Feature Article

Full implementation of the European Union's new energy-efficiency law faces many hurdles, explains Sonja van Renssen.

Cynthia Rosenzweig heads the Climate Impacts Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Recently she has taken on another role co-leading the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project. She explains that task to Nature Climate Change.

Carbon emissions from cities represent the single largest human contribution to climate change. Here we present a vision, strategy and roadmap for an international framework to assess directly the carbon emission trends of the world's megacities.

The potential for power generation from geothermal energy in China is vast but as yet largely untapped.

The prediction of climate effects on terrestrial ecosystems and water resources is one of the major research questions in hydrology. Conceptual water-energy balance models can be used to gain a first order estimate of how long-term average streamflow is changing with a change in water and energy supply. A common framework for investigation of this question is based on the Budyko hypothesis, which links hydrological response to aridity. Recently, Renner et al.

The sensitivity of groundwater recharge to different climate conditions was simulated using the approach of climatic analogue stations, i.e. stations presently experiencing climatic conditions corresponding to a possible future climate state. The study was conducted in the context of a safety assessment of a future near-surface disposal facility for low and intermediate level short-lived radioactive waste in Belgium; this includes estimation of groundwater recharge for the next millennia.

Economic and social development has greatly increased ecological water demand and modified land use of river systems worldwide, causing overall degradation of many of these systems. In this study, theoretical and technical frameworks for regionalization on the eco-environmental function of river systems are formulated and applied to the Luanhe River system.

The identification of hydrological drought at global scale has received considerable attention during the last decade. However, climate-induced variation in runoff across the world makes such analyses rather complicated. This especially holds for the drier regions of the world (both cold and warm), where, for a considerable period of time, zero runoff can be observed. In the current paper, we present a method that enables to identify drought at global scale across climate regimes in a consistent manner.

On 15 July, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi hosted a group of professionals working on rural housing in diverse geographies of the country. The agenda for the meeting, which was co-hosted by several partners, was to present a portal built for the rural housing sector (www.ruralhousingnetwork.com) and to get feedback before the portal goes live in a month.

An angry protest is gathering momentum in Mithi Virdi, a picturesque village in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar district. Four villages have united forces to oppose a nuclear plant coming up in their vicinity. Mithi Virdi is likely to become as famous as Jaitapur and Kudankulam. In 2008, Mithi Virdi was placed on India’s nuclear map when the Indo-US deal was signed. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) endorsed a Memoradum of Understanding (MoU) with Westinghouse, a nuclear major in Pennsylvania, to build a power plant on land acquired from four villages here. External Affairs S.M.