Abstract: Climate change is related with weather extremes, which may cause damages to infrastructure used by freight transport services. Heavy rainfall may lead to flooding and damage to railway lines, roads and inland waterways. Extreme drought may lead to extremely low water levels, which prevent safe navigation by inland barges. Wet and dry periods may alternate, leaving little time to repair damages. In some Western and Middle-European countries, barges have a large share in freight transport. If a main waterway is out of service, then alternatives are called for. Volume- and price-wise, trucking is not a viable alternative. Could railways be that alternative? The paper was written after the unusually long dry summer period in Europe in 2022. It deals with the question: If the Rhine, a major European waterway becomes locally inaccessible, could railways (temporarily) play a larger role in freight transport? It is a continuation of our earlier research. It contains a case study, the data of which was fed into a simulation model. The model deals with technical details like service specification route length, energy consumption and emissions. The study points to interesting rail services to keep Europe’s freight on the move. Their realization may be complex especially in terms of logistics and infrastructure, but is there an alternative?
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By use of a literature review and an environmental scan four plausible future scenarios will be created, based on the research question: How could the future of backpack tourism look like in 2030, and how could tourism businesses anticipate on the changing demand. The scenarios, which allow one to ‘think out of the box’, will eventually be translated into recommendations towards the tourism sector and therefore can create a future proof company strategy.
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In deze rapportage worden de bevindingen gepresenteerd van een studie naar de huidige en toekomstige focus van de toeristisch-recreatieve beleidskaders en samenwerkingsmogelijkheden van Emsland-Drenthe.
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All over the world entrepreneurs drive changes. They develop new products and services, inspire others and take decisions that result in growth of their businesses. But the world around entrepreneurs is changing and so are entrepreneurs. Life-long selfemployment or permanent wage employment are of the past. And the way people perceive self-employment is changing as well. And so must our thinking. Changes in our society call for policies and programmes in support of enterprising people. Diversity, mobility and connectivity offer new opportunities for enterprising people. Markets are changing, become more accessible and there is less need to be bound physically to one place for an entrepreneur. New avenues for business are open thanks to our improved access to information, our connectivity globally through social media and our ability to travel freely and frequently from one country to another. With less focus on life-long (self) employment people now combine paid work (or unpaid – house- work) with self-employment, or opt for just parttime entrepreneurship. New, hybrid forms of enterprising emerge. This combining of work with self-employment is rather common in developing countries, but in Europe it is a phenomenon not yet reported on in statistics and for which policy makers and service providers have no answers yet. Neither exist clear definitions or classifications. This book may serve as an eye-opener: hybrid entrepreneurs are indeed around us and deserve our attention. The research unit Financial Inclusion and New Entrepreneurship of The Hague University of Applied Science challenges policy makers, academics and service providers (such as educational institutes, business advisers and financial institutions) to pay more attention to hybrid entrepreneurs, those enterprising people who intend to create new values for a fair and sustainable society. They might not yet been seen, but they exist…..
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This paper describes the concept of a new algorithm to control an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for accurate autonomous indoor flight. Inside a greenhouse, Global Positioning System (GPS) signals are not reliable and not accurate enough. As an alternative, Ultra Wide Band (UWB) is used for localization. The noise is compensated by combining the UWB with the delta position signal from a novel optical flow algorithm through a Kalman Filter (KF). The end result is an accurate and stable position signal with low noise and low drift.
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This paper adopts a problematising review approach to examine the extent of mitigating climate change research in the sustainable tourism literature. As climate change has developed into an existential global environmental crisis and while tourism's emissions are still increasing, one would expect it to be at the heart of sustainable tourism research. However, from a corpus of 2573 journal articles featuring ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords, only 6.5% covered climate change mitigation. Our critical content analysis of 35 of the most influential papers found that the current methods, scope and traditions of tourism research hamper effective and in-depth research into climate change. Transport, the greatest contributor to tourism's emissions, was mostly overlooked, and weak definitions of sustainability were common. Tight system boundaries, lack of common definitions and incomplete data within tourism studies appear to hamper assessing ways to mitigate tourism's contribution to climate change.
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The aim of this research is to assess the potential impact of the CO2 Performance Ladder on CO2 emission reduction. The CO2 Performance Ladder is a new green procurement scheme that has been adopted by several public authorities in the Netherlands; it is a staged certification scheme for energy and CO2 management. The achieved certification level gives companies a certain competitive advantage in contract awarding procedures. While the scheme has been widely adopted by companies in the construction industry, other types of companies in the supply chain of the commissioning parties also participate. Currently, more than 190 companies participate in the scheme. The aggregate CO2 emissions covered by the scheme are around 1.7 Mtonnes, which corresponds to almost 1 % of national greenhouse gas emissions in the Netherlands. Since the introduction of the scheme the total CO2 emissions have decreased substantially. Nevertheless, these emission reductions should be interpreted with caution since emission reductions are dominated by a few companies and are affected to a large extent by economic activity. Companies participating in the scheme have set different types of CO2 emission reduction targets with varying ambition levels. The projected impact of these targets on CO2 emissions is in the range of a 0.5 %-1.3 % absolute emission reduction per year, with a most likely value of 1.1 %. The CO2 Performance Ladder can therefore make a substantial contribution to achieving the CO2 emission reductions for non-ETS sectors in the Netherlands up to 2020.
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