•A study of workforce characteristics associated to environmental sustainability in US.•We compare the skills and human capital of green and non-green occupations.•Green jobs exhibit higher levels of ...education, work experience and job training.•Green jobs use higher levels of cognitive and interpersonal skills.
This paper elaborates an empirical analysis of labour force characteristics that emerge as a response to the growing importance of environmental sustainability. Using data on the United States we compare green and non-green occupations to detect differences in terms of skill content and of human capital. Our empirical profiling reveals that green jobs use more intensively high-level cognitive and interpersonal skills compared to non-green jobs. Green occupations also exhibit higher levels of standard dimensions of human capital such as formal education, work experience and on-the-job training. While preliminary, our exploratory exercise seeks to call attention to an underdeveloped theme, namely the labour market implications associated with the transition towards green growth.
The paper investigates whether and through which channels green public procurement (GPP) and the skills composition stimulate local environmental innovation capacity. We use detailed data sources on ...green patents and procurement expenditure at the level of US Commuting Zones for the period 2001–2011. We also check for the moderating effects of local labor market composition in the relation between GPP and green innovation capacity. Lastly, we test for differential effects of GPP on different classes of green technologies (GTs). The main finding is that GPP is an important driver for the local generation of GTs. High availability of abstract skills in the local workforce also drives the generation of GTs and magnifies the positive effect of GPP. When separated by type of GTs, we find evidence of a more pronounced effect of GPP on the local generation of mitigation, relative to adaptation, technologies.
Integral equation formulations are a competitive strategy in computational electromagnetics but, lamentably, are often plagued by ill-conditioning and by related numerical instabilities that can ...jeopardize their effectiveness in several real case scenarios. Luckily, however, it is possible to leverage effective preconditioning and regularization strategies that can cure a large majority of these problems. Not surprisingly, integral equation preconditioning is currently a quite active field of research. To give the reader a propositive overview of the state of the art, this paper will review and discuss the main advancements in the field of integral equation preconditioning in electromagnetics summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of each technique. The contribution will guide the reader through the choices of the right preconditioner for a given application scenario. This will be complemented by new analyses and discussions which will provide a further and more intuitive understanding of the ill-conditioning of the electric field (EFIE), magnetic field (MFIE), and combined field integral equation (CFIE) and of the associated remedies.
The paper focuses on the nexus between climate change and armed conflicts with an empirical analysis based on a panel of 2653 georeferenced cells for the African continent between 1990 and 2016. Our ...econometric approach addresses unobservable heterogeneity in predicting the probability of violent events and the persistency of conflicting behaviour over time. The proposed strategy also accounts for both changes in climatic conditions and spatial dynamics. The two main findings carry policy-relevant implications. First, changes in climatic conditions influence the probability of conflicts over large spatial ranges, thus suggesting that the design of adaptation policies to reduce climate vulnerability should account for multiple spatial interrelations. Second, the persistency of violence calls for planning adaptation strategies for climate resilience jointly designed with measures in support of peacekeeping.
Green Technology Fitness Sbardella, Angelica; Perruchas, François; Napolitano, Lorenzo ...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland),
10/2018, Volume:
20, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The present study provides an analysis of empirical regularities in the development of green technology. We use patent data to examine inventions that can be traced to the environment-related ...catalogue (ENV-Tech) covering technologies in environmental management, water-related adaptation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, we employ the Economic Fitness-Complexity (EFC) approach to assess their development and geographical distribution across countries between 1970 and 2010. This allows us to identify three typologies of countries: leaders, laggards and catch-up. While, as expected, there is a direct relationship between GDP per capita and invention capacity, we also document the remarkable growth of East Asia countries that started from the periphery and rapidly established themselves as key actors. This geographical pattern coincides with higher integration across domains so that, while the relative development of individual areas may have peaked, there is now demand for greater interoperability across green technologies.
This paper inquires into the organizational and spatial dynamics of scientific research by focussing on the evolution of epistemic networks in a specific area of medical practice, glaucoma. As ...researchers and practitioners struggle to come to grips with this elusive disease, the medical scientific community exhibits a great degree of variety in the ecology of organisations and the associated scientific pathways. Data on scientific publications over a thirty-year period affords a clearer understanding of the changing configurations of a clinical-scientific community, and speaks to the adaptive nature of problem-solving in medicine.
•The paper elaborates an empirical analysis of the relationships between ICTs, digital skills and green diversification in European regions.•The econometric analysis is on a panel of 142 regions ...(NUTS-1 and NUTS-2), in 22 European countries, for the period 2006-2013.•The level of e-skills in the workforce is a positive predictor of regions’ ability to specialise in new technological domains, and this effect is stronger for green than non-green specializations.•Also, e-skills negatively moderate the effect of relatedness on technological diversification. This negative moderation holds for both green and non-green diversification.•The study brings together two core dimensions of the current EU agenda – digitalisation and transition towards sustainability – and, in so doing, opens up new avenues for the debate of Smart Specialization Policies.
Prior research identifies relatedness as a key driver of new specializations in the domain of green technologies. The present paper extends the evolutionary economic geography framework by focussing on digital literacy. Specifically, we argue that workforce skills associated with the use and development of ICT technologies are an important, if understudied, determinant of regional diversification into new green technologies. Accordingly, we analyse their relationships with relatedness and green diversification using panel data on 142 European regions for the period 2006 – 2013. We find that e-skills endowment is a positive predictor of regions’ ability to specialise in new technological domains, and especially for green specializations. Further, e-skills negatively moderate the effect of relatedness on technological diversification. These results call attention to the potential of digitalisation in the context of the transition towards a greener economy.
This article focuses on the institutional adjustments that facilitate the routinization of technological opportunities. We propose a life-cycle approach that accounts for the emergence, development, ...and transformation of new knowledge with special emphasis on the role of adaptive educational and training systems for the diffusion of skills that complement new technology. The article reconciles two empirical phenomena associated with radical technological breakthroughs: changes in the skill content within occupations and the process of knowledge systematization underpinning the adaptation of education and training. We claim that systematization is a crucial, but largely overlooked, element in the study of skill mismatches, inequalities, and successful takeoff of new technologies. web URL: http://icc.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/6/1393.abstract
The article presents results of using remote sensing images and machine learning to map and assess land potential based on time-series of potential Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active ...Radiation (FAPAR) composites. Land potential here refers to the potential vegetation productivity in the hypothetical absence of short-term anthropogenic influence, such as intensive agriculture and urbanization. Knowledge on this ecological land potential could support the assessment of levels of land degradation as well as restoration potentials. Monthly aggregated FAPAR time-series of three percentiles (0.05, 0.50 and 0.95 probability) at 250 m spatial resolution were derived from the 8-day GLASS FAPAR V6 product for 2000-2021 and used to determine long-term trends in FAPAR, as well as to model potential FAPAR in the absence of human pressure. CCa 3 million training points sampled from 12,500 locations across the globe were overlaid with 68 bio-physical variables representing climate, terrain, landform, and vegetation cover, as well as several variables representing human pressure including: population count, cropland intensity, nightlights and a human footprint index. The training points were used in an ensemble machine learning model that stacks three base learners (extremely randomized trees, gradient descended trees and artificial neural network) using a linear regressor as meta-learner. The potential FAPAR was then projected by removing the impact of urbanization and intensive agriculture in the covariate layers. The results of strict cross-validation show that the global distribution of FAPAR can be explained with an R
of 0.89, with the most important covariates being growing season length, forest cover indicator and annual precipitation. From this model, a global map of potential monthly FAPAR for the recent year (2021) was produced, and used to predict gaps in actual
. potential FAPAR. The produced global maps of actual
. potential FAPAR and long-term trends were each spatially matched with stable and transitional land cover classes. The assessment showed large negative FAPAR gaps (actual lower than potential) for classes: urban, needle-leave deciduous trees, and flooded shrub or herbaceous cover, while strong negative FAPAR trends were found for classes: urban, sparse vegetation and rainfed cropland. On the other hand, classes: irrigated or post-flooded cropland, tree cover mixed leaf type, and broad-leave deciduous showed largely positive trends. The framework allows land managers to assess potential land degradation from two aspects: as an actual declining trend in observed FAPAR and as a difference between actual and potential vegetation FAPAR.
•The paper explores the connection between climate change-induced disasters, inequality and vulnerability.•We study a panel of 149 countries from 1992 to 2018.•Natural disasters affect more countries ...with higher income inequality.•Inequality increases future disaster vulnerability.•A vicious cycle keeps some countries stuck in a disasters-inequality trap.
The purpose of the present paper is to disentangle the mechanisms that connect climate change-induced disasters, inequality and vulnerability by accounting for both directions of causality. We do so by means of a simultaneous equations approach on a panel of 149 countries from 1992 to 2018. The empirical analysis reveals that countries with higher levels of income inequality suffer greater damages when hit by a natural disaster. At the same time, inequality is found to increase the number of people affected by disasters. Our analysis discloses the existence of a vicious cycle that keeps some countries stuck in a disasters-inequality trap.
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