ALBERT

Description: Strain energy from tectonic loading can be partly released through aseismic creep. Earthquake repeaters, repeatedly activated brittle fault patches surrounded by creep, indicate steady-state creep that affects the amount of seismic energy available for the next large earthquake along a plate contact. The offshore Main Marmara Fault (MMF) of the North Anatolian Fault Zone represents a seismic gap capable of generating a M 〉 7 earthquake in direct vicinity to the mega-city Istanbul. Based on a newly compiled seismicity catalog, we identify repeating earthquakes to resolve the spatial creep variability along the MMF during a 15-year period. We observe a maximum of seismic repeaters indicating creep along the central and western MMF segments tapering off toward the locked onshore Ganos fault in the west, and the locked offshore Princes Islands segment immediately south of Istanbul in the east. This indicates a high degree of spatial creep variability along the Istanbul-Marmara seismic gap.

Description: The Bakreswar geothermal province represents a medium enthalpy geothermal system with its Bakreswar and Tantloie hot springs. It lies within the Chotanagpur Granite Gneissic Complex in the eastern part of the Indian Peninsula. The province has a high heat flow and a high geothermal gradient of 90°C/km. Magnetotelluric data from 95 sites in a frequency range of 10 kHz–10 Hz were acquired over the Bakreswar geothermal province to obtain an electrical conductivity model and map the geothermal reservoir with its fluid pathways and related geological structures. Subsurface conductivity models obtained from three-dimensional inversions of the Magnetotelluric data exhibit several prominent anomalies, which are supplemented by gravity results. The conductivity model maps three features which act as a conduit (a) a northwest–southeast trending feature, (b) an east–west trending feature to the south of the northwest–southeast trending feature (which lies 1 km north of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation fault marked by previous studies) and (c) shallow conducting features close to Bakreswar hot spring. The northwest–southeast trending feature coincides with the boundary of the high-density intrusive block. This northwest–southeast trending feature provides the pathway for the meteoric water to reach a maximum depth of 2.7 km, where it gets heated by interacting with deep-seated structures and then it rises towards the surface. The radiogenic process occurring within the granites of Chotanagpur Granite Gneissic Complex provides the heat responsible for heating the meteoric water. The northwest–southeast and east–west trending features are responsible for the transport of meteoric water to deeper depths and then towards the shallow regions of the Earth. The near surface features close to the Bakreswar hot spring are responsible for carrying the water further towards the hot spring. The resistivity of these structures plotted as a function of salinity and temperatures for saline crustal fluids suggests the involvement of meteoric water. Further, applying Archie's law to this resistivity suggests that the conduit path has a porosity greater than 10%. This study successfully maps the anomalous structures which might foster the migration of geothermal fluid in Bakreswar geothermal province.

Description: Emission inventories are a critical basis for air quality and climate modeling, as well as policy decisions. Non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) are key precursor compounds in ozone and secondary organic aerosol formation. Accurately representing NMVOCs in emission inventories is crucial for understanding atmospheric chemistry, the impact of policy measures, and climate projections. Improving NMVOC representation in emission inventories is fraught with challenges, ranging from the lack of (long-term) NMVOC measurements, limited efforts in updating emission factors, to the diversity of NMVOC species reactivity. Here we take an initial step to evaluate the representation of urban NMVOC speciation in an emission inventory (EDGARv4.3.2 and EDGARv6.1) at the global level. To compare the urban measurements of NMVOCs to the emission inventory estimates, ratios of individual NMVOCs to acetylene are used. Owing to limitations in measurement data and grouping of NMVOCs in emission inventories, the comparison includes only a limited number of alkanes, alkenes, and aromatics. Results show little to no agreement between the ratios in the observations and those in the global emission inventory for the species compared (r2 0.01–0.20). This could be related to incorrect speciation profiles and/or spatial allocation of NMVOCs to urban areas. Regional emission inventories show better agreement among the ratios (r2 0.43–0.70). The inclusion of oxygenated species in NMVOC measurements, as well as greater global coverage of measurements could improve representation of NMVOC species in emission inventories, and a mosaic of regional inventories may be a better approach.

Description: The international UN Climate Change conferences known as “Conferences of the Parties (COPs)” have an enormous convening power and are attended annually by tens of thousands of actors working on climate change topics from a wide range of perspectives. In the COP spaces outside of the formal negotiations, the communication culture is dominated by “side events,” a format that relies heavily on conventional presentations and panels that can be informative, but is generally not conducive to mutual engagement, reflection, or dialogue. There is an urgent need for new dialogue formats that can better foster learning and community-building and thereby harness the enormous latent potential for climate action represented by the diverse stakeholders that gather at the COP. Against this backdrop, and drawing on our experience with the development and implementation of the Co-Creative Reflection and Dialogue Spaces at COP25, COP26, and COP27, we make recommendations for further developing the communication culture of the COPs. At the level of individual sessions, we provide recommendations for designing participatory dialogues that can better support reflection, interconnection, and action orientation. In addition, we offer guidance for scaling up these practices, for instance through networks and communities of practice to support a shift of the overall communication culture of the COPs. Our recommendations focus on interactions and exchanges that unfold outside of the formal negotiation sessions, with a view toward enabling and accelerating transformative action by non-state actors.

Description: The twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai among many other items concluded the first Global Stocktake (GST) under the Paris Agreement. This article discusses the conference's outcomes in the areas of mitigation, loss and damage, adaptation, climate finance, and cooperation under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The conference arguably made history by for the first time ever recognising the need to "transition away" from fossil fuels, adopting specific targets for the scale-up of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and by operationalising a fund to support developing countries in dealing with loss and damage caused by climate change. However, the legal language in the call for an energy transition is relatively non-committal and the conference failed to underpin the new global objectives with adequate resources. Actual implementation of the Dubai outcomes will therefore to a large extent depend on whether COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan - already billed as "finance COP" - will be able to cut the Gordian knot of finance.

Description: North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is the industrial center of Germany and one of the most important industrial locations in Europe. It is a key location for the energy-intensive basic materials industry like the production of steel and non-ferrous metals, (petro)chemicals, cement and lime, bricks, glass and ceramics, and paper. Around 20 % of NRW's total greenhouse emissions derive from industrial processes. By 2045, industry must achieve climate-neutrality, which requires a massive transformation effort. Technologically, this needs large-scale utilization of green hydrogen, carbon management, consequent circular economy, and climate-neutral production of process heat. Furthermore, various adjustments to the policy framework are essential.

Description: Over 175 million Nigerians rely on the use of traditional biomass for cooking, and it is estimated that more than 128,000 people died in Nigeria in 2019 from household air pollution related to these fuels. There is currently a gap in the study of possible pathways to meet Nigeria's goals in clean cooking and in understanding the health and climate impacts that different pathways can bring about. We explore clean cooking access scenarios for Nigeria until 2060 under a business-as-usual scenario, a moderate climate mitigation scenario, and an ambitious transformative scenario. We carry out a disaggregation at the state level for the period up to 2030 to better guide shorter-term policy development. Our analysis shows that under an ambitious scenario where 85 million households achieve access to clean cooking by 2060, annual premature deaths due to exposure to household air pollution would decrease by 7 % compared to 2018 levels. A baseline scenario, on the other hand, sees a dramatic 77 % increase, resulting in 209,000 people dying prematurely, of which 94,000 children under 5. Furthermore, we find that woodfuel removals from forestland would lead to a tripling of carbon dioxide emissions from land use change, reaching 602 Mt CO2 by 2060. Our findings stress the vital importance of a clean cooking transition in Nigeria and underline the urgent need for immediate acceleration in national efforts regarding access to clean cooking for all.

Description: The goal of this dissertation is to facilitate the assessment of impacts from sustainable measures and projects with an emphasis on impact reporting for Green, Social or Sustainability Bonds in the Sustainable Finance market. It does so by providing analysts with the means to develop, depict, formulate, and assess a causal hypothesis between an intervention and its subsequent effects in an impact-chain, represented by desired environmental (E), social (S) or governance (G) changes. This is achieved by developing a methodology for so-called ESG Logic Models or ESG-LM, that combine heuristic Theories-of-Change with propositional logic and Bayesian Reasoning. Three research questions are investigated and responded to. Research Question 1 asks how such Theories-of-Change can be developed for any type of ESG-related issue and how the different process steps in a causal chain can be classified, hierarchised, and prioritised regarding their efficacy towards overarching sustainability goals and their plausibility. Research Question 2 studies (a) the means by which the analyst or any other interested third party might be warranted in believing the causal claims from an ESG-LM, and (b) how an ESG-LM can be improved if this credence is low. Research Question 3 then looks at the reporting of impacts themselves regarding indicator selection, indicator assessment and indicator quantification as well as the provision of information on the contributions and attributions by different actors. The dissertation draws on a variety of theories and adapts existing methods to achieve that. It operationalises concepts from empirical Sustainable Finance research and already existing impact assessment methodologies. It adapts scholarly and practitioner approaches for theory-based evaluation and applies a qualitative social science perspective towards theory-building and evaluation, while some of the assessment tools in the dissertation are grounded in Logic, Set Theory and Bayesian Epistemology. Examples for such tools include rules for the Attribution by actors, heuristics for the abduction of plausible outcome pathways, or a four-stage Argument and Decision-Tree to assess the credibility of ESG-LM claims (based on Bayes Theorem). My assessment of the entire methodology is positive overall, as it provides solutions to each of the three research areas. Limitations of the approach, and thus opportunities for further research, are the additional expertise and time required by analysts compared to the existing, and somewhat more pragmatic, solutions in the current market. However, this is outweighed in my opinion by the ability of the framework to strongly mitigate impact washing by actors in the financial markets as well as biases by analysts. Its overall methodology also provides opportunities for new research angles in the area of sustainability indicators and assessments.