This paper presents a multi-criteria economics, environment, and thermodynamics assessment for a combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) system consist of a heat recovery system, a small ...absorption chiller, a 5kW PEMFC stack, gas compressor, and a humidifier. This study presents an improved version of a new optimization technique called improved emperor penguin optimization (IEPO) algorithm for optimizing the system efficiency. After simulations, the system is analyzed in terms of energy and exergy efficiencies, annual cost, and pollutant emission reduction. Simulation results declare low operating temperature develop GHG emission reduction, high relative humidity, pressure of inlet gases, and system exergy performance. The results of the IEPO algorithm are the compared with the standard EPO and also NSGA-II as a widely used optimization algorithm for showing the superiority of the algorithm.
As the sustainable development movement gains traction, many initiatives have aimed to provide support with sustainability assessment methods using a loosely structured set of indicators, resulting ...in an explosive development of such indicators. Several reviews have sought to gain a clearer understanding of this “indicator zoo” by comparing assessment methods. However, most reviews covered few methods and mainly focused on describing and evaluating them to help users select the one that suited their needs. What is still lacking is an in-depth analysis of the conceptual and methodological framework behind the sustainability assessment methods in order to provide recommendations for assessment method developers and identify research gaps. To fill this gap, we conducted a conceptual and methodological review on a sample of 262 studies covering the worldwide agricultural sector between 1993 and 2019. Because the subject is so vast and due to disciplinary barriers, we restricted this review to studies with an environmental dimension but did not set any geographic limitations (the studies cover both temperate and tropical zones). The initial results show a need for clarity on terminology. Methods should also explicitly specify the purpose, target users and temporal scale. Additional efforts must be made in selecting indicators on the causal chain at emission level or those that pertain to impacts, such as in life cycle assessment. There are additional research gaps when more than a simple sum of scores is required to aggregate indicators, or when dealing with upscaling or spatialization issues. Dynamic assessment of resilience or robustness with multiple criteria also remains a challenge. Environmental sustainability assessment methods will also need to integrate ecosystem services and emerging environmental issues such as pollution from antibiotics or microplastics. Finally, a similar study on assessment methods should be conducted with a focus on social and economic dimensions.
•We reviewed 262 methods assessing environmental sustainability.•This review was performed thanks to 43 descriptors and 67 themes.•The terminology used is rich as we identified 100 different combination of terms.•Very few methods consider interaction between indicators.•We identified some research gaps like ecosystem services or microplastics.
The environmental risks of traditional waste disposal methods, together with the resource and energy value of waste, had established the foundation for waste-to-energy (WTE) technologies. WTE is ...rarely implemented in developing countries, mostly due to the lack of knowledge and experience under their specific local conditions. The present research investigates the feasibility of WTE strategies in middle income developing countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Multiple waste management scenarios, involving incineration and anaerobic digestion, were evaluated based on energy, economic, and environmental parameters. A multi-criteria assessment was conducted for the Governorate of Kafr El-Sheikh (Egypt); a 3.2-million rural-urban agro-industrial population with socio-economic and demographic features similar to those of the selected MENA countries. The actual waste generation rates and characteristics of Kafr El-Sheikh were measured through a comprehensive field study. It was found that anaerobic digestion with recycling is the optimum strategy for Kafr El-Sheikh, with annual energy potential of 1170-kWh per ton of waste and net economic savings of 6.5 million USD. This optimum waste management scenario was extended to the selected MENA countries to investigate potential benefits of shifting to WTE-based waste management strategies. The total annual energy production was estimated to be 103,000-GWh, which translates to 17% of the total energy consumption. Moreover, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by around 98,500-Gg CO2 annually, which represents around 6.5% of the total annual CO2 footprint generated by the selected countries. Furthermore, the overall economic benefits ranged between −12 and 200 million USD for the selected countries.
•Anaerobic digestion with recycling is the optimum WTE strategy for Kafr El-Sheikh.•WTE strategies can produce up to 1170 KWh per ton of waste for the Kafr El-Sheikh.•Landfill GHG emissions can be reduced by 99% using WTE for Kafr El-Sheikh.•WTE strategies provide financial benefits for most of the selected MENA countries.•Optimum WTE strategy covers 17% of energy demand for selected MENA countries.
This paper presents the performance and multi-criteria assessment of a combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) system applied to a residence under electric-following and thermal-following ...strategies. The CCHP system mainly consists of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), LiBr absorption chiller, and water tank or lithium battery to simultaneously provide electric power, cooling power, thermal power, and domestic hot water for the household. The output power, system efficiency, exergy analysis, economic analysis, annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, and thermoelectric ratio of the CCHP system under the two control strategies above are investigated. The results show that the SOFC–CCHP system with the hot water tank controlled by the electric-following strategy in summer and winter improves system and exergy efficiencies as well as reduces daily cost and annual GHG reduction with decreased economic performance. System efficiency is between 67.1% and 96.8%, exergy efficiency stabilizes at approximately 42%, the annual GHG reduction is between 1.356 t and 4.71 t, the daily cost is 9 $ and the thermoelectric ratio is between 0.132 and 1.819 in summer. System efficiency is between 86.5% and 88%, exergy efficiency stabilizes at approximately 43%, the annual GHG reduction is between 0.886 t and 7.742 t, the daily cost is 7.31 $ and the thermoelectric ratio is between 0.091 and 1.62 in winter.
•A SOFC–CCHP system with energy storage device is proposed.•The electric-following and thermal-following strategies are studied.•The thermal, economic and environmental performance of the system are performed.•The daily system cost is 6.117 USD in summer and 1.35 USD in winter.
Abstract
A significant proportion of Southern Ocean seafloor biodiversity is thought to be associated with fragile, slow growing, long-lived, and habitat-forming taxa. Minimizing adverse impact to ...these so-called vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) is a conservation priority that is often managed by relying on fisheries bycatch data, combined with threshold-based conservation rules in which all “indicator” taxa are considered equal. However, VME indicator taxa have different vulnerabilities to fishing disturbance and more consideration needs to be given to how these taxa may combine to form components of ecosystems with high conservation value. Here, we propose a multi-criteria approach to VME identification that explicitly considers multiple taxa identified from imagery as VME indicator morpho-taxa. Each VME indicator morpho-taxon is weighted differently, based on its vulnerability to fishing. Using the “Antarctic Seafloor Annotated Imagery Database”, where 53 VME indicator morpho-taxa were manually annotated generating >40000 annotations, we computed an index of cumulative abundance and overall richness and assigned it to spatial grid cells. Our analysis quantifies the assemblage-level vulnerability to fishing, and allows assemblages to be characterized, e.g. as highly diverse or highly abundant. The implementation of this quantitative method is intended to enhance VME identification and contextualize the bycatch events.
Globally, rainfed regions encounter several constraints that limit crop production. Poor and degraded soils resulting from soil erosion are one among them. We hypothesized that a diversified cropping ...system in rainfed drylands can reduce soil erosion and improve soil health and crop productivity and meet the food security needs of rainfed farmers.
The study aimed to assess potential diversified cropping systems in terms of reducing soil erosion and water and nutrient losses, and increasing crop and systems productivity and profitability.
The study was carried out at the Gungal Research Farm of ICAR Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (17o05’ N, 78o39’E) from 2015 to 16 to 2020–21. The study investigated seven diversified cropping systems (treatments): sorghum + pigeon pea- hedge lucerne, sorghum + pigeonpea- guinea grass, castor- hedge lucerne, castor- guinea grass, sorghum- fodder clusterbean- fodder cowpea- fodder horsegram, sole sorghum, and sole pigeonpea. Multi-criteria assessments were conducted to understand trade-offs related to soil nutrients and their losses, and productivity and profitability of various annual and perennial based systems.
Among the various systems evaluated, sole sorghum was the most sensitive to soil erosion, leading to highest amount of nutrient loss in all years (87.5, 47.3, and 9.8 kg N, P and K ha−1 in 2019–20, 102.4, 58.2, 14.2 kg N, P and K ha−1 in 2020–21, and 78.6, 39.2, 6.16 kg N, P and K ha−1 in 2021–22). The perennial based cropping systems with more diverse crops and greater land cover that included sorghum + pigeonpea - guinea grass and sorghum + pigeon pea - hedge lucerne had the lowest amount of nutrient loss. The least cumulative monetary value of nutrient loss was in sorghum + pigeon pea - hedge lucerne (137.11 US$) followed by sorghum + pigeonpea - guinea grass (145.33 US$). The systems with diverse crops reduced runoff and soil erosion, improved soil health, and increased crop and systems productivity and profitability. The trade-offs analysis using the radar graphs also showed lower soil loss and improved soil heath in diversified perennial based cropping systems, resulting in increase in net income to US$1981 for sorghum + pigeonpea - hedge lucerne compared to US$909 for sole sorghum.
Perennial based cropping systems with diverse crops can be an effective strategy to reduce soil erosion and improve soil health, and increase crop and systems productivity in rainfed areas of south India. These results have implications to other countries globally with rainfed climate and dryland farming.
Display omitted
•Potential of diversified cropping system to reduce soil erosion and water and nutrient losses in rainfed environments has not been fully explored•The study was to identify systems that reduce soil water and nutrient losses and increase productivity and profitability in rainfed environments•Multi-criteria assessments helped to understand trade-offs related to soil erosion and nutrients loss, and crop productivity and profitability•Perennial fodder with cereal and pulse intercrops reduced soil and nutrient losses, and increased crop productivity and profitability•Sorghum+pigeonpea-hedge lucerne and sorghum+pigeonpea-guinea grass have potential to reduce soil erosion and increase profitability
Europe's agriculture is highly specialized, dependent on external inputs and responsible for negative environmental impacts. Legume crops are grown on less than 2% of the arable land and more than ...70% of the demand for protein feed supplement is imported from overseas. The integration of legumes into cropping systems has the potential to contribute to the transition to a more resource-efficient agriculture and reduce the current protein deficit. Legume crops influence the production of other crops in the rotation making it difficult to evaluate the overall agronomic effects of legumes in cropping systems. A novel assessment framework was developed and applied in five case study regions across Europe with the objective of evaluating trade-offs between economic and environmental effects of integrating legumes into cropping systems. Legumes resulted in positive and negative impacts when integrated into various cropping systems across the case studies. On average, cropping systems with legumes reduced nitrous oxide emissions by 18 and 33% and N fertilizer use by 24 and 38% in arable and forage systems, respectively, compared to systems without legumes. Nitrate leaching was similar with and without legumes in arable systems and reduced by 22% in forage systems. However, grain legumes reduced gross margins in 3 of 5 regions. Forage legumes increased gross margins in 3 of 3 regions. Among the cropping systems with legumes, systems could be identified that had both relatively high economic returns and positive environmental impacts. Thus, increasing the cultivation of legumes could lead to economic competitive cropping systems and positive environmental impacts, but achieving this aim requires the development of novel management strategies informed by the involvement of advisors and farmers.
Sustainability assessment of agricultural systems is frequently hampered by data availability. Elicitation of expert opinions combined with multi-criteria assessment (MCA) could be a useful approach ...for sustainability assessments in data-scarce situations. To our knowledge, the validity of expert opinion used to score sustainability performance of agricultural systems, however, has not been addressed. Also, robustness of the overall outcome of MCA to uncertainty about scores obtained from expert elicitation and weights used to aggregate scores is generally not addressed. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the validity of expert opinion, and to evaluate the robustness of the overall MCA outcome to uncertainty about scores and weights. The case study considers three soybean agricultural systems in Latin America: conventional agricultural system, with either genetically modified (GM) or non-genetically modified (non-GM) soybeans, and organic agricultural system. The validation was carried out by comparing the sustainability scores of experts with values from scientific studies. The robustness of the overall outcome of the MCA to uncertainty about scores and weights was assessed using Monte Carlo simulation. The comparison of expert opinion with reviewed studies showed that expert opinions are a potential alternative to extensive data-rich methods. The validity of expert opinions can be increased by considering a larger group of experts, with a high level of knowledge about agricultural systems and sustainability issues. With regard to robustness, the overall outcome of the MCA showed higher variation for organic soybean agricultural systems compared with GM and non-GM, in both Brazil and Argentina.
•Evaluate the validity of expert opinion.•Robustness of the of MCA outcomes to uncertainty•Expert opinions as alternative to extensive data-rich methods•Higher variation for organic soybean agricultural systems
The article presents a multicriteria assessment framework for the qualitative estimation of regional potentials to provide ecosystem services as a prerequisite to support regional development ...planning. We applied this approach to a model region in Saxony, Eastern Germany. For the estimation of the potentials of the model region to provide ecosystem services, we used a modified approach compared to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). We then employed a benefit transfer and a purely expert driven approach to assess contribution of the land cover classes in our model region to the provision of ecosystem services. In a subsequent step, the services in our set were combined to ecosystem services groups that were designed together with regional actors, while considering their ideas, concerns and experiences in regional decision making. The latter was analyzed in a weighting experiment, in which different weighting approaches were tested. Based upon this, we analyzed the performance of the model region to provide ecosystem services and generated ecosystem services distribution maps. We could show that the different data gathering methods “benefit transfer” and “expert-based assessment” have a considerable impact on the evaluation outcomes.
The results of our study show that the combination of selected services and land cover data can contribute to regional planning by communicating the effect of land cover change on ecosystem services groups, especially when applied as an evaluation basis in the tool Pimp Your Landscape (PYL). The approach supports also the assessment of the performance of a region to provide ecosystem services and the comparison of regions towards this aspect. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our approach that are related to coarse land cover data, lacking knowledge on the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale, and the difficulty to make relevant the ecosystem services concept in regional planning processes.
•A multi-criteria assessment study on PEMFC based CCHP system is conducted.•A three dimension Pareto solution set is obtained using NSGA-Ⅱ.•A comparison of system performances before and after ...optimization is performed.
This paper presents a multi-criteria assessment (including thermodynamics, economics and environment) study on 5 kW PEMFC based residential combined cooling, heating and power system (CCHP). The system is mainly composed of a 5 kW PEMFC stack, a heat recovery system, a small absorption chiller and auxiliary component (including gas compressor and humidifier), which can provide electric power, space heating/cooling and hot water for apartment simultaneously. The thermodynamic model of the CCHP system is partially validated. The system performances, including energy and exergy efficiencies, annual cost and pollutant emission reduction, are evaluated in a parametric analysis method. Moreover, aiming at improving the evaluation indexes, the system is optimized using evolution algorithm, and three dimensional (3D) Pareto solutions and optimal operating parameter set are obtained. The results indicate that low operating temperature, high relative humidity and pressure of inlet gases are helpful for improving system exergy efficiency and GHG emission reduction. The optimized system exergy efficiency, annual cost and GHG emission reduction at Final Optimal Point (FOP) are 39.9%, 29337.3$ and 1.82 ×107 g, respectively. Comparing with un-optimized system, the system working at optimal parameters shows better performances in both exergy efficiency and GHG emission reduction besides a sacrifice in economic cost.
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