Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Direct and Indirect Solar Water Disinfection Processes in Developing Countries

In July 2010, the UN General Assembly recognized the universal human right to sufficient water for health and sanitation (UN…, 2010). The reliable disinfection of this water plays a critical role in public health (Carter and Miller, 2005), and this study investigates the use of four ultraviolet (UV) disinfection methods for use in international development and disaster relief. The study focuses on the life cycle impacts of four direct and indirect solar ultraviolet disinfection systems. Direct solar disinfection refers to exposure of water to solar radiation, while indirect solar disinfection collects solar energy and uses this to power a UV lamp disinfection reactor. These four systems were compared to chlorine disinfection and automobile distribution as baseline methods. Existing literature was used to define a life cycle functional unit for each system, which quantified the material use, infrastructure required, and life cycle of the components of each system. The impact of each system was then defined in the Life Cycle Analysis software SimaPro. Analyses compared the use of each technology at “community, school, small group, and family” scales. Due to the significant impact that end-of-use of a system can have on rural communities, an end-of-life analysis was conducted in addition to the quantitative life cycle analysis. Life cycle analysis shows that both direct and indirect UV disinfection methods vary dramatically over several categories of impact assessment. End of life analysis and this variation highlight the extremely complicated process of designing the appropriate disinfection system for use in developing countries

The role of urban agriculture in food-energy-water nexus policies: Insights from Europe and the U.S

The growth of urban agriculture (UA) has raised the awareness of city officials and civil society organizations of its potential effects on food systems. This has led to various policies to regulate and support UA. This research characterizes existing food, energy and water (FEW nexus) policies based on policy data from five case study cities in Europe and the U.S. (Dortmund, Gorz´ow Wielkopolski, London, Nantes, and New York City) to analyze their relationships to UA, and to identify policy types that support resource-efficient UA. The paper presents the results of an analysis of 78 policy documents related to UA and the FEW nexus, and the results of a Q-sort ranking by UA policy experts on the effectiveness of 16 generalized UA policies in promoting resource-efficient UA. The number, type, and degree of support for nexus policies vary among the five case studies. The results show that the majority of policies (36) are implemented at the local scale, that few policies (19) incorporate all elements of the nexus, yet many nexus policies include UA indirectly. Regulations are more prevalent and are considered more effective at ensuring resource-efficient UA than incentives or awareness-raising policies. The study offers guidance to policy makers who want to improve resource use in future UA pointing at the increasing importance of local food policies

Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture

Urban agriculture (UA) is a widely proposed strategy to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable. Until now, we have lacked a comprehensive assessment of the environmental performance of UA relative to conventional agriculture, and results from earlier studies have been mixed. This is the first large-scale study to resolve this uncertainty across cities and types of UA, employing citizen science at 73 UA sites in Europe and the United States to compare UA products to food from conventional farms. Results reveal that the carbon footprint of food from UA is six times greater than conventional agriculture (420 gCO2e versus 70 gCO2e per serving). However, some UA crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. These exceptions suggest that UA practitioners can reduce their climate impacts by cultivating crops that are typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted, maintaining UA sites for many years, and leveraging circularity (waste as inputs)

Global Service-Learning: A Systematic Review of Principles and Practices

Related dataset is at https://doi.org/10.7302/wazb-wk46 and also listed in the dc.relation field of the full item record.Global service-learning brings students, instructors, and communities together to support learning and community development across borders. In global service-learning, practitioners act at the intersection of two fields: service-learning and international development. Critical scholarship in all service-learning and international development has highlighted the tensions inherent in defining and tracking “success” in community development. In response, service-learning and international development have turned considerable attention to documenting project characteristics, also known as best practices or success factors, that support equitable, sustainable community development. This article presents a systematic synthesis of these fields’ best practices in the context of global service-learning. The authors propose 18 guiding principles for project design to support practitioners in creating and maintaining justice-oriented, stakeholder-driven projects. The authors compare these principles to emerging best practices in global service-learning and assess the contribution of service-learning and international development research to informing the future of the field.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171267/1/Hawes et al_2021_Global Service-Learning.pdfSEL

Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study

There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 urban agriculture sites, representing three types of spaces (urban farms, collective gardens, individual gardens), in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and United States). We answered three key questions about urban agriculture with this unprecedented dataset: (1) What are its land, water, nutrient, and energy demands? (2) How productive is it relative to conventional agriculture and across types of farms? and (3) What are its contributions to local biodiversity? We found that participant farms used dozens of inputs, most of which were organic (e.g., manure for fertilizers). Farms required on average 71.6 L of irrigation water, 5.5 L of compost, and 0.53 m2 of land per kilogram of harvested food. Irrigation was lower in individual gardens and higher in sites using drip irrigation. While extremely variable, yields at well-managed urban farms can exceed those of conventional counterparts. Although farm type did not predict yield, our cluster analysis demonstrated that individually managed leisure gardens had lower yields than other farms and gardens. Farms in our sample contributed significantly to local biodiversity, with an average of 20 different crops per farm not including ornamental plants. Aside from clarifying important trends in resource use at urban farms using a robust and open dataset, this study also raises numerous questions about how crop selection and growing practices influence the environmental impacts of growing food in cities. We conclude with a research agenda to tackle these and other pressing questions on resource use at urban farms

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The role of competition in structuring primate communities under different productivity regimes in the Amazon

The factors responsible for the formation of Amazonian primate communities are not well understood. Here we investigated the influence of interspecific competition in the assembly of these communities, specifically whether they follow an assembly rule known as "favored states". According to this rule, interspecific competition influences final species composition, resulting in functional groups that are equally represented in the community.We compiled presence-absence data for primate species at 39 Amazonian sites in Brazil, contrasting two regions with distinct productivity regimes: the eutrophic Juruá River basin and the oligotrophic Negro River basin. We tested two hypotheses: that interspecific competition is a mechanism that influences the structure of Amazonian primate communities, and that competition has had a greater influence on the structure of primate communities in regions with low productivity, where resources are more limited. We used null models to test the statistical significance of the results, and found a non-random pattern compatible with the favored states rule in the two regions. Our findings suggest that interspecific competition is an important force driving primate community assembly regardless of productivity regimes

The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015