scholarly journals Leading agritourism facilities along Nearly Zero Energy paths: proposal of an easy-to-use evaluation method

2020 ◽  
Vol 197 ◽  
pp. 02004
Author(s):  
Laura Cirrincione ◽  
Giorgia Peri ◽  
Gianfranco Rizzo ◽  
Gianluca Scaccianoce

The tourist sector, despite the present severe constraints imposed by the sanitary emergence, can be considered as an important component of almost all countries’ economies. In Italy agriturism, in particular, has been experiences a continuously rising trend in recent years. Clearly, such great interest towards these businesses also calls for a deep attention by an energy point of view, in sight of an energy efficiency improvement, hence a lowering of the pressure that such facilities exert to the natural environment. On the other hand, the European Union has been engaged, for a long time, in awarding the tourist accommodations environmental excellence brands, like the EU Ecolabel. Unfortunately, the achievement of such excellence brands requires the capability of managing complex energy and environmental data, which is often not the prerogative of people running such facilities. In order of contributing to overcome this difficulty, and with the aim of helping the addressing of agritourism towards a Nearly Zero Energy path, we propose here a simple approach that does not require the modelling and simulation of the energy behaviour of an agritourism, being essentially based on the application of easy-to-use ARERA (Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy Networks and Environment) datasheets scheme. On purpose, an application of the method, involving two typical Sicilian agritourism, is presented. The obtained results showed the viability of the proposed methodology, although the need of an update and/or replacement of some technical datasheets arose.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Ewa Kaczan-Winiarska

The Austrian government is extremely sceptical about the accession negotiations which are conducted by the European Commission on behalf of the European Union with Turkey and calls for the negotiation process to end. Serious reservations of Vienna have been raised by the current political situation in Turkey under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as by the standards of democracy in Turkey, which differ greatly from European standards. Serious deficiencies in rule of law, freedom of speech and independence of the judiciary, confirmed in the latest European Commission report on Turkey, do not justify, from Vienna’s point of view, the continuation of talks with Ankara on EU membership. In fact, Austria’s scepticism about the European perspective for Turkey has a longer tradition. This was marked previously in 2005 when the accession negotiations began. Until now, Austria’s position has not had enough clout within the European arena. Pragmatic cooperation with Turkey as a strategic partner of the EU, both in the context of the migration crisis and security policy, proved to be a key factor. The question is whether Austria, which took over the EU presidency from 1.7.2018, will be able to more strongly accentuate its reservations about Turkey and even build an alliance of Member States strong enough to block Turkey’s accession process.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Kraler

AbstractAlmost all Member States in the European Union currently make use, or in the past have made use of some form of regularisation of irregular immigrants, although to greatly varying degrees, in different ways and as a rule only reluctantly. A distinct feature of recent regularisations has been the shift towards a humanitarian justification of regularisation measures. In this context, regularisation has become reframed as an issue of the protection of irregular migrants’ human rights. As a result, regularisation has to some extent also been turned from a political tool in managing migration into an issue of international, European and national human rights law. While a human rights framework indeed offers a powerful rationale and at times compelling reasons why states ought to afford a legal status to irregular migrants, I argue that a human rights based approach must always be complemented by pragmatic considerations, as a human rights based justification of regularisation alone will be insufficient to find adequate responses to the changing presence of irregular migrants in the EU, not all of which can invoke human rights based claims to residence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (11) ◽  
pp. 167-173
Author(s):  
Mihail V. Rybin ◽  
◽  
Alexander A. Stepanov ◽  
Nadezhda V. Morozova ◽  
◽  
...  

The article reveals and analyzes conceptual approaches to the formation of strategic directions of energy policy of the European Union and Poland in the first decades of the XXI century. A critical assess-ment is given from the point of view of international cooperation in the field of energy between the Russian Federation, Poland and the EU as a whole and, in particular, European, national and regional programs for the transformation of the fuel and energy sector in the conditions of decarbonization and transition to green energy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jakub Charvát

Modern democratic political systems are hardly conceivable without political representation. This also applies to the European Union, a unique international organisation with a directly elected and fully-fledged assembly representing the EU citizens. Because geography is central to the operation of almost all electoral systems and the European Parliament is the first transnational assembly based on the Member States representation, the paper explores the spatial aspect of the composition of the European Parliament resulting from the 2019 election. The representation in the European Parliament may be degressively proportional, which implies malapportionment of seats across the EU Member States. The paper, thus, seeks to quantify the malapportionment in the 2019 election at both the aggregate level (by the adaption of Loosemore and Hanby´s distortion index) and individual level (advantage ratio and the value of a vote). It concludes malapportionment was just below 14,5% of the total seats in 2019 while the 2019 election did not bring the degressively proportional representation in the European Parliament as required by the Lisbon Treaty.


2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (No. 3) ◽  
pp. 125-133
Author(s):  
A. Kotevska ◽  
D. Dimitrievski ◽  
E. Erjavec

The Republic of Macedonia is in the process of integrating into the European Union (EU) and adjusting its policies through reforms in policy, regulations and institutions. This paper attempts to provide an answer to the question: what would be the impact on the Macedonian livestock, dairy and grain sectors of Macedonia integrating into the EU. In order to forecast the impact of the EU accession, the research uses the partial equilibrium model as a comprehensive tool for modelling the complex nature of the agricultural markets. The model simulation foresees the changes of the modelled sub-sectors in production, net-trade and income. The baseline scenario predicts a positive development for almost all selected commodities, with the exception of the beef sector, which is highly uncompetitive prior to the accession. Three EU accession scenarios foresee positive developments in the beef, lamb and cow’s milk markets, while a negative development is expected in the pig meat and grains markets.  


2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-607
Author(s):  
SABINE M.-L. URBAN ◽  
DARIO VELO

The fast rate of the globalisation process and huge technological changes are leading to increased uncertainty. Risk (considered either as a threat or as an opportunity) is correlated to uncertainty. That means that the socio-economic environment may be considered as ambiguous, and the reaction of players complex, unforeseeable and difficult to handle. In such conditions one looks for simple formulae or tricks to manage the necessary change in human behaviour, institutional structures, production and trade methods. ‘Flexibility’ seems to be a magic keyword – both a performance driver and an expression of freedom. Labour market flexibility is currently the focus of ideological and political debate. This paper aims to clarify some points in the debate, especially in the European Union context. First, we give some brief information about the EU framework with regard to the labour market flexibility and its performance. Second, we try to understand how labour market flexibility is dependent on decisions of enterprises (in search of competitiveness). But this point of view needs to be enlarged to a more systemic approach; flexibility is only one of the socio-economic performance variables. A flexibility paradigm is related to a new political and humanistic project, and is a serious consideration for a number of industrial and financial companies, scientific associations and bodies.


elni Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 28-28
Author(s):  
Nicola Below

The book “Environmental Crime in Europe” by the editors Andrew Farmer, Michael Faure and Grazia Maria Vagliasindi is the second edited volume of the the EU-project “European Union Action to Fight Environmental Crime" (EFFACE). The book is a follow-up to the results of the research strand of EFFACE dealing with actors, instruments and institutions involved in the fight against environmental crime and goes beyond a mere technical implementation study. The aim of this collection is to explore how environmental crime is controlled and environmental criminal law is shaped and implemented within the European Union and its Member States, from a technical and practical point of view. This article reviews the book.


Author(s):  
Robert Krimmer ◽  
Andriana Prentza ◽  
Szymon Mamrot ◽  
Carsten Schmidt

AbstractThe Single Market is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. The idea to transform it into a Digital Single Market (DSM) was outlined several years ago. The EU has started different initiatives to support this transformation process. One of them is the program Horizon 2020 to support the process from a technical point of view. In parallel to this, initiatives were started to set up a sound legal framework for the DSM. The Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) is an outcome of these initiatives. The key aspect of the SDGR is the underlying Once-Only Principle (OOP), outlining that businesses and citizens in contact with public administrations have to provide data only once. “The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP)” is the EU-funded project initiated for research, testing, and implementation of the OOP in Europe. The authors give an overview of the research questions of the different parts of TOOP. Besides that, they introduce the other chapters of this book and what the reader can expect as the content of them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (35) ◽  
pp. 6-20
Author(s):  
Armenia ANDRONICEANU ◽  
Jani KINNUNEN ◽  
Irina GEORGESCU

The use of advanced ICT technologies and the support of new ways of thinking, acting and working in public administration, together with the increased provision of information and interactive services accessible through various channels, is the foundation of eGovernment. In recent years, there has been visible progress in all EU countries in terms of the general framework for e-government strategy, which is based on best practices and methodologies. The aim of our research is to discover the way in which the EU states are situated from the point of view of the digitalization of the administration. For this I used Gaussian models. The main research parameters were: accessibility; transparency, investments in information and communication technologies and investments in infrastructure related to public administrations in EU countries. The results show significant differences between state administrations. We applied Gaussian Mixture Model clustering in order to make an analysis of the national E-government situation in the European Union for 2018. The GMM algorithm estimated six clusters. We find that the first cluster, with Nordic countries, Netherlands and Austria, has the highest values of telecommunication infrastructure, citizens’ access to e-government services and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. At the opposite pole, in cluster 2, Romania and Bulgaria have the lowest values of these three indicators, while their public investment levels are not significantly under EU averages. Our research provides not only an overview of the digitization of administrations, but also what are the main lags that state administrations have to recover in order to reach a digital system integrated into the EU's administrative space.


Author(s):  
Lucia Zeleňáková ◽  
Jana Žiarovská ◽  
Stanislav Kráčmar ◽  
Ladislav Mura ◽  
Dagmar Kozelová ◽  
...  

The aim of the work was to analyze the changes in the epidemiology of salmonellosis and campylobacteriosis diseases in Slovakia over the past 10 years and evaluate them in the context of epidemiological changes comparing to the EU. Salmonellosis (A020) and campylobacteriosis (A045) belong to the diseases with the highest morbidity in Slovakia. For the period 2001–2010 was reported in Slovakia 109 304 salmonellosis cases in human and 3 327 cases of Salmonella carriage. The five-year EU-trend (2005–2009) showed a statistically significant decrease of salmonellosis disease (with a mean reduction of 12% per year). Campylobacteriosis remains a long time the most frequently reported zoonotic disease in humans in Slovakia as well as in EU. For the period of 2001–2010 25 574 campylobacteriosis cases was reported in Slovakia. Most diseases were reported in 2010 with the number 4 591 (84.63 morbidity/100 000 inhabitants). Increase in morbidity is evident since 2003 with an average annual increase of 22%. We focused on more in-depth epidemiological analysis of salmonellosis and campylobacteriosis cases in Slovak Republic in relation to the infection agens and the outbreak of disease transmission mechanism, age and gender, location and seasonality of disease.


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