Urbanisation and climate change have an effect on the water balance in our cities resulting in challenges as flooding, droughts and heatstress. Implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) can help to restore the water balance in cities by storing and infiltrating stormwater into the subsurface to minimise flooding, restoration of groundwater tables to prevent droughts, lowering temperatures by evapotranspiration to fight heatstress. Urban planners and otherstakeholders in municipalities and water authorities struggle with implementing SuDS at locations where infiltration of water seems challenging. Questions arise as: can you infiltrate in countries as The Netherlands with parts under sea level, high groundwater table and low permeable soil? Can you infiltrate in Norway with low permeable or impermeable bedrock and frozen ground most of theyear? How do you find space to implement SuDS in the dense urban areas of Bucharest? These questions are answered by researchers of the JPI Water funded project INovations for eXtreme Climatic Events (INXCES).To answer the question on ‘can we infiltrate stormwater under worse case conditions?’, testing of the hydraulic capacity take place at rainwater gardens in Norway (Bergen and Trondheim) and (bio)swales in the low lying parts of The Netherlands. The first results show that even under these ‘extreme’ hydraulic circumstances the hydraulic capacity (or empty time) is sufficient to infiltratemost of the stormwater throughout the year.INXCES exchanged researchers on an international level, shared research results with stakeholders and sets up guidelines for design, implementation and maintenance of SuDS to promote the implementation of sustainable water management systems throughout the world.One of the tools used to promote SuDS is www.climatescan.nl, an open source online map application that provides an easy-to-access database of international project information in the field of urban resilience and climate adaptation. The tool is able to map several sustainable urban drainage systems as has been done for Norway, The Netherlands, Romania and other countries in the world.The tool is used for engagement with stakeholders within EU projects as INXCES and WaterCoG and resulted in international knowledge exchange on infiltration of stormwater under extreme climate and geohydrolic circumstances.
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The current development of tourism is environmentally unsustainable. Specifically, tourism's contribution to climate change is increasing while other sectors are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. This paper has two goals: reveal the main structural cause for tourism's emission growth and show the consequences thereof for (mitigation) policies. It is reasoned that the main cause for tourism's strong emission growth is the time-space expansion of global tourism behavior. Contemporary tourism theory and geography fail to clearly describe this geographical development, making it difficult to understand this expansion and develop effective policies to mitigate environmental impacts. Therefore, this paper explores some elements of a 'new tourism geography' and shows how this may help to better understand the causes of the environmentally unsustainable development of tourism with respect to climate change and devise mitigation policies.
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Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are potential high-impact climate change mitigation actions towards low carbon or even climate neutral cities. This implies that the energy performance and greenhouse gas emissions of PEDs need to be assessed. To this end, an accounting methodology, metrics, supporting (accounting) tools, and reporting are necessary that capture the full energy and climate impact of PEDs. The European Commission's Building Energy Specification Table (BEST) provides a methodological approach for calculating the energy balance of PEDs. The BEST is a formal requirement of the European Commission's proposal process, with respect to the Horizon 2020 funding program. An improved methodology for calculating the annual energy balance of a of PED, based on the international standard ISO52000, was developed by the Making City project in 2020. In this paper, we evaluate and compare accounting methods for assessing the energy performance of PEDs and conclude on their use and shortcomings. The hypothesis to be explored is that current accounting practices are based on accounting at a building level and alternative methodologies are needed to capture the full impacts at a district level. To this end, we apply the current approaches on the ATELIER project's PED pilot in Buiksloterham, Amsterdam, which will serve as a case study to illustrate the differences in outcomes and in the use of the results in evaluation and policy making. Consequently, we reflect and recommend on improved approaches and methodologies.
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