Urban food consumption and associated water resources: The example of Dutch cities

AbstractFull self-sufficiency in cities is a major concern. Cities import resources for food, water and energy security. They are however key to global sustainability, as they concentrate a rapidly increasing and urbanising population (or number of consumers). In this paper, we analysed the dependency of urban inhabitants on the resource water for food consumption, by means of Dutch cities. We found that in extremely urbanised municipalities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, people eat more meat and cereals and less potatoes than in other Dutch municipalities. Their current water footprint (WF) related to food consumption is therefore higher (3245l/cap/day) than in strongly urbanised cities (3126l/cap/day). Dutch urban citizens who eat too many animal products, crop oils and sugar can reduce their WF (with 29 to 32%) by shifting to a healthier diet. Recommended less meat consumption has the largest impact on the total WF reduction. A shift to a pesco-vegetarian or vegetarian diet would require even less water resources, where the WF can be reduced by 36 to 39% and 40 to 42% respectively. Dutch cities such as Amsterdam have always scored very high in international sustainability rankings for cities, partly due to a long history in integrated (urban) water management in the Netherlands. We argue that such existing rankings only show a certain – undoubtedly very important – part of urban environmental sustainability. To communicate the full picture to citizens, stakeholders and policy makers, indicators on external resource usage need to be employed. The fact that external resource dependency can be altered through changing dietary behaviour should be communicated

Quantum trajectory approach to stochastically-induced quantum interference effects in coherently-driven two-level atoms

Stochastic perturbation of two-level atoms strongly driven by a coherent light field is analyzed by the quantum trajectory method. A new method is developed for calculating the resonance fluorescence spectra from numerical simulations. It is shown that in the case of dominant incoherent perturbation, the stochastic noise can unexpectedly create phase correlation between the neighboring atomic dressed states. This phase correlation is responsible for quantum interference between the related transitions resulting in anomalous modifications of the resonance fluorescence spectra.Comment: paper accepted for publicatio

Estimation of soil adsorption coefficients of organic compounds by HPLC screening using the second generation of the European reference soil set.

The European reference soil set was introduced as common basis for a better comparability of soil sorption data measured within the framework of chemical testing of environmental chemicals. The success of the EUROSOILS, as the set is commonly called, convinced the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre to evaluate the possibility of producing a remake of these unique and new type of reference materials maintaining the principal sorption-controlling properties of the soils. In this paper the recently proposed second generation of the EUROSOILS is used to evaluate a HPLC-screening technique for the estimation of soil adsorption coefficients of organic chemicals. It could be shown that the derived correlations between HPLC capacity factors of the test substances and the respective soil adsorption coefficients resulting from batch experiments with the second version of the EUROSOILS agreed with those derived for the first generation of reference soils at a different occasion

Characterization of the Danube River sediments using the PMF multivariate approach

Chemical composition data for the Danube River and its tributaries sediments were analyzed using positive matrix factorization (PMF). The objective was to identify both natural and anthropogenic sources affecting Danube Basin. During the Joint Danube Survey 2 (JDS2) campaign 148 bottom sediments samples were collected. The following elements were analyzed using the X-ray fluorescence technique: Al, As, Ca, Cd, Cl, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Mn, Na, Ni, P, Pb, S, Si, Ti, V and Zn. Mercury was determined by cold vapour atomic absorption spectrometry. Three factors were obtained considering the whole dataset (Danube and tributaries), identified as: (i) carbonate component characterized by Ca and Mg; (ii) alumino- silicate component dominated by Si and Al content and the presence of some metals attributed to natural processes; (iii) anthropogenic source identified by Hg, S, P and some heavy metals load. To better characterize the role of tributaries, the Danube and tributaries datasets, were also analyzed separately. The same three factor structures were identified in the Danube dataset. For the tributaries, a four-factor source model gave one further factor dominated by S and P, which could be attributed to the use of fertilizers in agriculture

Characterisation of Alpine lake sediments using multivariate statistical techniques

A recent type of receptor modelling technique the Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) has been applied to a geochemical dataset obtained by XRF analysis on sediments from 11 alpine lakes located in Italy. Also, two usual pattern recognition techniques, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Cluster Analysis (CA), were investigated. Four interpretable factors were identified through PMF analysis, in connection with the mineralogical/chemical features of lake sediments in the catchment areas: phosphate and sulphur source, carbonates, silicates and heavy metal-bearing minerals. Also, to properly modify individual uncertainty estimates, a new PMF factor was identified, explaining a possible Pb contamination source