Project acronym CWASI
Project Coping with water scarcity in a globalized world
Researcher (PI) Francesco Laio
Host Institution (HI) POLITECNICO DI TORINO
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary We intend to set up a new globalized perspective to tackle water and food security in the 21st century. This issue is intrinsically global as the international trade of massive amounts of food makes societies less reliant on locally available water, and entails large-scale transfers of virtual water (defined as the water needed to produce a given amount of a food commodity). The network of virtual water trade connects a large portion of the global population, with 2800 km3 of virtual water moved around the globe in a year. We provide here definitive indications on the effects of the globalization of (virtual) water on the vulnerability to a water crisis of the global water system. More specifically, we formulate the following research hypotheses:
1) The globalization of (virtual) water resources is a short-term solution to malnourishment, famine, and conflicts, but it also has relevant negative implications for human societies.
2) The virtual water dynamics provide the suitable framework in order to quantitatively relate water-crises occurrence to environmental and socio-economic factors.
3) The risk of catastrophic, global-scale, water crises will increase in the next decades.
To test these hypotheses, we will capitalize on the tremendous amount of information embedded in nearly 50 years of available food and virtual water trade data. We will adopt an innovative research approach based on the use of: advanced statistical tools for data verification and uncertainty modeling; methods borrowed from the complex network theory, aimed at analyzing the propagation of failures through the network; multivariate nonlinear analyses, to reproduce the dependence of virtual water on time and on external drivers; multi-state stochastic modeling, to study the effect on the global water system of random fluctuations of the external drivers; and scenario analysis, to predict the future probability of occurrence of water crises.
Summary
We intend to set up a new globalized perspective to tackle water and food security in the 21st century. This issue is intrinsically global as the international trade of massive amounts of food makes societies less reliant on locally available water, and entails large-scale transfers of virtual water (defined as the water needed to produce a given amount of a food commodity). The network of virtual water trade connects a large portion of the global population, with 2800 km3 of virtual water moved around the globe in a year. We provide here definitive indications on the effects of the globalization of (virtual) water on the vulnerability to a water crisis of the global water system. More specifically, we formulate the following research hypotheses:
1) The globalization of (virtual) water resources is a short-term solution to malnourishment, famine, and conflicts, but it also has relevant negative implications for human societies.
2) The virtual water dynamics provide the suitable framework in order to quantitatively relate water-crises occurrence to environmental and socio-economic factors.
3) The risk of catastrophic, global-scale, water crises will increase in the next decades.
To test these hypotheses, we will capitalize on the tremendous amount of information embedded in nearly 50 years of available food and virtual water trade data. We will adopt an innovative research approach based on the use of: advanced statistical tools for data verification and uncertainty modeling; methods borrowed from the complex network theory, aimed at analyzing the propagation of failures through the network; multivariate nonlinear analyses, to reproduce the dependence of virtual water on time and on external drivers; multi-state stochastic modeling, to study the effect on the global water system of random fluctuations of the external drivers; and scenario analysis, to predict the future probability of occurrence of water crises.
Max ERC Funding
1 222 500 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-07-01, End date: 2020-06-30
Project acronym LIFECOURSE
Project A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS ON THE EFFECTS OF STRESS ON BIOLOGY, EMOTIONS AND BEHAVIOUR THROUGHOUT CHILDHOOD
Researcher (PI) Inga Dora Sigfusdottir
Host Institution (HI) HASKOLINN I REYKJAVIK EHF
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary The overall objective of the proposed research is to improve our understanding of the interplay between biological, environmental, and social factors that influence the development of harmful behaviours in adolescents. We propose to conduct the first multilevel cohort study of its kind that would combine biological, behavioural, and social data from before birth through adolescence for an entire population birth cohort of adolescents. The program is based in Iceland due to a unique infrastructure for the collection of health and social registry data as well as available access to a whole cohort of adolescents. We will extend our previous work using a multilevel developmental framework to identify both individual and collective level variables to study the independent and interactive effects of biological, environmental, and social determinants of adolescent harmful behaviours, with special emphasis on the influence of stress on substance use, self-inflicted harm, suicidal behaviour, and delinquency. Our retrospective longitudinal database will include existing registry information on maternal, child, and environmental determinants of adolescent harmful behaviours, measured prior to birth, at the time of birth, and during the infant, toddler, preschool, middle-childhood and early adolescent years, for the entire 2000 year birth cohort. We will prospectively measure biomarkers in human saliva and use an existing social survey infrastructure to add to the registry database. We have acquired all necessary ethical and organizational permissions and have carried out a preliminary study that shows registry data compliance of over 90% for all variables we intend to combine. This is a fundamental research project, examining unchartered territory. The results of this project will stimulate international research but more importantly, an understanding that will lead to better policies, planning and quality of life for young people in Europe and beyond.
Summary
The overall objective of the proposed research is to improve our understanding of the interplay between biological, environmental, and social factors that influence the development of harmful behaviours in adolescents. We propose to conduct the first multilevel cohort study of its kind that would combine biological, behavioural, and social data from before birth through adolescence for an entire population birth cohort of adolescents. The program is based in Iceland due to a unique infrastructure for the collection of health and social registry data as well as available access to a whole cohort of adolescents. We will extend our previous work using a multilevel developmental framework to identify both individual and collective level variables to study the independent and interactive effects of biological, environmental, and social determinants of adolescent harmful behaviours, with special emphasis on the influence of stress on substance use, self-inflicted harm, suicidal behaviour, and delinquency. Our retrospective longitudinal database will include existing registry information on maternal, child, and environmental determinants of adolescent harmful behaviours, measured prior to birth, at the time of birth, and during the infant, toddler, preschool, middle-childhood and early adolescent years, for the entire 2000 year birth cohort. We will prospectively measure biomarkers in human saliva and use an existing social survey infrastructure to add to the registry database. We have acquired all necessary ethical and organizational permissions and have carried out a preliminary study that shows registry data compliance of over 90% for all variables we intend to combine. This is a fundamental research project, examining unchartered territory. The results of this project will stimulate international research but more importantly, an understanding that will lead to better policies, planning and quality of life for young people in Europe and beyond.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 188 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-07-01, End date: 2020-06-30
Project acronym MADE
Project Migration as Development
Researcher (PI) Hein Gysbert de Haas
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary How do processes of development and social transformation shape human migration? More specifically, how do development process affect the geographical orientation, timing, composition and volume of both internal and international migration? The relation between development and human mobility is highly contested. While economic development in poor countries and areas is usually seen as the most effective way to reduce migration, other studies suggest that development actually increases migration. However, evidence has remained highly inconclusive so far because of theoretical and methodological limitations.
This research develops new theoretical and empirical approaches to gain a fundamental understanding of the relation between development processes and human migration. While prior analyses focused on a limited number of economic and demographic ‘predictor’ variables, this project applies a broader concept of development to examine how internal and international migration trends and patterns are shaped by wider social, economic, technological and political transformations.
This will be achieved through (i) theory-building (reconceptualising migration as an intrinsic part of broader development processes) enabling the formulation of appropriate hypotheses; (ii) quantitative tests drawing on new, innovative databases on international and internal migration flow and stocks; and (iii) mixed method case-studies of six countries (provisionally Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Italy, Morocco and the Netherlands) representing different development-migration trajectories over the 19th and 20th centuries.
This project is scientifically ground-breaking by fundamentally shifting our understanding of how long-term development and social transformation processes shape human migration. This is also relevant for policy by challenging popular understandings of migration as a development failure and to make more realistic assessments of how future global change may affect migration.
Summary
How do processes of development and social transformation shape human migration? More specifically, how do development process affect the geographical orientation, timing, composition and volume of both internal and international migration? The relation between development and human mobility is highly contested. While economic development in poor countries and areas is usually seen as the most effective way to reduce migration, other studies suggest that development actually increases migration. However, evidence has remained highly inconclusive so far because of theoretical and methodological limitations.
This research develops new theoretical and empirical approaches to gain a fundamental understanding of the relation between development processes and human migration. While prior analyses focused on a limited number of economic and demographic ‘predictor’ variables, this project applies a broader concept of development to examine how internal and international migration trends and patterns are shaped by wider social, economic, technological and political transformations.
This will be achieved through (i) theory-building (reconceptualising migration as an intrinsic part of broader development processes) enabling the formulation of appropriate hypotheses; (ii) quantitative tests drawing on new, innovative databases on international and internal migration flow and stocks; and (iii) mixed method case-studies of six countries (provisionally Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Italy, Morocco and the Netherlands) representing different development-migration trajectories over the 19th and 20th centuries.
This project is scientifically ground-breaking by fundamentally shifting our understanding of how long-term development and social transformation processes shape human migration. This is also relevant for policy by challenging popular understandings of migration as a development failure and to make more realistic assessments of how future global change may affect migration.
Max ERC Funding
1 748 656 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym MAGnUM
Project A Multiscale and Multimodal Modelling Approach for Green Urban Traffic Management
Researcher (PI) Ludovic Leclercq
Host Institution (HI) INSTITUT FRANCAIS DES SCIENCES ET TECHNOLOGIES DES TRANSPORTS, DE L'AMENAGEMENT ET DES RESEAUX
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary The MAGnUM project aims to (i) create a consistent set of interrelated dynamic and multimodal traffic models able to capture driver behaviours at the different urban scales and (ii) apply this variety of models to design efficient and green traffic management strategies.
Traffic flow dynamics is well reproduced at a local urban scale by the kinematic wave model and its numerous extensions. Even if this model is parsimonious compared to other modelling approaches, it can hardly be applied at larger urban scales for traffic control applications. Very recently, a new modelling approach has been proposed to represent congestion dynamics at large scales. It relates the total travel production to the vehicle accumulation in a traffic network with for now a restrictive condition about network homogeneity. This approach is very promising for designing new traffic management systems but heterogeneous situations should be handled by properly connecting with the local scale to account for the effects of the local distributions and variations of the driver behaviour (demand) and the network structure (supply). Investigating these relationships and proposing a full set of consistent models representing traffic dynamics at several relevant scales (successive spatial and temporal integration) is very challenging with high potential gains for traffic control applications. This is the primary goal of MAGnUM and will be achieved by mixing analytical investigations on idealized but insightful test cases with explanatory approaches based on data gained from dynamic simulations or serious game sessions on more realistic and complex cases.
The second goal of the project concerns the design of innovative traffic management strategies at multiple urban scales. Breakthroughs will be achieved by considering multiple and competitive objectives when optimizing with a tight focus on environment issues and multi-modality.
Summary
The MAGnUM project aims to (i) create a consistent set of interrelated dynamic and multimodal traffic models able to capture driver behaviours at the different urban scales and (ii) apply this variety of models to design efficient and green traffic management strategies.
Traffic flow dynamics is well reproduced at a local urban scale by the kinematic wave model and its numerous extensions. Even if this model is parsimonious compared to other modelling approaches, it can hardly be applied at larger urban scales for traffic control applications. Very recently, a new modelling approach has been proposed to represent congestion dynamics at large scales. It relates the total travel production to the vehicle accumulation in a traffic network with for now a restrictive condition about network homogeneity. This approach is very promising for designing new traffic management systems but heterogeneous situations should be handled by properly connecting with the local scale to account for the effects of the local distributions and variations of the driver behaviour (demand) and the network structure (supply). Investigating these relationships and proposing a full set of consistent models representing traffic dynamics at several relevant scales (successive spatial and temporal integration) is very challenging with high potential gains for traffic control applications. This is the primary goal of MAGnUM and will be achieved by mixing analytical investigations on idealized but insightful test cases with explanatory approaches based on data gained from dynamic simulations or serious game sessions on more realistic and complex cases.
The second goal of the project concerns the design of innovative traffic management strategies at multiple urban scales. Breakthroughs will be achieved by considering multiple and competitive objectives when optimizing with a tight focus on environment issues and multi-modality.
Max ERC Funding
1 975 500 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym MobiliSense
Project Air pollution and noise exposure related to personal transport behaviour: short-term and longer-term effects on health
Researcher (PI) Basile Georges Paul Chaix
Host Institution (HI) INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA SANTE ET DE LA RECHERCHE MEDICALE
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary To support policies at the European and national levels, MobiliSense aims to explore the effects of air pollution and noise exposure related to personal transport habits on respiratory and cardiovascular health. Building on methods from Epidemiology, Geography, and Transport sciences, the objectives of MobiliSense are to quantify the contribution of personal transport to the air pollution and noise exposure of individuals; to compare the air pollution and noise exposure in the different transport modes; to investigate whether total and transport-related personal exposure to air pollutants and noise are associated with short-term and two-year changes in respiratory and cardiovascular health; and to examine whether transport-related exposures mediate socioeconomic disparities in health. The MobiliSense project will use passive and active sensors of location, behaviour, environmental nuisances, and health in a representative sample of 1000 participants followed-up over two years. It addresses a gap in knowledge: (i) by assessing transport behaviour over 6 days with GPS receivers and an electronic mobility survey; (ii) by considering the personal exposure to both air pollution and noise and improving its characterisation (inhaled doses, noise frequency components, impulsive noise, and interactions with subjective annoyance); (iii) by measuring a wide range of respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes (smartphone-assessed respiratory symptoms, lung function assessed by spirometry, resting blood pressure, ambulatory brachial / central blood pressure, arterial stiffness, and heart rate variability); and (iv) by investigating short-term and longer-term effects of transport. To assist policy-makers, the final aim is to deliver a simulation tool permitting to determine the extent to which scenarios (i) of changes in personal transport behaviour and (ii) of changes in exposure levels during transport affect individual exposure and respiratory / cardiovascular health.
Summary
To support policies at the European and national levels, MobiliSense aims to explore the effects of air pollution and noise exposure related to personal transport habits on respiratory and cardiovascular health. Building on methods from Epidemiology, Geography, and Transport sciences, the objectives of MobiliSense are to quantify the contribution of personal transport to the air pollution and noise exposure of individuals; to compare the air pollution and noise exposure in the different transport modes; to investigate whether total and transport-related personal exposure to air pollutants and noise are associated with short-term and two-year changes in respiratory and cardiovascular health; and to examine whether transport-related exposures mediate socioeconomic disparities in health. The MobiliSense project will use passive and active sensors of location, behaviour, environmental nuisances, and health in a representative sample of 1000 participants followed-up over two years. It addresses a gap in knowledge: (i) by assessing transport behaviour over 6 days with GPS receivers and an electronic mobility survey; (ii) by considering the personal exposure to both air pollution and noise and improving its characterisation (inhaled doses, noise frequency components, impulsive noise, and interactions with subjective annoyance); (iii) by measuring a wide range of respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes (smartphone-assessed respiratory symptoms, lung function assessed by spirometry, resting blood pressure, ambulatory brachial / central blood pressure, arterial stiffness, and heart rate variability); and (iv) by investigating short-term and longer-term effects of transport. To assist policy-makers, the final aim is to deliver a simulation tool permitting to determine the extent to which scenarios (i) of changes in personal transport behaviour and (ii) of changes in exposure levels during transport affect individual exposure and respiratory / cardiovascular health.
Max ERC Funding
2 000 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30
Project acronym SHARECITY
Project SHARECITY: Assessing the practice and sustainability potential of city-based food sharing economies
Researcher (PI) Anna Ray Davies
Host Institution (HI) THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary With planetary urbanization fast approaching there is growing clarity regarding the unsustainability of cities, not least with respect to food consumption. Sharing, including food sharing, is increasingly being identified as one transformative mechanism for sustainable cities: reducing consumption; conserving resources, preventing waste and providing new forms of socio-economic relations. However, such claims currently rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations. SHARECITY will identify and examine diverse practices of city-based food sharing economies, first determining their form, function and governance and then identifying their impact and potential to reorient eating practices. The research has four objectives: to advance theoretical understanding of contemporary food sharing economies in cities; to generate a significant body of comparative and novel international empirical knowledge about food sharing economies and their governance within global cities; to design and test an assessment framework for establishing the impact of city-based food sharing economies on societal relations, economic vitality and the environment; and to develop and implement a novel variant of backcasting to explore how food sharing economies within cities might evolve in the future. Providing conceptual insights that bridge sharing, social practice and urban transitions theories, SHARECITY will generate a typology of food sharing economies; a database of food sharing activities in 100 global cities; in-depth food sharing profiles of 7 cities from the contrasting contexts of USA, Brazil and Germany, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Australia; a sustainability impact toolkit to enable examination of city-based food sharing initiatives; and scenarios for future food sharing in cities. Conducting such frontier science SHARECITY will open new research horizons to substantively improve understanding of how, why and to what end people share food within cities in the 21st Century.
Summary
With planetary urbanization fast approaching there is growing clarity regarding the unsustainability of cities, not least with respect to food consumption. Sharing, including food sharing, is increasingly being identified as one transformative mechanism for sustainable cities: reducing consumption; conserving resources, preventing waste and providing new forms of socio-economic relations. However, such claims currently rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations. SHARECITY will identify and examine diverse practices of city-based food sharing economies, first determining their form, function and governance and then identifying their impact and potential to reorient eating practices. The research has four objectives: to advance theoretical understanding of contemporary food sharing economies in cities; to generate a significant body of comparative and novel international empirical knowledge about food sharing economies and their governance within global cities; to design and test an assessment framework for establishing the impact of city-based food sharing economies on societal relations, economic vitality and the environment; and to develop and implement a novel variant of backcasting to explore how food sharing economies within cities might evolve in the future. Providing conceptual insights that bridge sharing, social practice and urban transitions theories, SHARECITY will generate a typology of food sharing economies; a database of food sharing activities in 100 global cities; in-depth food sharing profiles of 7 cities from the contrasting contexts of USA, Brazil and Germany, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Australia; a sustainability impact toolkit to enable examination of city-based food sharing initiatives; and scenarios for future food sharing in cities. Conducting such frontier science SHARECITY will open new research horizons to substantively improve understanding of how, why and to what end people share food within cities in the 21st Century.
Max ERC Funding
1 860 009 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2021-07-31
Project acronym SIZE
Project Size matters: scaling principles for the prediction of the ecological footprint of biofuels
Researcher (PI) Mark Antonius Jan Huijbregts
Host Institution (HI) STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary There is a major scientific and societal challenge in quantifying and reducing ecological footprints of products. Ecological footprint calculations suffer severely from a limited availability of data, such as the amount of energy and materials associated with the production, use and disposal of products. Furthermore, ecological footprints pertaining to biodiversity are typically biased towards a limited number of well-known species with a focus on relative species richness, leaving out ecosystem service attributes of biodiversity. As it is virtually impossible to collect all the empirical data required for all species, there is an urgent need to develop an operational framework to derive representative ecological footprints with limited data requirements. I propose to develop a novel framework based on a set of unifying scaling principles related to the production size of products and the body size of species. These scaling principles will be developed to predict key characteristics of biofuel production, such as energy return of investment, agricultural land requirements and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as global impact indicators, such as species extinction risks. The focus of the research is on (1) liquid biofuel production (bioethanol and biodiesel) from various first and second generation feedstock as an important but controversial renewable energy source (2) vascular plant diversity, as the common basis of all terrestrial ecosystems, and (3) habitat destruction and climate change, as important drivers of global change. Together with the PI, two PhD students, two Postdocs and a technical assistant will work on different components of the new predictive models, substantially enhancing the scientific understanding of how to provide reliable ecological footprints in practice.
Summary
There is a major scientific and societal challenge in quantifying and reducing ecological footprints of products. Ecological footprint calculations suffer severely from a limited availability of data, such as the amount of energy and materials associated with the production, use and disposal of products. Furthermore, ecological footprints pertaining to biodiversity are typically biased towards a limited number of well-known species with a focus on relative species richness, leaving out ecosystem service attributes of biodiversity. As it is virtually impossible to collect all the empirical data required for all species, there is an urgent need to develop an operational framework to derive representative ecological footprints with limited data requirements. I propose to develop a novel framework based on a set of unifying scaling principles related to the production size of products and the body size of species. These scaling principles will be developed to predict key characteristics of biofuel production, such as energy return of investment, agricultural land requirements and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as global impact indicators, such as species extinction risks. The focus of the research is on (1) liquid biofuel production (bioethanol and biodiesel) from various first and second generation feedstock as an important but controversial renewable energy source (2) vascular plant diversity, as the common basis of all terrestrial ecosystems, and (3) habitat destruction and climate change, as important drivers of global change. Together with the PI, two PhD students, two Postdocs and a technical assistant will work on different components of the new predictive models, substantially enhancing the scientific understanding of how to provide reliable ecological footprints in practice.
Max ERC Funding
1 670 406 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
