Circular Economy in Construction and Demolition Waste Management in the Western Balkans: A Sustainability Assessment Framework

Population growth, consumerism and linear (take-make-dispose) economy models have been piling up waste for decades. The construction industry is also based primarily on linear economy models, but the good news is that most of the waste can be re-used or recycled. So far, numerous models for managing construction and demolition waste in a sustainable way have been developed, but only a few models have included circular economy approaches. The main objective of this study is to propose an integrated framework for the sustainability assessment of CDW management. Apart from the economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability, this model also includes circular economy principles. The proposed framework is based on the integration of existing methods: bottom-up materials stock approximation; cost–benefit analysis for criteria calculation; and scenario and multi-criteria decision-making analysis for sustainability. It is suggested that the European average recovery rates should be used for future scenario development. With higher re-use and recycling rates, the potential for the circularity of the recovered waste grows. In an effort to increase circularity in the region, particular attention was devoted to customize the framework and examine its potential for use in the Western Balkan countries. The framework may also be useful in countries with immature construction and demolition waste management.

Virtual Reality in Healthcare

Over the past few years, the rapid development of virtual reality has led to the technology finding its way into the professional sector in addition to the gaming market. It plays a particularly important role in medical applications by providing a virtual environment to enable therapy, rehabilitation, and serving as an educational platform. The chapter provides an overview of the applications of virtual reality in medicine about some of the most important areas. Both scenario development and application validation methods are presented, as well as their impact on the end user. Finally, the technological potential and future development of VR applications used for improving medical service delivery are summarized and briefly discussed.

Stress factor human activities

Activities of future humans can influence the safety of a closed repository. The German safety requirements for a final repository for high-level radioactive waste (EndlSiAnfV, 2020) therefore stipulate that developments induced by future human activities which may become relevant for the safety of the repository system must be taken into account when optimising the repository system and verifying its robustness. The focus here is on inadvertent human intrusion into the repository. Developments that can be induced by present human activities serve as reference developments. Dealing with future human activities is challenging. The uncertainties about anthropogenic developments taking place in the 1 million-year assessment period are overwhelming and can hardly be reduced. Moreover, knowledge about human activities in the future cannot be empirically verified, so that it becomes difficult to differentiate between knowledge and mere opinion (Grunwald, 2007, p. 57). Developments in future human activities are the subject of futures research. In the interdisciplinary experiment “Stress factor human activities”, it was therefore investigated whether findings can be derived from futurology sources that might be useful for optimising the repository system and verifying its robustness. Based on potential impacts on the sealed repository, drivers and trends, future narratives, findings and ideas from technical literature and science fiction as well as experiences in the field of radioactive waste management, 25 scenarios of future human activities that may influence the safety of a repository were derived. The spectrum of scenarios ranges from “drift into failure” in uses of the geological subsurface to attacks targeting the repository. It includes biological, chemical and physical impacts on the repository. In addition to direct impacts, those that occur slowly and possibly unnoticed are also addressed. From today's point of view, climate change and the endeavour to open up new reserves of raw materials and energy are important drivers. The distinction between intended and unintended activities is often not clear-cut. The experiment confirms that scenario development is ridden with prerequisites and is necessarily interdisciplinary. Different methodological approaches have to be combined, prerequisites and assumptions have to be clearly identified. Due to the limited time horizon of futures research, it is necessary to continually adapt and update scenarios of future human activities in the sense of a “learning process” with new findings and developments. Although many details remain speculative, scenarios provide a differentiated picture of human activities that may influence the safety of the final repository from the current perspective. Patterns are emerging that indicate how human activities could be incorporated into the optimisation of a repository and the verification of its robustness. The results of the interdisciplinary study “Stress factor human activities” therefore lead to the conclusion that futures research can contribute to optimising the long-term safety of a final repository (Eckhardt, 2021).

Phenological Water Balance Applications for Trend Analyses and Risk Management

The overarching goal of this work is to develop and demonstrate methods that support effective agro-pastoral risk management in a changing climate. Disaster mitigation strategies, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), emphasize the need to address underlying causes of disaster risk and to prevent the emergence of new risks. Such assessments can be difficult, because they require transforming changes in meteorological outcomes into sector-specific impact. While it is common to examine trends in seasonal precipitation and precipitation extremes, it is much less common to study how these trends interact with crop and pasture water needs. Here, we show that the Water Requirement (WR) component of the widely used Water Requirement Satisfaction Index (WRSI) can be used to enhance the interpretation of precipitation changes. The WR helps answer a key question: was the amount of rainfall received in a given season enough to satisfy a crop or pasture's water needs? Our first results section focuses on analyzing spatial patterns of climate change. We show how WR values can be used to translate east African rainfall declines into estimates of crop and rangeland water deficits. We also show that increases in WR, during recent droughts, has intensified aridity in arid regions. In addition, using the PWB, we also show that precipitation increases in humid areas of western east Africa have been producing increasingly frequent excessive rainfall seasons. The second portion of our paper focuses on assessing temporal outcomes for a fixed location (Kenya) to support drought-management scenario development. Kenyan rainfall is decreasing and population is increasing. How can we translate this data into actionable information? The United Nations and World Meteorological Organization advise nations to proactively plan for agro-hydrologic shocks by setting aside sufficient grain and financial resources to help buffer inevitable low-crop production years. We show how precipitation, WR, crop statistics, and population data can be used to help guide 1-in-10 and 1-in-25-year low crop yield scenarios, which could be used to guide Kenya's drought management planning and development. The first and second research components share a common objective: using the PWB to translate rainfall data into more actionable information that can inform disaster risk management and development planning.

Before the Next COP: How to Stop Missing our Environmental Policy Targets

While the scientific community has focused on documenting environmental degradation and developing scenarios that help identify the operational margins for system Earth, less attention has been given to the mental models of decision-makers that underpin environmental policies. We suggest that global efforts to stop deforestation and biodiversity loss are failing in part due to a critical blind spot in the analysis—human agency. To address this weakness, we propose to formulate mental models and translate them into strategy games. This will increase the representation of agency in scenario development and create spaces for deliberation between different worldviews. We claim that personal transformation can be achieved through transparent democratic dialogues that identify, challenge, and respond to the human and social limitations inherent to decision-making and we present empirical examples that validate that claim. Their transformation through gaming gives decision-makers access to the experience of consciousness: “what is it like being a stakeholder?”. Such experience will help to break free of established norms in science and political processes.