Background: There is a growing body of literature that examines the role of local governments in addressing climate change vis-à-vis mitigation and adaptation. Although it appears that climate change mitigation strategies in particular those addressing energy issues are being adopted by a large majority of local governments, this cannot be said of climate change adaptation. This paper explores ...

vrije Universiteit amsterdam 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years the interest in urban environmental and energy policies has shown a remarkable rise. After the era of nationwide and/or sectoral energy policies it has been realized that cities and regions form important focal points for integrative and effective energy savings strategies with a view on both economizing on resource expenditures and i...

The paper describes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework for coordinated sensing and adaptive communication in embedded sensor networks. The technique enables distributed sensor nodes to adapt their sampling rates in response to changing event criticality and the availability of resources (energy) at each node. The relationship between energy consumption, sampling rates, and utility of coo...

In late 2007, after signing the Kyoto Protocol, a new Australian federal government committed to generating 20% of Australia's electricity from renewable energy by 2020, for a transition to a low-carbon economy. With wind energy the most viable technology for such expansion, little recognition, however, was paid to intense social conflict surrounding wind farm location. By 2006, inadequate comm...

Sustained policy support is necessary in order to drive a transition toward renewable energy (RE). The ability to realize RE policy objectives with minimal impact on policy goals outside of the RE domain is constrained by a range of geographic factors related to resource potential, the distribution of resources, land availability / suitability, the absorptive capacity of proximal infrastructure...