Originally published in 1999, The Kyoto Protocol provides a detailed discussion on the history, terms and implications of the Kyoto Protocol 1997. It explains the meaning of provision on emissions trading and other flexibility mechanisms, and provides a quantitative analysis using the Energy and Environment Programme's emissions trading model. It also contains the full text of the Kyoto Protocol and developments at the 4th Conference of the Parties in December 1998. This book will be of interest to academics working in the field of climate change, as well as the broader area of environment and sustainability.

The adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997 was a major achievement in the endeavour to tackle the problem of global climate change at the dawn of the 21st century. After many years of involvement in the negotiation process, the book's two internationally recognised authors now offer the international community a first hand and inside perspective of the debate on the Kyoto Protocol. The book provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of the history and content of the Protocol itself as well as of the economic, political and legal implications of its implementation. It also presents a perspective for the further development of the climate regime. These important features make this book an indispensable working tool for policy makers, negotiators, academics and all those actively involved and interested in climate change issues in both the developed and developing world.

This book aims to provide a new vision of how algorithms are the core of decision support systems (DSSs), which are increasingly important information systems that help to make decisions related to unstructured and semi-unstructured decision problems that do not have a simple solution from a human point of view. It begins with a discussion of how DSSs will be vital to improving the health of the population. The following article deals with how DSSs can be applied to improve the performance of people doing a specific task, like playing tennis. It continues with a work in which authors apply DSSs to insect pest management, together with an interactive platform for fitting data and carrying out spatial visualization. The next article improves how to reschedule trains whenever disturbances occur, together with an evaluation framework. The final works focus on different relevant areas of DSSs: 1) a comparison of ensemble and dimensionality reduction models based on an entropy criterion; 2) a radar emitter identification method based on semi-supervised and transfer learning; 3) design limitations, errors, and hazards in creating very large-scale DSSs; and 4) efficient rule generation for associative classification. We hope you enjoy all the contents in the book.

This book presents a selection of the best papers given at the XXIV International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management. The conference is promoted by ADINGOR (Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Ingeniería de Organización) and organized by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It took place at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Leganés, Spain) in July 2020. Ensuring Sustainability embodies the latest advances in research and cutting-edge analyses of real case studies in industrial engineering and operations management from diverse international contexts. It also identifies business applications for the latest findings and innovations in operations management and the decision sciences.

This book gathers cutting-edge studies on the relationship between energy innovations, economic growth, environmental regulation, promotion of renewable energy use, and climate change. Building on the research discussed in the editor’s previous book Decarbonization and Energy Technology in the Era of Globalization, it discusses recent developments such as the impacts of globalization and energy efficiency on economic growth and environmental quality. It also explores the ways in which globalization has benefited green energy development, e.g. the expansion of new technologies and cleaner machinery, as well as the problems it has caused. Written by respected experts, the respective contributions address topics including econometric modelling of the behaviour of and dynamics between economic growth and environmental quality, aspects of energy production and consumption, oil prices, economic growth, trade openness, environmental quality, regulatory measures, and innovations in the energy sector. Providing a comprehensive overview of the latest research, the book offers a valuable reference guide for researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students in the fields of renewable energy development and economics.

Carbon Politics and the Failure of Kyoto charts the framework and political evolution of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations and examines the ensuing failure of the international community to adequately address climate change. The focus is not on the science or consequences of climate change but on the political gamesmanship of the major players throughout the UNFCCC negotiation process. More than an updated history of the subject matter, this book provides a detailed study of the carbon targets which became the biggest influencing factor on the reaction of nations to Kyoto’s binding agreements. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the leading nations’ motives, including the US, China and Germany, in entering the negotiations, in particular, their economic interests. Despite the effort to combat climate change in politics that the negotiations represent, the book concludes that an agreement which requires almost 200 very different nations to agree on a single protocol is doomed to failure. The book offers a novel contribution to our understanding of this failure and suggests alternative frameworks and policies to tackle what is arguably the most complex political issue of our time.

In Environmental Ethics and Medical Reproduction, Dr. Cristina Richie uses the term "medicalized reproduction" (MR) to describe the impact of technology on human reproduction, including from pre-conception gamete retrieval, in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and birthing suites. Unlike other areas of high-carbon health care, such as organ transplantation or chemotherapy, medicalized reproduction does not treat, cure, or prevent disease. It is supported by an economized medical industry, and as such, is open for ethical scrutiny. This book considers how technology has fundamentally changed the discussion on biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, and reproductive ethics.

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 full and 14 short papers were accepted to the main track from 156 submissions; 212 full and 43 short papers were accepted to the workshops/ thematic tracks from 479 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: Part I: ICCS Main Track Part II: Advances in High-Performance Computational Earth Sciences: Applications and Frameworks; Applications of Computational Methods in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing for Advanced Simulations; Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges for Computer Science Part III: Classifier Learning from Difficult Data; Computational Analysis of Complex Social Systems; Computational Collective Intelligence; Computational Health Part IV: Computational Methods for Emerging Problems in (dis-)Information Analysis; Computational Methods in Smart Agriculture; Computational Optimization, Modelling and Simulation; Computational Science in IoT and Smart Systems Part V: Computer Graphics, Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence; Data-Driven Computational Sciences; Machine Learning and Data Assimilation for Dynamical Systems; MeshFree Methods and Radial Basis Functions in Computational Sciences; Multiscale Modelling and Simulation Part VI: Quantum Computing Workshop; Simulations of Flow and Transport: Modeling, Algorithms and Computation; Smart Systems: Bringing Together Computer Vision, Sensor Networks and Machine Learning; Software Engineering for Computational Science; Solving Problems with Uncertainty; Teaching Computational Science; Uncertainty Quantification for Computational Models *The conference was held virtually.

The Kyoto Protocol became law in February 2005--eight years after its conception as a framework for reducing emissions and a full four years after the United States abandoned it. But while President George W. Bush embarrassed much of the scientific community by challenging the veracity of the greenhouse effect, and thus the impetus for Kyoto, officials elsewhere expressed far different concerns. Reading the Kyoto Protocol explores their qualms and objections to everything from Kyoto's controversial policies on emissions trading to the question of a "post-Kyoto era." Contributors include internationally known philosophers, researchers, and environmentalists.