by T V Ramachandra  , Bharath Setturu  , Karthik R. Naik  and Jagadessha B Pai

Received: 29 December 2021;  Published: 22 April 2022;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2202014

Ecologically susceptible zones (ESZs) are endowed with the distinct bio, geo, climatic, hydrological, and ecological integrity that sustain natural resources to support the livelihood of dependent populations. However, globalization and consequent anthropogenic activities have led to the erosion of the natural resource base and enhanced the levels of pollutants, triggering global environmental change, evident from changes in the climate. Alterations in the structure and the ecological integrity of ESZs may lead to [...]

by Joana Sousa

Received: 09 December 2022;  Published: 16 March 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2301025

The present research was part of a cross-sectional project involving children aged 8 to 10 years in Porto, Portugal. The project involved a first research part at primary schools where the health tests and a questionnaire were performed and a second research part concerning environmental conditions. Two groups emerged from the health questionnaire answers: one group that reported “asthma diagnosed by a doctor” and/or “wheezing or whistling in the chest during last 12 months” and another that answered negatively to [...]

by Katie Conlon

Received: 04 September 2023;  Published: 04 January 2024;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2401002

Unsustainable material extraction, use and disposal - the ‘take-make-waste’ model - places communities globally in a state of social inequalities and environmental conflict (the slow violence of polluting the air, water, and soil we all depend). Current waste management practices are designed for efficiency of disposal but do not address increasing waste generation and waste externalities. The present global waste situation is magnified by exponential increases in plastic production; misconceptions of recycling; an [...]

by Faraz Estelaji  , Alireza Naseri  and Rahim Zahedi

Received: 08 October 2022;  Published: 26 December 2022;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2204057

Crisis management assessment and planning include many components. One of the essential elements is the review and analysis of the structure of the existing situation and the performance of Vital services in the face of critical cases. During the occurrence of natural disasters, the issue of crisis management is crucial in order to reduce the damages caused by the crisis. One thing that reduces the damages is the correct and timely access of critical relief centers such as fire departments, emergency, police force, [...]

by Christopher Lavers

Received: 23 November 2022;  Published: 12 June 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2302036

This paper reviews the growing importance of satellite imagery to provide Normalized Difference Vegetative Index (NDVI) maps, relevant to environmental land management assessment, in the context of resource and climate-related conflict based upon our own humanitarian project-related support. Near real-time space-based monitoring benefits land assessment, human rights observers, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), in the presence of unstable regimes or socio-economic upheaval. Access to areas to validate clai [...]

by Lara Gabrielle Garcia  , Luiz Felippe Salemi  , Rafael Mingoti  , Carla Cristina Cassiano  , Aline Aparecida Fransozi  , Vinicius Guidotti de Faria  , Carlos Alberto Vettorazzi  , Walter Paula Lima  and Silvio Frosini de Barros Ferraz

Received: 07 October 2022;  Published: 21 February 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2301022

Eucalyptus forests are expanding worldwide and concerns exist about their impact on water resources. There is a lack of information about the hydrological effects of spatial harvest patterns in terms of their effects on streamflow. In this paper, we examined harvest amount and hillslope position effects on flow indices (Q70; Q50 and Q10) and water yield in a small catchment covered with a fast-growing Eucalyptus plantation. To do that, we used the Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis (GSSHA), a physical-b [...]

by Kristin Drexler  and Ed Boles

Received: 02 March 2024;  Published: 25 July 2024;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2403017

Watershed health and integrity are essential to human and ecosystem health and well-being. New River watershed communities in northern Belize, Central America are vulnerable to annual ‘cultural eutrophication’ - natural eutrophication exacerbated by human activity. Human-caused pollution from agriculture, septic effluent, and industrial drainage, in combination with extended drought and the slow flow of New River, has caused more frequent and prolonged periods of eutrophication. In this qualitative study, 42 New Ri [...]

by Joana Sousa

Received: 15 May 2023;  Published: 15 January 2024;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2401003

The climate change and the social crisis launched the basis for the policy discussion about future trajectories of development and sustainability. Innovation policies are expected to promote the transformation of complex socio-technical systems and call for fundamentally different societal production and consumption patterns. This is strictly associated with energy systems and energy policies. A policy framework was conceptualized considering three levels approach: the policy shape at the micro level, the policy co [...]

by Mieczyslaw Szyszkowicz  and Nicholas de Angelis

Received: 18 September 2021;  Published: 11 February 2022;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2201005

Air pollution affects various aspects of human health. Here, the associations between the number of emergency department visits for circulatory and respiratory problems and ambient air pollution in Toronto, Canada, in the period between April 2004 and December 2015 were studied. The health data were linked with urban air pollution data and weather factors. The conditional Poisson regression models were built for 18 strata (sex, age group, season), 8 exposure factors (air pollutants, indexes), and their 15 lags (0-1 [...]

by Vladimir N. Bashkin

Received: 05 September 2022;  Published: 13 October 2022;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2204040

This research aims at one of the most important economic and environmental problems - the elimination of the consequences in case of emergency spills while cleaning petroleum products. The objectives of the study include the development and production of new biological products and biosorbents based on carbon-oxidizing microorganisms, testing the developed technologies for environmental risk management to eliminate the consequences of emergency petroleum product spills, creating an algorithm for conducting prelimin [...]

by Gary W. Shugart  and Tessa G. Nania

Received: 09 July 2021;  Published: 29 September 2021;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2103023

On the Washington and Oregon coast of the NE Pacific Ocean from 2008-2015, we found that juveniles represented 83% of Northern Fulmars that were beached. In comparison to older birds, juveniles averaged more mass and pieces of plastic in stomachs. This reflected relatively larger plastic loads in the cranial stomach section, the proventriculus, which we found was associated with relatively large accumulations in the caudal stomach section, the ventriculus. We estimate that the proventriculus could retain almost 10 [...]

by Vladimir Bashkin  , Andrey Alekseev  , Boris Levin  and Evgenia Mescherova

Received: 17 October 2022;  Published: 28 January 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2301012

The review article discusses the application of biogeochemical technologies aimed at restoring biogeochemical cycles in agroecosystems, primarily in the microbial link regulating CO2 flows. The factors of management this microbial link when applying mineral and organic fertilizers are shown. The processes of mineralization of soil organic matter and methods of controlling soil's conjugate carbon- and nitrogen-mineralizing ability are considered. The changes in the productivity of agricultural ecosystems under c [...]

by Agegnehu Kitanbo Yoshe

Received: 03 September 2024;  Published: 06 January 2025;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2501003

Managing water resources offers crucial information about the availability of water supplied from catchments into water bodies, which plays a vital role in water resource engineering. However, due to changes in the global climate, hydrological modeling of river catchments is critically crucial for socio-economic development and livelihoods. Numerous models evaluate runoff from precipitation, but the SCS-CN method is fundamental and the most widely recognized for calculating runoff. This research evaluates runoff de [...]

by Zakhar Slukovskii  and Tatiana Shelekhova

Received: 09 March 2023;  Published: 05 July 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2303038

Core sediment (sapropel) samples were collected from Lake Okunozero, the Republic of Karelia, Russia, to assess the distribution of heavy metals and their main fractions, probable sources of pollution, and potential ecological and toxicological risks for the water body. Heavy metal concentrations were measured by the mass spectrometry method using an XSeries-2 ICP-MS. The sequential extraction of heavy metals from sapropel samples was performed using the scheme of Tessier. According to the Russian Interstate Standa [...]

by Fiona Bénard

Received: 15 June 2022;  Published: 16 November 2022;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2204045

In the context of resource depletion and global warming, the energy transition has become a necessity. To provide a basis for analysis and to support countries in this transition, it is necessary to better understand this transition. The creation of a good measurement tool could help. This paper proposes a measure of national resilience through an analogy to kinetic energy. Preliminary results show that some countries have strong potential for resilience in the energy transition. Inequalities exist and still exist [...]

by Deiby Bizerra  , João Nunes  , Chastryane Barros  , Raul Paixão  , Rosali Marques  , Francisco Simão Neto  , José Santos  , Rafael Melo  , Bruno Fernandes  and Maria Rios

Received: 29 March 2023;  Published: 09 August 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2303043

Carnauba straw (Copernicia prunifera), residual biomass derived from wax extraction, was evaluated as a potential feedstock for bioenergy production. The characterization was carried out using elemental analysis, proximate analysis, Higher Heating Value (HHV), FTIR spectroscopy, SEM, and FRX. The carbonization, using a Muffle Furnace, was applied as a thermal conversion technique to improve the fixed carbon content, and preliminary densification was done to assess the potential for future production of briquettes. [...]

by Giorgos Mountrakis  and Sheng Yang

Received: 24 September 2020;  Published: 09 March 2021;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2101003

Few studies have investigated deforestation and population connections in the U.S. at large spatial extents or small scales. We examined forest cover changes over two decades, 1990-2000 and 2000-2010, in the continental U.S. at the county scale. Forest dynamics were estimated using the National Land Cover Database, a satellite-derived classification product and then linked to population data from the US. Census. At the aggregate level, high population growth seems to increase net forest loss in a non-linear manner, [...]

by Matthieu Tshanga  , Faidance Mashauri  and Pierre Mashala

Received: 19 September 2024;  Published: 16 April 2025;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2502019

This study examines the hydrochemical characteristics of groundwater in the Mutoshi mining environment in Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo, addressing gaps in understanding the impact of mining on water quality. Despite the DRC's vast water resources, only 26% of the urban population has access to safe drinking water, with the Mutoshi aquifer, providing over a quarter of Kolwezi's drinking water, facing deterioration due to underlying copper and cobalt-rich geological formations. Groundwater and geological sam [...]

by Roberto De Vivo  , Luigi Zicarelli  , Roberto Napolano  and Fabio Zicarelli

Received: 03 March 2023;  Published: 15 August 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2303044

The environmental impact of emissions appears to be increasingly important for food, particularly those of animal origin. The LCA (Life-Cycle Assessment) method, an internationally standardized method used to calculate the environmental impact of goods or services, in the carbon footprint, does not take into account the carbon set and consequently the subtraction of carbon dioxide by the plant biomass whether or not aimed at the production of food of animal origin. This methodology could overestimate the carbon dio [...]

by Paul Fagan

Received: 10 August 2022;  Published: 16 February 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2301021

Focusing upon the United Kingdom reveals that centralised provisions of energy have historically failed to uphold standards of human rights. Even if a transition is made to renewable energy, existing centralised distribution systems cannot promise improvement. This work would recommend the transition to domestic renewables, whereby energy is harnessed and used in situ, as it may support the more desirable notion of social justice with regard to energy usage. Domestic renewables are likely to become an inevitability [...]

by José Nieto  , Carmen Vasquez  , Rubén Acevedo  , Rodrigo Ramírez-Pisco  , Luís Manuel-Navas  , Mercedes Gaitan-Angulo  , Melva Inés Gómez-Caicedo  and Catalina Altamar-Cuervo

Received: 16 June 2022;  Published: 13 October 2022;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2204041

Because of climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased, leading to the implementation of energy transition policies. Countries have adopted the Paris Agreement to curb the effects of climate change. The emergence of COVID-19 in 2020 led to the application of different measures to stop its transmission. This study evaluated the effects of COVID-19-related restrictions (such as quarantine and mobility restriction) in Chile during the first wave on compliance with the country's energy transition poli [...]

by Fabiana Cristina Lima Barbosa  , Ana Carolina Teles de Aquino  , Marcos Paulo Gomes Mol  and Raphael Tobias de Vasconcelos Barros

Received: 16 October 2024;  Published: 10 April 2025;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2502018

When addressing Healthcare Waste Management (HCWM), numerous factors play a crucial role in ensuring its safety and environmentally responsible handling within institutional processes. Recognizing this imperative, this study employed the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) methodology to establish a comprehensive assessment of 10 primary criteria and 66 sub-criteria concerning the governance and operational aspects of Healthcare Waste Management. This evaluation was based on the insights of 14 specialists in the [...]

by Daniel Thiel

Received: 21 February 2023;  Published: 15 May 2023;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2302031

This research aims to model and compare two strategies for locating new hydrogen refueling stations (HRS) in a context of high uncertainty on H2 demand and on the spatial distribution of demand points. The first strategy S1 represented by an agent-based model integrating a particle swarm optimization metaheuristic consists of finding the best HRS locations by adapting to the real evolution of the demand. A second strategy S2 consists in solving a classical capacitated p-median problem based on H2 consumption foreca [...]

by Marta I. Litter

Received: 15 September 2025;  Published: 22 September 2025;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2503029

by Fabian Banda  , Leonard Simukoko  , Mulenga Kalumba  and Mwansa Kaoma

Received: 26 September 2024;  Published: 17 April 2025;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2502020

Aquatic weeds present significant ecological and socio-economic challenges in the Bangweulu Wetlands of northern Zambia, where their proliferation disrupts aquatic ecosystems, impedes fishing activities, and affects local livelihoods. Despite these challenges, aquatic weeds also offer a unique opportunity for sustainable biochar production, a clean alternative cooking fuel that can alleviate pressure on diminishing forest resources. This study explores the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to estimate [...]