FIA community on the important research topics that should be addressed for the Framework Programme 8 research programmes broadly grouped around three main concerns; economic and business interests; societal interests and challenges; technical disruptions and capabilities. The contents of this roadmap originate with the community of researchers working on all aspects of the Future Internet and meet to share and discuss ideas through the Future Internet Assembly through an open consultation of research projects who participate in FIA. This roadmap is primarily concerned with identifying research that can be carried out in the second half of this decade and which will have an impact in 2020 and beyond. By ‘impact ’ we mean will result in products, services, systems, capabilities, that come to market and are available and deployed in that timeframe The approach adopted in this report is to integrate contributions across the entire space of future Internet research with the aim of bringing out the vision for how and where the Internet will make a significant difference in the future and identifying the broad challenges and gaps, and identifying the solutions and research needs in the future. In this report we have summarised and grouped ideas with the aim of identifying the strong themes and consistent challenges that emerge looking acros

A Step-by-Step Process towards an Evolutionary Policy Encouraging the Adoption of Sustainable Business Models

The increasing awareness on environmental issues and their implications for society and economy, has led policymakers to rethink the legislative and financial measures supporting companies to innovate their business. As a result, companies are encouraged to integrate corporate sustainability (CS) into their value creation. Different from the past approaches, the current policy making process has been inspired by a multi-value creation system, aimed to deeply analyze the present situation, and identify the bottlenecks to design further steps to be taken. In this context, regional authorities cover a pivotal role in financing the pre-competitive phase of innovative and sustainable business models (SBMs). A survey was launched in the Emilia Romagna Region (ERR), analyzing the main factors contributing to maximizing CS. This paper investigates supply chain, welfare, environmental management as well as planning, control and communication strategy together with ecological footprints such as materials, energy, water, plastics, and waste ecological footprints. It gives a twofold contribution: first, it sets the stage for the construction of a theoretical model representing an SBM, and second, it gives a practical contribution by supporting the public administration decision-making in adopting a breakthrough roadmap facilitating the value transfer from industry to society