With this UFOPLAN project on land use indicators, the German Federal Environment Agency aimed at further developing indicators from a consumption perspective in support of Germany’s sustainability strategy, covering both area-based and impact-oriented land footprint indicators. The project also aimed at calculating selected land footprint indicators for Germany and the EU. These indicators shou...

This study of secular trend in Portugal has shown that a positive increment in height occurred in Portuguese 18year-old males between 1904 and 2000, and a secular trend in the age at menarche, towards an earliest age, also took place. Mean height increased 8.93 cm, from 1904 to 2000, when reached 172,13 cm. Besides that, in 2000, statistically significant differences (p ≤ 0.001) among the distr...

Most current land surface models (LSMs) coupled to regional climate models (RCMs) have been implemented at the several tens of kilometer spatial scales. Modeling land surface processes in LSMs at a finer resolution is necessary for improvements in terrestrial water and energy predictions especially for small catchments. This study has therefore assessed the applicability of high-resolution simu...

Soil moisture satellite mission accuracy, repeat time and spatial resolution requirements are addressed through a numerical twin data assimilation study. Simulated soil moisture profile retrievals were made by assimilating near-surface soil moisture observations with various accuracy (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10%v/v standard deviation) repeat time (1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 days), and spatial r...

Polypyrrole (Ppy) was synthesized using Ferric Chloride (FeCl3) as oxidant. The ratio of monomer to oxidant was 1:2.4. The polymerization was carried out at 5 ̊C. Attempts were made to increase the electrical conductivity by using various dopants viz. Lithium per Chlorate (LiClO4), para-Toluene Sulfonate (p-TS) and Napthalene Sulfonic acid (NSA). The materials were characterized using FTIR, X-Ra...

The Basic Electricity Support Tariff (BEST) was designed to advance the welfare of poor households (UCT 2002). Specifically the South African government chose to supply 50kWh Free Basic Electricity (FBE) per month per household. We illustrate an alternative that would cost less, with larger benefits for the poor. By offering electricity for free, FBE distorts the energy choices of poor househol...

To achieve sustainable development, governments have increasingly turned to legislating new rights, restrictions and responsibilities over land. These laws are designed to control the community’s behaviour in relation to land. Examples include the creation of tradeable water rights and the reallocation of land to indigenous peoples. Whilst the new interests aim to improve land management, they ...

The paper addresses the problem of plan repair for tasks involving mandatory constraints on consumable and continuous resources, modeled as numeric fluents. The approach starts by proposing a new notion of numeric macro actions allowing to handle as an extension to the classical macro action formulation conditions and operations not only on the propositional fragment, but also on the numeric on...