Promoting sustainable construction: European and British networks at the knowledge-policy interface

The responsibility of builders, developers, planners, architects and policy-makers to promote more sustainable urban environments and buildings is consistently prioritized in nascent European, national and local planning strategies. Yet what counts as ‘sustainable construction’ varies by issue, sector and policy mandate. Proponents of sustainable construction might promote technological shifts in terms of materials, energy use and waste reduction, or they might encourage cultural and behavioural adaptations to how society views, uses and plans its built environment. This paper examines this problematic bifurcation of sustainable construction into two exclusive agendas: the construction technology agenda and the urban sustainability planning agenda, each constituted by distinct policy and sector-based networks. It is argued that the orientation to detail in the construction technology agenda operates at odds with the holistic process orientation of the broader urban sustainability agenda, thus complicating the effective translation or co-generation of sustainable construction knowledge between the two networks. The lack of integration between these two sets of networks should be cause for concern, yet appears to be largely overlooked in mainstream policy processes

Granular technologies to accelerate decarbonization

Of the 45 energy technologies deemed critical by the International Energy Agency for meeting global climate targets, 38 need to improve substan- tially in cost and performance while accelerating deployment over the next decades.Low-carbon technological solutions vary in scale from solar panels, e-bikes, and smart thermostats to carbon capture and storage, light rail transit, and whole-building retrofits. We make three contributions to long-standing debates on the appropriate scale of technological responses in the energy system. First, we focus on the specific needs of accelerated low-carbon transformation: rapid technology deployment, escaping lock-in, and social legitimacy. Second, we synthesize evidence on energy end-use technologies in homes, transport, and industry, as well as electricity generation and energy supply. Third, we go beyond technical and economic considerations to include innovation, investment, deployment, social, and equity criteria for assessing the relative advantage of alternative technologies as a function of their scale. We suggest numerous potential advantages of more-granular energy technologies for accelerating progress toward climate targets, as well as the conditions on which such progress depends

The Weight of Economic Growth and Urbanization on Electricity Demand in UAE

This study aims to explore the relationship between economic growth, urbanization, financial development and electricity consumption in case of United Arab Emirates. The study covers the time period of 1975-2011. We have applied the ARDL bounds testing to examine long run relationship between the variables in the presence of structural breaks. The VECM Granger causality is applied to investigate the direction of causal relationship between the variables. Our empirical exercise found cointegration between the series in case of United Arab Emirates. Further, results reveal that inverted U-shaped relationship is found between economic growth and electricity consumption i.e. economic growth raises electricity consumption initially and declines it after a threshold level of income per capita. Financial development adds in electricity consumption. The relationship between urbanization and electricity consumption is also inverted U-shaped. This implies that urbanization increases electricity consumption initially and after a threshold level of urbanization, electricity demand falls. The causality analysis finds feedback hypothesis between economic growth and electricity consumption i.e. economic growth and electricity consumption are interdependent. The bidirectional causality is found between financial development and electricity consumption. Economic growth and urbanization Granger cause each other. The feedback hypothesis is also found between urbanization and financial development, financial development and economic growth and same is true for electricity consumption and urbanization.

Modelling Dynamic Conditional Correlations in WTI Oil Forward and Futures Returns

This paper estimates the dynamic conditional correlations in the returns on WTI oil one-month forward prices, and one-, three-, six-, and twelve-month futures prices, using recently developed multivariate conditional volatility models. The dynamic correlations enable a determination of whether the forward and various futures returns are substitutes or complements, which are crucial for deciding whether or not to hedge against unforeseen circumstances. The models are estimated using daily data on WTI oil forward and futures prices, and their associated returns, from 3 January 1985 to 16 January 2004. At the univariate level, the estimates are statistically significant, with the occasional asymmetric effect in which negative shocks have a greater impact on volatility than positive shocks. In all cases, both the short- and long-run persistence of shocks are statistically significant. Among the five returns, there are ten conditional correlations, with the highest estimate of constant conditional correlation being 0.975 between the volatilities of the three-month and six-month futures returns, and the lowest being 0.656 between the volatilities of the forward and twelve-month futures returns. The dynamic conditional correlations can vary dramatically, being negative in four of ten cases and being close to zero in another five cases. Only in the case of the dynamic volatilities of the three-month and six-month futures returns is the range of variation relatively narrow, namely (0.832, 0.996). Thus, in general, the dynamic volatilities in the returns in the WTI oil forward and future prices can be either independent or interdependent over time.Constant conditional correlations, Dynamic conditional correlations, Multivariate GARCH models, Forward prices and returns, Futures prices and returns, WTI oil prices

Towards real-world complexity: an introduction to multiplex networks

Many real-world complex systems are best modeled by multiplex networks of interacting network layers. The multiplex network study is one of the newest and hottest themes in the statistical physics of complex networks. Pioneering studies have proven that the multiplexity has broad impact on the system's structure and function. In this Colloquium paper, we present an organized review of the growing body of current literature on multiplex networks by categorizing existing studies broadly according to the type of layer coupling in the problem. Major recent advances in the field are surveyed and some outstanding open challenges and future perspectives will be proposed.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure