An Overview of Environmental Policies for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change and Application of Multilevel Regression Analysis to Investigate the CO2 Emissions over the Years of 1970 to 2018 in All Brazilian States

Background: Brazil, one of the largest greenhouse gas emitting countries in the world, emitted approximately 2 billion gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2018. This data is practically the same recorded in the previous year, suggesting that the country’s trajectory of CO2 emissions is stabilized. Methods: This study presents an overview of environmental protection and climate change mitigation policies adopted in Brazil, as well as makes use the multilevel regression modeling technique to investigate the relationship between economic activities variables in relation to CO2 emissions over the years of 1970 to 2018 in all Brazilian states. Results: The results show that the CO2 emissions in the states have the same behavior as the timeline of the change in land use. Conclusions: The public policies and actions by society and the private sector were fundamental to the reduction verified from the year of 2004 that followed until 2010, both in CO2 emissions and in the change in land use and forests. As of this year, there has been a trend towards stability in CO2 emissions. Another important characteristic is that even with a drop in the number of deforestation, the production variables continued to grow, which shows that there may be an increase in production activities, while there is a reduction in deforestation and in CO2 emissions.

Element-splitting-invariant local-length-scale calculation in B-Spline meshes for complex geometries

Variational multiscale methods and their precursors, stabilized methods, which are sometimes supplemented with discontinuity-capturing (DC) methods, have been playing their core-method role in flow computations increasingly with isogeometric discretization. The stabilization and DC parameters embedded in most of these methods play a significant role. The parameters almost always involve some local-length-scale expressions, most of the time in specific directions, such as the direction of the flow or solution gradient. Until recently, local-length-scale expressions originally intended for finite element discretization were being used also for isogeometric discretization. The direction-dependent expressions introduced in [Y. Otoguro, K. Takizawa and T. E. Tezduyar, Element length calculation in B-spline meshes for complex geometries, Comput. Mech. 65 (2020) 1085–1103, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00466-019-01809-w ] target B-spline meshes for complex geometries. The key stages of deriving these expressions are mapping the direction vector from the physical element to the parent element in the parametric space, accounting for the discretization spacing along each of the parametric coordinates, and mapping what has been obtained back to the physical element. The expressions are based on a preferred parametric space and a transformation tensor that represents the relationship between the integration and preferred parametric spaces. Element splitting may be a part of the computational method in a variety of cases, including computations with T-spline discretization and immersed boundary and extended finite element methods and their isogeometric versions. We do not want the element splitting to influence the actual discretization, which is represented by the control or nodal points. Therefore, the local length scale should be invariant with respect to element splitting. In element definition, invariance of the local length scale is a crucial requirement, because, unlike the element definition choices based on implementation convenience or computational efficiency, it influences the solution. We provide a proof, in the context of B-spline meshes, for the element-splitting invariance of the local-length-scale expressions introduced in the above reference.

Element length calculation in B-spline meshes for complex geometries

Variational multiscale methods, and their precursors, stabilized methods, have been playing a core-method role in semi-discrete and space–time (ST) flow computations for decades. These methods are sometimes supplemented with discontinuity-capturing (DC) methods. The stabilization and DC parameters embedded in most of these methods play a significant role. Various well-performing stabilization and DC parameters have been introduced in both the semi-discrete and ST contexts. The parameters almost always involve some element length expressions, most of the time in specific directions, such as the direction of the flow or solution gradient. Until recently, stabilization and DC parameters originally intended for finite element discretization were being used also for isogeometric discretization. Recently, element lengths and stabilization and DC parameters targeting isogeometric discretization were introduced for ST and semi-discrete computations, and these expressions are also applicable to finite element discretization. The key stages of deriving the direction-dependent element length expression were mapping the direction vector from the physical (ST or space-only) element to the parent element in the parametric space, accounting for the discretization spacing along each of the parametric coordinates, and mapping what has been obtained back to the physical element. Targeting B-spline meshes for complex geometries, we introduce here new element length expressions, which are outcome of a clear and convincing derivation and more suitable for element-level evaluation. The new expressions are based on a preferred parametric space and a transformation tensor that represents the relationship between the integration and preferred parametric spaces. The test computations we present for advection-dominated cases, including 2D computations with complex meshes, show that the proposed element length expressions result in good solution profiles.

A node-numbering-invariant directional length scale for simplex elements

Variational multiscale methods, and their precursors, stabilized methods, have been very popular in flow computations in the past several decades. Stabilization parameters embedded in most of these methods play a significant role. The parameters almost always involve element length scales, most of the time in specific directions, such as the direction of the flow or solution gradient. We require the length scales, including the directional length scales, to have node-numbering invariance for all element types, including simplex elements. We propose a length scale expression meeting that requirement. We analytically evaluate the expression in the context of simplex elements and compared to one of the most widely used length scale expressions and show the levels of noninvariance avoided.

Camellia: A Rapid Development Framework for Finite Element Solvers

The discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin (DPG) methodology of Demkowicz and Gopalakrishnan guarantees the optimality of the finite element solution in a user-controllable energy norm, and provides several features supporting adaptive schemes. The approach provides stability automatically; there is no need for carefully derived numerical fluxes (as in DG schemes) or for mesh-dependent stabilization terms (as in stabilized methods). In this paper, we focus on features of Camellia that facilitate implementation of new DPG formulations; chief among these is a rich set of features in support of symbolic manipulation, which allow, e.g., bilinear formulations in the code to appear much as they would on paper. Many of these features are general in the sense that they can also be used in the implementation of other finite element formulations. In fact, because DPG’s requirements are essentially a superset of those of other finite element methods, Camellia provides built-in support for most common methods. We believe, however, that the combination of an essentially “hands-free” finite element methodology as found in DPG with the rapid development features of Camellia are particularly winsome, so we focus on use cases in this class. In addition to the symbolic manipulation features mentioned above, Camellia offers support for one-irregular adaptive meshes in 1D, 2D, 3D, and space-time. It provides a geometric multigrid preconditioner particularly suited for DPG problems, and supports distributed parallel execution using MPI. For its load balancing and distributed data structures, Camellia relies on packages from the Trilinos project, which simplifies interfacing with other computational science packages. Camellia also allows loading of standard mesh formats through an interface with the MOAB package. Camellia includes support for static condensation to eliminate element-interior degrees of freedom locally, usually resulting in substantial reduction of the cost of the global problem. We include a discussion of the variational formulations built into Camellia, with references to those formulations in the literature, as well as an MPI performance study.