Principles and criteria for assessing urban energy resilience: A literature review

AbstractBetween 60% and 80% of global energy is consumed in urban areas and given the projected increase in world׳s urban population, this share is expected to further increase in the future. Continuity of energy supply in cities is affected by climate change and a growing array of other threats such as cyber attacks, terrorism, technical deficiencies, and market volatility. Determined efforts, acknowledging the interactions and interlinkages between energy and other sectors, are needed to avoid adverse consequences of disruption in energy supply. Resilience thinking is an approach to management of socio-ecological systems that aims to develop an integrated framework for bringing together the (often) fragmented, diverse research on disaster risk management. The literature on urban resilience is immense and still growing. This paper reviews literature related to energy resilience to develop a conceptual framework for assessing urban energy resilience, identify planning and design criteria that can be used for assessing urban energy resilience, and examine the relationship of these criteria with the underlying components of the conceptual framework. In the conceptual framework, it is proposed that in order to be resilient, urban energy system needs to be capable of “planning and preparing for”, “absorbing”, “recovering from”, and “adapting” to any adverse events that may happen in the future. Integrating these four abilities into the system would enable it to continuously address “availability”, “accessibility”, “affordability”, and “acceptability” as the four sustainability-related dimensions of energy. The paper explains different resilience principles associated with these abilities and sustainability dimensions. Also, different planning and design criteria were extracted from the literature and categorized into five themes: infrastructure; resources; land use, urban geometry and morphology; governance; and socio-demographic aspects and human behavior. Examination of the relationship of these criteria with the underlying components of the conceptual framework highlighted the complexity and multi-faceted nature of energy resilience. Exploration of the relevance of the identified criteria to climate change mitigation and adaptation revealed that most of the identified criteria can provide both mitigation and adaptation benefits

Cyber Security Politics

This book examines new and challenging political aspects of cyber security and presents it as an issue defined by socio-technological uncertainty and political fragmentation. Structured along two broad themes and providing empirical examples for how socio-technical changes and political responses interact, the first part of the book looks at the current use of cyber space in conflictual settings, while the second focuses on political responses by state and non-state actors in an environment defined by uncertainties. Within this, it highlights four key debates that encapsulate the complexities and paradoxes of cyber security politics from a Western perspective – how much political influence states can achieve via cyber operations and what context factors condition the (limited) strategic utility of such operations; the role of emerging digital technologies and how the dynamics of the tech innovation process reinforce the fragmentation of the governance space; how states attempt to uphold stability in cyberspace and, more generally, in their strategic relations; and how the shared responsibility of state, economy, and society for cyber security continues to be re-negotiated in an increasingly trans-sectoral and transnational governance space. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber security, global governance, technology studies, and international relations

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Transitioning to Good Health and Well-Being

At this purpose characterization, production, effectiveness, safety and use of natural fibers, block copolymeric nanoparticles and food packaging will be briefly described and discussed

Cyber Security Politics

This book examines new and challenging political aspects of cyber security and presents it as an issue defined by socio-technological uncertainty and political fragmentation. Structured along two broad themes and providing empirical examples for how socio-technical changes and political responses interact, the first part of the book looks at the current use of cyber space in conflictual settings, while the second focuses on political responses by state and non-state actors in an environment defined by uncertainties. Within this, it highlights four key debates that encapsulate the complexities and paradoxes of cyber security politics from a Western perspective – how much political influence states can achieve via cyber operations and what context factors condition the (limited) strategic utility of such operations; the role of emerging digital technologies and how the dynamics of the tech innovation process reinforce the fragmentation of the governance space; how states attempt to uphold stability in cyberspace and, more generally, in their strategic relations; and how the shared responsibility of state, economy, and society for cyber security continues to be re-negotiated in an increasingly trans-sectoral and transnational governance space. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber security, global governance, technology studies, and international relations

Railway Research

This book focuses on selected research problems of contemporary railways. The first chapter is devoted to the prediction of railways development in the nearest future. The second chapter discusses safety and security problems in general, precisely from the system point of view. In the third chapter, both the general approach and a particular case study of a critical incident with regard to railway safety are presented. In the fourth chapter, the question of railway infrastructure studies is presented, which is devoted to track superstructure. In the fifth chapter, the modern system for the technical condition monitoring of railway tracks is discussed. The compact on-board sensing device is presented. The last chapter focuses on modeling railway vehicle dynamics using numerical simulation, where the dynamical models are exploited

Enhancing Safety: the Challenge of Foresight

We live in a world where advancement in technology coupled with human’s creative and innovative mind has led to the design of safer and better performing infrastructures (nuclear power plants, chemical process plants, high speed trains, spaceplanes, etc.), which are necessary for modern society. However, due to the interconnected socio-economic and technological landscape that is rapidly evolving, safety continues to have many new challenges (known unknowns, unknown unknowns) that add onto changed variants of the old challenges (e.g. modified knowns). Additionally, governance and legislation can be slow to catch up with this dynamic pace of change. At times, overregulation can occur, resulting in a significant resource investment towards compliance for existing infrastructure operators or for aspiring start-ups that would like to enter the market, but end up struggling or even abandoning the sector. Inspired by this background, the European Safety and Reliability Data Association’s Foresight in Safety Project Group prepared the 53rd ESReDA seminar with a purpose to launch an open dialogue with stakeholders in the safety arena. Thus, by providing an open forum where experiences in foresight in safety approaches from different sectors could be shared, cross-fertilisation of ideas, such as how foresight could be mainstreamed into safety practice in a more consistent manner, could be discussed. The project group will build on this rich compendium of experiences in its future endeavours.JRC.E.7-Knowledge for Security and Migratio