Electrification of High-Mileage Mobility Services in Cities and at Airports

High-mileage vehicles serving airports offer significant potential for the electrification of transportation, in ways that enhance the affordability and sustainability of mobility for people and electric vehicle infrastructure development. As one example, by mid-2018, transportation network company (TNC) electric vehicles (EVs) in California—as a high-mileage mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) vehicle platform—was estimated to represent 30% of total non-Tesla EV charging demand, despite being only 0.5% of EVs in the State, and having sixty times higher levels of charging energy demand relative to the other EVs. This chapter explores the potential importance of this phenomena, the emergence of urban electric mobility developments and the co-benefits for economic, environment and equity. Through focus on the synergies of electrification with shared-use vehicles and trips, and with mobility options that include higher mileage, utilization, and occupancy, this chapter identifies emerging concepts that will have potential for impacting adoption rates, management, modeling and control for urban electric mobility systems. More specifically, this chapter explores emerging trends at and adaptations for airports. City airports, as critical hubs for TNC trip demand, and engines of regional economic growth, may be a critical locale for siting fast-charging infrastructure and planning new urban electric mobility operations across many metropolitan areas and cities of the United States and globally

Sustainable and Resilient Water and Energy Futures: From New Ethics and Choices to Urban Nexus Strategies

A safe, secure and affordable water future—for life, health, economy—are foundational outcomes from a new form of ethics for water stewardship and energy management. Current business as usual in water and energy systems have not led to sustainable, healthy nor resilient pathways for urban and rural communities alike. Today, an estimated 400 million people live in cities with significant water shortages. This is while 25% of water is currently lost before even used in urban areas (up to 60% in some cities) due to aging infrastructure. In addition, on average, only 10% of wastewater is treated before returning to water bodies in developing countries. By 2040, more than 66% of the world’s populations could suffer from severe water shortages; and by 2050, an 80% increase in urban water demand (over current levels) may result in one billion city dwellers and 36% (one in three) of cities expected to face water crises. A crisis is often a catalyst for innovation and this chapter is a call to cities to enable strategic responses—moving away from legacy ‘siloed’ infrastructures, over-allocated water resources and emerging ethical dilemmas to integrated water- and energy-related urban nexus strategies

A Call to Cities: Run Out of Water or Create Resilience and Abundance?

New management choices, with new approaches to urbanization and integrated water-energy-food management, are emerging as critical to combat water stress. Urban strategies and tactics are explored in this chapter with a focus on scaling effective solutions and approaches. This includes a focus on small, modular, and integrated water-energy-food hubs; off-grid and localized “circular economy” services that are affordable, accessible, and reliable; blended finance for new technologies, infrastructure and business models, strategic plans, and policies; and urban, behavioral, and decision sciences-informed decisions and new public-private-research-driven partnerships and processes. There are two key messages: first, business as usual could lead to “running out” of water where it’s needed most—in cities and for agricultural and industrial production. Second, “innovators” and “early adopters” of market-based and data-driven efforts can help scale solutions led by people and communities investing in new ways to integrate urban water, energy, and food systems. The chapter concludes with discussion on a new, proactive “maturity” model, enabling integrated urban infrastructure systems, governance, and cross-sector innovation. This includes market-based and data-driven responses that first focus on improving quality of life, sustainability, and resilience of communities, bringing valued services via water-energy-food nexus decisions

A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world’s importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity

Exploring the nexus of infrastructures, environment, and health in Indian cities: Integrating multiple infrastructures and social factors with health risks

The overarching goal of this thesis is to explore and assess infrastructure-environment-health interactions in Indian cities, addressing social factors such as wealth and literacy, as well as the provision of multiple infrastructures. Five main studies are conducted. First, exploration of Delhi all-cause mortality data and survey of local experts on associations between infrastructures, environment, and health outcomes. Key findings include: a) that 50% of deaths in Delhi are reported with cause not classified (demonstrating the need for bottom-up study to supplement hospital data) and b) that ~19% of classified deaths by cause in Delhi, India could be related to infrastructure or infrastructure-related environmental factors. Second, review of epidemiology studies relating health outcomes to infrastructure and pollution exposure in Indian and Asian cities is conducted to help identify initial evidence and gaps for infrastructure-related health effects and quantification of differential risk based on social factors (e.g. low socio-economic status (SES)). Third, top-down analyses using national survey of under age-five mortality rates (U5MR) by multiple infrastructure conditions are studied while addressing confounding social factors. A key finding is that the relative risk for under-five mortality rates are 860% higher in Urban India for those lacking multiple basic infrastructure provisions relative to improved conditions for low SES condition and limited literacy households. These analyses demonstrates limited literacy household sensitivity and importance of considering multiple infrastructures together over single infrastructure improvements. Fourth, bottom-up comparative community study helps characterize infrastructure, environment, extreme weather conditions and local sustainability priorities. A key finding was that households deprived of infrastructure provisions would prioritize that first over pollution or extreme weather conditions. In addition, both low SES communities studied were different in their coverage of all infrastructures except cooking fuels. In the high SES area, infrastructure conditions were ranked as a highest priority (e.g. drainage) with pollution and climate-related extreme weather events still higher priorities than low SES areas, which selected water supply, parks and open space, and drainage as highest priorities. Multiple dimensions of access to healthcare conditions in the same neighborhoods were explored next with findings indicating the two low SES areas to have similar travel costs to reach care and different abilities to pay for care. The high SES area also had higher accessibility to care yet with quality of care less acceptable relative to low SES areas that had issues with wait times, affordability, and access- suggesting future study should address such factors and effects on health outcomes. Finally, data availability, needs, and challenges are explored for computing health benefits of multiple infrastructure interventions, while also identifying preliminary intervention scenarios and who may benefit more or less by age, gender, and SES. These efforts offer a preliminary approach to helping prioritize future decision-making in Asian cities by demonstrating initial methods that can be useful for modeling risks and interactions between infrastructure provisions, environment, and health