Related papers: The Structural Case for the Eco-Civilization Parad…
Global warming arises from 'temperature forcing', a net imbalance between energy fluxes entering and leaving the climate system and arising within it. Humanity introduces temperature forcing through greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture,…
Promoting and increasing energy efficiency is a promising method of reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding the potentially devastating effects of climate change. The question is: How do we induce a cultural or behavioural change whereby people…
Integrated global food system analysis is hampered by the fragmentation of data among food types, processes, and scales. Studies also often neglect the connection to human metabolism -- the ultimate driver of food demand. Here we use a…
Industrial ecosystems are coupled with natural systems through utilization of feedstocks and waste disposal. To ensure resilience in production of industrial systems under the threat of climate change scenarios, it is necessary to evaluate…
Climate change has become a major problem for humanity in the last two decades. One of the reasons that caused it, is our daily energy waste. People consume electricity in order to use home/work appliances and devices and also reach certain…
Much of today's sustainability discourse emphasizes efficiency, clean technologies, and smart systems, but largely underestimates fundamental physical constraints relating to energy-matter interactions. These constraints stem from the fact…
The climate change attribution problem is addressed using empirical decomposition. Cycles in solar motion and activity of 60 and 20 years were used to develop an empirical model of Earth temperature variations. The model was fit to the…
Conventional definitions of habitability require abundant liquid surface water to exist continuously over geologic timescales. Water in each of its thermodynamic phases interacts with solar and thermal radiation and is the cause for strong…
Due to climatic changes, excessive grazing, and deforestation, semi-arid and arid ecosystems are vulnerable to desertification and land degradation. As aridity increases, vegetation cover often self-organizes into spatial patterns before…
Extrasolar terrestrial planets with the potential to host life might have large obliquities or be subject to strong obliquity variations. We revisit the habitability of oblique planets with an energy balance climate model (EBM) allowing for…
Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the importance of inertia to continued growth in energy consumption. Drawing from thermodynamic arguments, and using 38 years of available statistics between…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
The Circular Economy (CE) is regarded as a solution to the environmental crisis. However, mainstream CE measures skirt around challenging the ethos of ever-increasing economic growth, overlooking social impacts and under-representing…
In this paper, we take a brief look at the advantages and disadvantages of dominant frameworks in consciousness studies -- functionalist and causal structure theories, and use it to motivate a new non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework of…
Energy system models underpin decisions by energy system planners and operators. Energy system modelling faces a transformation: accounting for changing meteorological conditions imposed by climate change. To enable that transformation, a…
The stability of Earth's climate on geological timescales is enabled by the carbon-silicate cycle that acts as a negative feedback mechanism stabilizing surface temperatures via the intake and outgas of atmospheric carbon. On Earth, this…
Spatial patterns are widely observed in numerous nonequilibrium natural systems, often undergoing complex transitions and bifurcations, thereby exhibiting significant importance in many physical and biological systems such as embryonic…
Economic Complexity (EC) methods have gained increasing popularity across fields and disciplines. In particular, the EC toolbox has proved particularly promising in the study of complex and interrelated phenomena, such as the transition…
We explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with…
Main aim of this topical issue is to report recent advances in noisy nonequilibrium processes useful to describe the dynamics of ecological systems and to address the mechanisms of spatio-temporal pattern formation in ecology both from the…