Special attention has been paid to sustainable macroalgae cultivation in Europe. The question on where suitable cultivation areas lie, without conflicting with current marine socio-economic activities and respecting the environment, remains a great challenge. Considering 13 criteria critical to seaweed farming such as depth, shipping traffic, and distance to ports, this paper aimed to identify suitable and sustainable offshore areas on the West Coast of Sweden for the cultivation of the Sugar Kelp, Saccharina latissima. An integrated approach with the tools geographic information systems (GIS) and multi-criteria analysis (MCA) was used to aggregate the criteria by means of Boolean and weighted linear combination (WLC) techniques. The Boolean method singled out 544?km2 as suitable, whereas the WLC method indicated 475?km2 as highly suitable. Both techniques complement each other in finding optimal sites. Furthermore, the integrated models excelled in providing an overview for effective spatial decision-making that fosters sustainable development of macroalgae cultivations within marine and coastal systems.
Highlights
To the authors’ knowledge no study on seaweed aquaculture site selection has been conducted using such a range of criteria with the purpose of including sustainability aspects within a comparative GIS-MCDA.
The large areas identified on the West Coast of Sweden as suitable highlight the potential of this new industry and the complexity of associated marine spatial planning.
Boolean and weighted linear combination methods were applied and compared, providing valuable insights in the selection of methods for spatial decision-making support. These insights should support a more sustainable development of macroalgae cultivation in the region, as well as a more resilient marine spatial planning process for blue growth strategies.
To identify key factors of transport CO2 emissions and determine effective policies for emission reductions in fast-growing cities, this study establishes transport CO2 emission models, quantifying the influences of polycentricity and satellite cities and re-examining the effects of per capita GDP and metro service. Based on the model results, we forecast future residents’ urban transport CO2 emissions under several scenarios of different urban and transport policies and new energy technologies. We find nonlinear quadratic growth relationship between commuting CO2 emissions and per capita GDP, and the elasticities of household and individual commuting CO2 emission to per capita GDP are 1.90% and 1.45%, respectively. Developing job-housing balanced satellite cities and self-contained polycentric city can greatly decrease emissions from high emitters and can contribute to about 51–82% of the emission reductions by 2050 compared with the scenario of business as usual (BAU). Promotion of electric vehicles, electric public buses, metros, and improvement of traditional energy efficiency contributes to about 48–57% of the emission reductions by 2050 compared with the BAU. When these policies and technologies are combined, about 90% of the emissions could be reduced by 2050 compared with the BAU, and the emissions will be about 1.2–4.9 times of the present. The findings suggest that fostering polycentric urban form and job-housing balanced satellite cities is the key step for future transport CO2 emission reductions. Metro network promotion, energy efficiency improvement, and new energy type applications can also be effective in emission reductions. 相似文献