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This analysis aims at the investigation of the techno-economic RES potentials and to minimize GHG emissions in the ENTSO-E. The ENTSO-E represents one of the world’s largest economic regions with a GDP of 19,835 billion US dollar (23%) and a primary energy consumption of 29,705 TWh (18%). ENTSO-E is coined with high degrees of fossil energy dependencies (49.9%) from third-party countries and contributes 3,517 Mt CO2eq (9%) to global GHG emissions. The Primary Sources onshore wind, offshore wind, utility-scale PV, and CSP techno-economic potentials are assessed via GIS-based georeferenced spatial analysis. Solar rooftop potentials are calculated based on a per capita approach. The Secondary Sources bioenergy, hydropower, geothermal, and hydrokinetic energy potentials are approximated based on meta-analysis. Primary and Secondary Sources potentials are input into the IES linear optimization model to simulate an energy system with high shares of RES and PTX. It is found that RES-based primary energy production potentials account for 13,492 TWh and energy dependency could be reduced by 6,482 TWh to 20.5%. Compared to the base year 1990, the direct GHG emission reduction amounts to 3,246 Mt CO2eq (70.7%). This reduction does not correspond with the EU reduction target of 80–95%. Hence, RES-based fuel imports, such as synthetic fuels and hydrogen, from third-party countries become necessary, to substitute fossil fuels and reduce domestic emissions. Additional GHG reduction potentials are suspected in the indirect emission sectors agriculture and waste management. In reference to the Sankey methodology, the analysis entails comprehensive energy flow balances for the ENTSO-E 2016 and 2050 energy systems. The ENTSO-E member countries exhibit heterogeneous properties regarding RES potentials, GHG emissions, and energy dependencies, and, hence, must be assessed individually. Integrated energy systems with high shares of RES and PTX represent a promising means to decrease direct energy use and non-energy use emissions as well as energy dependencies significantly.
Accra and Kumasi are the two major cities in Ghana. Spatial urban expansion has been experienced in transforming different non-urban Land Use Land Cover (LULC) types into urban/built-up areas with a potential direct relationship to temperature rise in the cities. Thus, this dissertation aims to establish the relationship between urban spatial expansion and temperature in Accra and Kumasi metropolis. Multi-source datasets such as remote sensing images, different GIS vector layers, reference maps and historical temperature datasets were used for this retrospective study. This research was grouped under three components: environmental science, environmental technology, as well as environmental management and planning. From the environmental science component, LULC maps were produced for different years to assess the trend of temporal change in the various LULC classes in the two metropolises. Remote sensing indices and land surface temperature were retrieved from the remote sensing images to determine their correlations. Temperature time series was analysed by calculating temperature indices and determining temporal trends to reveal changes in air temperature to detect urban warming and its impacts. From the environmental technology, the novel random forest algorithm was utilised to classify the satellite images of both cities since previous works have utilised other traditional classifiers. The satellite imageries were used for point-based estimation of temperature to determine Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) hotspots. For environmental management and planning, spatial urban expansion techniques were utilised to ascertain trends in urban/built-up areas, especially in both cities' sub-metropolitan zones. For prescient purposes, future LULC modelling was implemented to provide insights into the proportions of the various LULC changes in 2025. The analysis identified two salient findings: increased urban/built-up areas at the expense of agricultural and forestlands throughout the study period and the positive correlation between spatial urban expansion and temperature. This indicated warming up of urban temperature in both cities. The major findings in this dissertation provided evidence of how integrated datasets and research techniques can be utilised for LULC changes to determine the relationship between spatial urban expansion and temperature at local scales. Institutions such as metropolitan assemblies and policymakers may adopt the concepts demonstrated in this work to rapidly assess urban environments and investigate the relationship between spatial urban expansion and temperature.
Improvement of flood risk assessment under climate change in Ho Chi Minh City with GIS applications
(2014)
Ho Chi Minh City is the largest city in VN. The city is the most important center of economy, society and culture in the southern region of Vietnam. However, due to characteristics of natural conditions with low topography and borders touch the sea so that since the late 20th century with the rapid economic and urban development there are environmental problems have arisen. One of the problems is flooding issue caused by high tide. With these natural conditions and sea level rise of climate change in the future, Ho Chi Minh City is considered as one of the most affected and damaged cities in the world.
Therefore, many policies have been set out from the national to local levels in Vietnam to prepare for adaptability of impacts and risks of the sea level rise and the climate change. And this has also been considered in Ho Chi Minh City as the development policies of the city authorities have to consider in the context of the sea level rise and the climate change. A number of researches have been conducted to assess the impact of climate change to Ho Chi Minh City in the future. However, these researches are still need to be enhanced further.
The flooding problem is a major issue of the sea level rise in Ho Chi Minh City. And to make a good result, the flood model needs a lot of requirements that ensure fine quality of input data, suitable model and a relied procedure. In the available research, the input data is not really the highest quality in the available context in Ho Chi Minh City. As the flood model is implemented, one of the input data requirements of the model is information detail of elevation in the flooded area. And this is more necessary than in geophysical urban areas such as Ho Chi Minh City. And to assess fully flood risk issues for flooding caused by tidal phenomenon in Ho Chi Minh City, the determination of many characteristics of flood model is very useful for users who need to apply the results of the model for the planning development in Ho Chi Minh City in the future. Besides adopting a uniform environment as GIS for managing all the data of flooding problem and making conditions for the development of decision support systems is very necessary for flood management in the future.
The research has been carried out and its results have been generated on the flood risk assessment associated context of the sea level rise due to climate change with high emissions scenario A1FI in 2030 for the current houses, the population and the land use types. The results have shown a lot of the areas where are inundated in the future with the increasing flooding duration, depth and frequency even though they are not flooded at the current because there are some protective structures. This will be helpful for suggesting a forecast of the development direction to decision makers in Ho Chi Minh City for next time period.
And the last part is the proposal for decision and policy makers, authorities and planners as well. Moreover, the results of this research can be used as the references and the foundations for further researches and so that the problems that Ho Chi Minh City may be encountered due to flood risk caused by climate change to the economic and social aspects of the development in Ho Chi Minh City will encounter. And the problem of adaptation to climate change will be more completed and more thoroughly so that it is to minimize the damage of climate change for the city.
Human influence on the biosphere has transformed natural land cover (LC) into modified LC. Shifting focus from individual species study to large-scale assessment is therefore needed to restore the damaged ecosystem. The hypotheses were: (a) the post-mining landscapes are getting more diverse over time (b) GIS, remote sensing and patch analyst can generate LC information and landscape characterization statistics for assessing habitat diversity and monitoring land cover change (LCC) in a disturbance-dominated area (c) relationship exist between habitat diversity and field based species richness/LCC and environmental conditions/LCC and biodiversity losses. The general aims of this research were (a) to assess the impact of disturbance on LCC and habitat diversity (b) to identify how accurately patterns of habitat diversity, complexity, fragmentation, primary production and LCC can be assessed or predicted with GIS and remotely sensed data. LC maps of 1988, 1991, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2003 were produced from LANDSAT TM images of Schlabendorf Nord and Schlabendorf Süd. These images were used to survey the changing landscape. After classifying the images based on dominant land cover types, the area and perimeter of all patches were defined. Landscape characterization metrics were generated using patch analyst. LCC statistics were estimated for each LC map year. Change detection extension was used to identify changes among vegetation or land cover types into “negative change”, “no change” and “positive change”. DCA ordination technique (CANOCO) was used to study similarity among the distribution of land cover types. Other relevant analysis made include soil pH analysis and climate data evaluation. The outcome of the research shows that the process of LCC takes place at the interface between environmental and human systems. Land cover transformations in most cases in Schlabendorf were as a result of progressive and reversed plant succession. Overall changes in both landscapes showed increased area of pine afforestation, deciduous trees afforestation, lake and mixed grassland with trees. The LCC s were predominantly caused by harvesting of afforested pine, restoration related construction activities or other land cover management practices, reverse succession, low soil pH especially along the path of the mine strip, loss of soil fertility, human decisions and policies. There was increase in habitat richness, heterogeneity, fragmentation, and shape complexity due to decrease in habitat size, increased land use intensity etc. Lower habitat diversity in Schlabendorf Süd was due to the comparatively large landscape area, high patch number and higher habitat richness in most cases which confirms the claim that relationship between habitat diversity and habitat heterogeneity varies according to scale (Tews et al., 2004). Increase in biomass accumulation particularly in Schlabendorf Süd contributed to the exchanges for greenhouse gases between the forest cover, soil and the atmosphere, hence changing the climatic condition on terrestrial ecosystems, biodiversity and LCC. Unlike Schlabendorf Nord, Schlabendorf Süd still undergoes more active reclamation activities resulting in less similarity between the two post-mining landscapes over time. Within a given ecosystem, any change in habitat diversity can change the number of species in the resulting habitats types, in other words habitat diversity can be used to predict the species richness in a given ecosystem. The approach to this work provides a beneficial trade off between expensive ground vegetation or LCC survey and low-priced image processing analysis. It requires less manpower and less time but greatly reliable for assessing LCC, habitat diversity/richness and heterogeneity in large inaccessible areas such as dunes in post-mining landscape.
Ecological Land-Use Planning (ELUP) is the central strategy implemented in Mexico to achieve sustainable development. However, even after more than a decade of experience there are no concrete evaluations to determine how the implemented ELUP-Programmes (ELUPP) have influenced regional development and thus what the consequences on the environment are. In this investigation, some of the key stages of the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) are carried out on the ELUPP Cancun-Tulum, which is considered to be one of the most important land-use programmes in Mexico. Aim of the study: To achieve the SEA key principles, i.e. to identify reasonable alternatives and to improve the ELUPP Cancun-Tulum. Special emphasis is dedicated to the selection of environmental indicators for monitoring and to the supervision of the programme implementation using a GIS-remote sensing approach. Method of investigation: The baseline environment in the Riviera Maya and the ELUPP Cancun-Tulum’s framework are first examined. Next, an identification of alternatives at regional level is effectuated using geographic information systems (GIS). A monitoring scheme is then proposed to supervise the implementation of the ELUPP Cancun-Tulum. The supervision mechanism is based on a pressure-state-response (PSR) indicator framework. Finally, six environmental indicators are examined using GIS-remote sensing techniques. The assessment encompasses the remote sensing interpretation of two Landsat Geocover Mosaics, and the determination of six landscape spatial indices to evaluate extend and pattern of fragmentation of vegetation. Results and technical applicability: A reasonable alternative site location for the development of New Tulum (which is one of the cities included in the ELUPP Cancun-Tulum) was proposed. A monitoring mechanism was suggested to supervise the ELUP implementation, including the identification of 19 environmental indicators. The GIS-remote sensing analysis demonstrated that there has been a reduction in the total area of habitat available and that fragmentation of vegetation increased in the Riviera Maya. The results reported here can be used to improve the ELUPP Cancun-Tulum. In addition, this investigation may be useful to improve other ELUP-Programmes in Mexico.