Research Publications

There is an increasing global interest in scaling up urban agriculture (UA) in its various forms, from private gardens to sophisticated commercial operations. Much of this interest is in the spirit of...

Automated Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) systems depend entirely on the reliability of sensor readings. This paper fills an important gap in the literature by pinpointing the distinction between ...

Objectives and Scope of This ReportFood system stakeholders need to better understand, integrate, and create action related to food systems and climate change, beyond just agricultural production. Thi...

Accounting for 10% of the electricity consumption in the US, artificial lighting represents one of the easiest ways to cut household energy bills and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by upgrading to ene...

Policy and market conditions remain the primary barriers to stacking energy storage services, reducing its cost-competitiveness with traditional technologies. This article explores two cases that s...

The bioenergy mandate under Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA 2007) will result in large scale land-use changes in the US if it is ever fully realized. Energy crops such as switchgrass (Pa...

The human toxicity impact (HTI) of electricity produced from shale gas is lower than the HTI of electricity produced from coal, with 90% confidence using a Monte Carlo Analysis. Two different impac...

This is a set of eleven reports based on a review and summary of existing literature.  The set includes seven specific foods, two overaching issues, and two background documents. Tomatoes ...

Increasing urbanization places cities at the forefront of achieving global sustainability. For cities to become more sustainable, however, the infrastructure on which they rely must also become mor...

Despite the shared focus on nature-society relations, until recently, industrial ecology and political ecology have not substantively engaged each other. This is curious given that both fields stud...

Despite our declared era of ‘Big Data,’ we lack information on the flows of energy, water, and materials that support modern societies. These data are essential to understand how ecologies and the ...

Ancillary services are required to balance supply and demand in electric power systems. Demand response may provide attractive options for these services, through means such as varying the power co...

Pewabic is a not-for-profit ceramic studio and pottery school in Detroit, Michigan.  The organization employs full- and part-time ceramic artists and technicians to produce a variety of vessels a...

International trade separates the consumption of goods and services from their production as well as human health impacts associated with production-based environmental emissions. It is one of the ...

Estimating the embodied emissions in electricity has been a challenge due to the interconnectedness of electrical grids. Previous studies use a variety of methods that are often inaccurate or difficul...

Car-sharing companies have shown increasing support in the adoption of fuel efficient cars to reduce CO2 emissions and to meet heterogeneous demand. In this paper, we consider location design and r...

Existing studies on the evaluation of CO2 emissions due to electricity consumption in China are inaccurate and incomplete. This study uses a network approach to calculate CO2 emissions of purchased...

The environmental and social problems related to global production and consumption are matters of concern. One component of this is how the express delivery industry is continuing to grow and devel...

Large-scale energy storage may effectively meet the needs of several grid applications. However, understanding the environmental impact of energy storage for these grid applications is challenging ...

Urban systems draw on food, energy, and water outside of their physical boundaries, and create environmental impacts which extend beyond city borders. All three of these resources face growing dema...

Rural renewable electrification in Liberia is a key component for the development of the country.  The Rural and Renewable Energy Agency has taken leadership in promoting this sector.  With ...

What is urban resilience and how can we make cities resilient in the face of environmental and socioeconomic threats in a way that is sustainable and just? Despite the rapid growth of publications and...

Generation of and demand for electricity must match in real time for the electricity grid to operate reliably. To correct for mismatches, system operators deploy a suite of ancillary services, incl...