Sharif Digital Repository

Climate change as a serious environmental issue has been subjected to many management studies. Yet the issue of allocating global responsibilities to emission reduction in a reasonable way is an unconcluded challenge. Two main groups of responsibility allocation systems are production-based responsibilities (PBR) and consumption-based responsibilities (CBR). PBR takes territorial emissions within borders into account that is applied to global policy makings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In contrast, CBR considers the emission transfers through international trade and allocates the responsibilities based on the goods and services being consumed by each country. Both... 

The effects of climate change have disturbed the living patterns of many people around the globe during the past decade and it has been a key contributing factor to mass migrations. The ‘adaptation’ approach is currently considered the most effective available solution for balancing out these effects. As a result, many researchers are trying to find out how to increase the adaptive capacity of individuals and communities in response to the effects of climate change. The effect of place attachment as a factor which connects human societies to the surrounding environment is undeniable. In this regard, the present study attempts to analyse the role of place attachment in increasing the... 

The adverse effects of climate change will impact all regions around the world, especially Middle Eastern countries, which have prioritized economic growth over environmental protection. However, these impacts are not evenly distributed spatially, and some locations, namely climate change hotspots, will suffer more from climate change consequences. In this study, we identified climate change hotspots over Iran—a developing country in the Middle East that is facing dire economic situations—in order to suggest pragmatic solutions for vulnerable regions. We used a statistical index as a representative of the differences in climatic parameters for the RCP8.5 and RCP4.5 forcing pathways between... 

The Karkheh River Basin is one of the Iranian river basins with a high potential for hydropower production. While Iran is actively constructing large dams in the Basin for hydropower production, climate change is putting the future status of hydropower production in the Basin in question. Using MODSIM, sensitivity of the Basin to climate change is investigated by estimating stream flow changes and the resulting impacts on hydropower production for different climate change scenarios. Results indicate considerable reductions in annual and seasonal hydropower production due to the expected dry climatic conditions under the existing operation rules. Findings highlight the necessity for revision... 

The effects of climate change have disturbed the living patterns of many people around the globe during the past decade and it has been a key contributing factor to mass migrations. The ‘adaptation’ approach is currently considered the most effective available solution for balancing out these effects. As a result, many researchers are trying to find out how to increase the adaptive capacity of individuals and communities in response to the effects of climate change. The effect of place attachment as a factor which connects human societies to the surrounding environment is undeniable. In this regard, the present study attempts to analyse the role of place attachment in increasing the... 

Carbon accounting is necessary for designing effective climate change mitigation policies. A proper and fair accounting method should motivate both the producers toward cleaner production methods and the consumers toward reducing the embodied emissions of their consumption. This research work proposes a new approach to map the production chain of carbon emissions in which every subsystem is responsible for the level and efficiency of its production activities and embodied emissions for providing its economic activities or final demands. The exergy cost formation concept is used to track the emissions in the production chain. The results of this accounting present the total carbon loads on... 

Based on International Energy Agency studies, achievement of 450 ppm CO2-equivalent emission target in global emission means that the CO2 emissions in 2050 must be reduced to %50 of 2005 level, and this implies that a portfolio of emission reduction policies and strategies need to be exploited through current century. At the present time, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Technology is a dominant strategy among all the long-term carbon abatement strategies in many countries. Nevertheless, its potential as a climate mitigating option will be proved, only if it is implemented in the countries which are developing at a great pace and taking advantage of fossil fuels in order to afford their... 

A comprehensive investigation of historical hydro-climatic changes at a county level is an essential prerequisite of developing any adaptation or mitigation strategies to deal with the destructive impacts of climate change. In this study, spatial distributions and trends in thirty-seven hydro-climatic mean and extreme indices across Iran were analyzed based on the state-of-the-art reanalysis datasets (ERA5-Land and AgERA5) at the county level from 1986 to 2015 using several nonparametric approaches such as multiple modified Mann–Kendall statistical tests and Sen’s Slope estimator. Their interannual oscillations were also examined using continuous wavelet transform to portray a complete... 

This paper formulates flow of energy from primary resources and import routes to different socio-economic sectors by making use of Long-Range Energy Alternatives Planning (LEAP) model. It presents a baseline of how Iran’s future production and consumption patterns evolve. It also seeks plausible scenario for renewable energies utilization and evaluates its mitigation potential and economic aspects. Model results indicate that exploitation of a "not-too-strict" package of renewable sources featuring 10 GW of wind and 19 GW of hydro by the end of 2035 will lead to CO2 emissions to be reduced up to an amount of 190.7 million tons in the study period. By accounting for the opportunity costs... 

The increment of using fossil fuels has caused many perilous environmental problems such as acid precipitation, global climate change and air pollution. More than 50% of the energy that is used in the world is wasted as heat. Recovering the wasted heat could increase the system efficiency and lead to lower fuel consumption and CO2 production. Organic Rankine cycle (ORC) which is a reliable technology to efficiently convert low and medium temperature heat sources into electricity, has been known as a promising solution to recover the waste heat. There are numerous studies about ORC technology in a wide range of application and condition. The main objective of this paper is to presents a... 

Today's world energy-related challenges, ranging from anthropogenic climate change to continuous growth of demand for different energy forms, have enforced planners of energy systems (ESs) to concentrate on more optimal and eco-friendly operation and/or expansion planning methodologies. In this context, increased interdependencies of gas, heat and electricity ESs have recently encouraged the planners to design operation and/or expiation strategies in an integrated manner in favor of a new concept, the so-called “Energy Hub” (EH). Although this concept has been employed so far in a multitude of studies, but its real nature, advantages, difficulties, importance or inevitability aspect, and... 

The aim of this paper is to develop a simulation framework to minimise the cost associated with commercial greenhouse yields (production cost). Greenhouse energy demand and yield production models are coupled with a cost model to investigate the interaction between energy consumption costs and yield production benefits. The coupled model is defined as an optimisation problem to determine the optimal values of decision variables (e.g. cover material, heating and cooling technology, inside temperature and relative humidity set points, plant density, etc.), which result in minimum production cost as the objective function. The results show that the integrated energy demand-crop yield production... 

The combined effects of climate change and growing water demand due to population growth, industrial and agricultural developments cause an increase in water scarcity and the subsequent environmental crisis in river basins, which results in conflicts over the property rights and allocation agreements. Thus, an integrated, sustainable and efficient water allocation considering changes in water resources due to climate change and change of users’ demands is necessary. In this study, the drainage basin of Zarinehrood was chosen to evaluate the function of selective methods. Assessing climate change impact scenarios of the Fifth IPCC reports, e.g., RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5, have been... 

Global climate change and anthropogenic impacts lead to alterations in the water cycle, water resource availability and the frequency and intensity of floods and droughts. As a result, developing effective techniques such as hydrological modeling is essential to monitor and predict water storage changes. However, inaccuracies and uncertainties in different aspects of modeling, due to simplification of meteorological physical processes, data limitations and inaccurate climate forcing data limit the reliability of hydrological models. Satellite remote sensing datasets, especially Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) data which can be obtained from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE),... 

This paper addresses the impacts of climate change on hydrology and water resources in the Karkheh River Basin (KRB), which is the third most productive basin in Iran and has great potential for hydropower generation. The total potential capacity of reservoirs in this basin is more than 15 ×109 Mm3, of which 40% has been built. The sensitivity of the KRB to potential climate change is investigated by simulating basin streamflow response under different climate change scenarios. A conceptual rainfall-runoff model (IHACRES) was first calibrated by using hydrological and streamflow observations. The model was then applied by downscaling two general circulation model outputs (CGCM3 and HadCM3)...