Description / Table of Contents: A comprehensive review on the development of zero waste management -- Crop residue management practices for sustaining soil health -- Biostimulation of microbes for enhanced oil removal from petroleum hydrocarbon contaminated soils: A zero waste remediation approach.

Description / Table of Contents: Part 1: General issues and interdisciplinary approach to deep-sea mining -- Chapter 1: Deep-sea mining and the water column – an Introduction -- Chapter 2: Interdisciplinary approach to Deep Sea Mining - with an emphasis on the water column -- Part 2: Engineering concepts for deep-sea mining, ore handling and processing -- Chapter 3: Contemporary Technological Progress in Deep Sea Mining -- Chapter 4: Handling of bulk solids in a marine environment, from seabed to shore -- Chapter 5: Considerations for using Polymetallic Nodules as alternative metal extraction resource: focus on energy related applications -- Part 3: Approaches to sea surface and water column monitoring -- Chapter 6: Understanding deep-sea turbulence for environmental impact assessments -- Chapter 7: Turbidity at the source: aiming for minimized sediment dispersion during deep-sea mining -- Chapter 8: Applicability of satellite data in the selection of protected areas within REMP- Chapter 9: Assessment of possible environmental impacts using flow-cytometric analysis of metal toxicity in marine phytoplankton -- Part 4: Regional assessment of water column characteristics and management -- Chapter 10: Atmospheric and oceanographic characteristics of the BGR exploration area in the CCZ and model simulations of suspended sediment transport -- Chapter 11: Ocean current observations throughout the water column in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, tropical North Pacific -- Chapter 12: Biogeochemistry of the South Indian Ocean – Water Masses, Nutrient Distribution, and Sinking Particulate Matter -- Chapter 13: Multilevel assessment and options for the management of cumulative impacts on pelagic ecosystems in the north-eastern tropical Pacific Ocean -- Chapter 14: Marine mammal communities and human activities in the north-eastern tropical Pacific: Conservation and management strategies -- Part 5: Legal, policy and economic issues of deep-sea mining -- Chapter 15: The water column and seabed mining in the Area – selected environmental legal issues -- Chapter 16: Economic policy considerations for deep-sea mining -- Chapter 17: A Comparative Economic Scenario of Nodules Mining in Pacific and Indian Oceans, Associated Challenges and Their Prospects -- Chapter 18: Economic potential of polymetallic nodules mining.

Description / Table of Contents: Part I. The City and Social Justice: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations -- Chapter 1 Addressing Social and Spatial Justice Issues in American Universities: A Review of Architecture and Urban Planning Curricula -- Chapter 2 Architecture, Urban Planning and Social Justice: The Role of Transformative Design in Achieving Spatial Justice -- PART II. Designing for Social Justice: Urban “Shelters” -- Chapter 3 Social Justice and the Right to Housing as a Transformative Vision: American and Global Examples -- Chapter 4 Spatial Design and Management of Refugee Camps: Al Za’atri and Its Transformation from a Temporary Shelter to a Permanent “Slum” -- Chapter 5 Punishment or Transformative Rehabilitation? Architectural Design and Management of Maximum-Security Prisons in the United States and Norway -- PART III. Designing City Spaces and Social Justice: Contested Urban Landscapes -- Chapter 6 Architecture of Racial Segregation and Landscapes of Collective Memory: Transformation of the South Carolina State House Grounds -- Chapter 7 Reclaiming and Transforming the Cities During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: American and Global Examples -- Epilogue -- Chapter 8 Architects, Planners, and Social Activists as Transformative “Spatial Agents”: Prospects and Limitations.

Description / Table of Contents: The Built Environment in the Context of the New Urban Agenda: An Overview -- The Built Environment as a Value Chain Process.-The Biophysical Environment: Key Ingredient in Shaping the Built Environment -- Geoinformatics and Land Surveying Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Spatial Planning Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Construction and Civil Engineering Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- The Role of architecture in implementing the New Urban Agenda -- Sustainable Urban Mobility and the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Quantity Surveying Steering the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- A review of the contribution of the real estate sector towards the attainment of the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe -- Institutions, Laws and Governance Structures for Developing and Managing the Built Environment: Elephant in the Room for Advancing the New Urban Agenda -- Climate Resilience and the New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe: The Role of the Built Environment Disciplines and Practice -- The New Urban Agenda in Zimbabwe: Policy and the Future .

Description / Table of Contents: Environmental Science -- Exploration of Resources and Environmental Protection -- Energy Economics and Management.

Description / Table of Contents: General introduction -- Navigating the dimensions of poverty from global goals to local realities -- Definition and importance of formal land titling -- Sub-Saharan Africa's customary practices and land titling policy reforms -- Land titling and its effects -- Is land titling beneficial for active poverty reduction?- Overcoming constraints and empowering small and medium-sized enterprises through land titling -- Summary and policy implications.

Description / Table of Contents: Chapter 1. Urbanization and urban climate in high-density cities -- Chapter 2. Origins and evolution of the Local Climate Zone classification system -- Chapter 3. Current popular methods for LCZ mapping -- Chapter 4. Recent improvements in supervised pixel-based LCZ classification -- Chapter 5. Application of LCZ to urban heat island studies -- Chapter 6. Application of LCZ to land use and land cover studies -- Chapter 7. Application of LCZ to wind environment studies -- Chapter 8. Application of LCZ to energy consumption and carbon emission modeling -- Chapter 9. Application of LCZ to thermal comfort and health-related studies -- Chapter 10. Application of LCZ to time-series urban morphology detection -- Chapter 11. Application of LCZ in mesoscale meteorological model simulations and climate projection -- Chapter 12. Integration of LCZ to planning strategies -- Chapter 13. Conclusions and outlook.

Description / Table of Contents: Quantifying species responses to the effects of changing environmental conditions is critical for a better understanding of how climate change affects invasion, expansion, and contraction of marine coastal species. Climate change is leading to modifications in the marine coastal environment, to conditions not experienced before; climate change results in that marine organisms experience simultaneous changes in several environmental variables (=drivers: e.g. temperature, salinity, food). How simultaneous changes in multiple drivers are experienced depend on species-specific traits (e.g. physiological tolerance, developmental time); for instance, co-occurring native and non-native species may experience and respond to climate change in different ways. In addition, within species, responses to multiple drivers may vary across populations and environmental gradients. The general objective of this thesis was to quantify the effects of environmental drivers (temperature, salinity and food limitation) on performance of native and non-native species with focus on larval stages and using crabs as model systems. There were two main objectives, first to compare native and non-native species in the responses to multiple environmental drivers and to quantify larval responses to temperature across their distribution range. I focused on larvae because they play a critical role in population dynamics: larvae are important for the dispersion and connectivity of populations, and are more sensitive to changes in environmental conditions than adults. I used three ecologically relevant species of coastal areas of the North Sea and North Atlantic Ocean as models: Hemigrapsus sanguineus, Carcinus maenas and Hemigrapsus takanoi. C. maenas is native to Europe; Hemigrapsus spp. are both non-native species in the European coast, where they coexist with C. maenas as juveniles and adults in the benthos. I used factorial experiments rearing larvae from hatching to megalopae at different combinations of temperature and other environmental drivers (salinity, food limitation). Larval performance was quantified as survival, duration of development, and growth. The first series of result show that both non-native (Hemigrapsus spp) species had higher performance (high survival, shorter duration of development and high growth rates) than the native C. maenas at higher temperatures and at moderately low salinities (18 – 24 °C, 20 – 25 ‰). These results are comparable to another non-native species in Europe, the Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis. In H. sanguineus, larvae show moderate level of tolerance to limited access to food at high temperature, which contrasted to the low tolerance shown in native C. maenas. Experiments and modelling show that the nature of the multiple driver response depends strongly on the metric used to measure time, where my emphasis is on biological time (time to metamorphosis). The results from the populations comparisons showed species and gradient-specific responses. For H. takanoi, distributed over a salinity gradient (North Sea -Baltic Sea), larvae from the North Sea populations always showed higher survival and faster development compared with those from the Baltic Sea. The population near the limit of the distribution showed very low survival, suggesting that subsidies or complex ontogenetic migration patterns are needed for population persistence. Results did not show genetic differentiation among the studied populations in the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit one gene (COI) suggesting that there is high connectivity among populations. For C. maenas distributed across a latitudinal gradient (South: Vigo, Spain; North: Bergen and Trondheim, Norway) and reared under different temperatures (range 6 to 27 °C in steps of 3 °C), there was little variation in survival and growth among populations. However, larvae from the Norwegian populations had a slightly shorter duration of development at low temperatures than those from Vigo, this response has an adaptive value in that it could sustain survival in scenarios of reduced temperature, by shortening the larval phase, when mortality rates are high. Besides, results from this experiment (as well as for the mentioned above) showed high intrapopulation variability in larval performance which has a potential to affect range expansion of the above-mentioned species. Variation in the responses of larval stages to the effects of different environmental drivers highlights the importance of using physiological descriptors to quantify the performance of marine invertebrates to changing environments. Larval responses vary in rates of survival but also in the duration of time to achieve metamorphosis, as well as the rate at which the organisms grow, with concomitant effects on post-metamorphic success, which in seasonal habitats may strongly depend on temperature. The results from the thesis highlight the importance of quantifying the responses of marine invertebrates to changing environmental conditions, considering different species and species distributed across different gradients as well as variations among and within species.

Description / Table of Contents: State-of-the-art climate models and computing infrastructure are now able to resolve mesoscale ocean eddy activity in many contexts. However, in computationally intensive model applications, such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) or simulations of the high latitudes, grid resolutions largely remain eddy-parameterizing due to resource constraints. These missing mesoscale processes are understood to be crucial drivers of ocean circulation and climate and may become still more relevant in the context of anthropogenic climate change. To overcome the computational limitations of traditional models, multiscale modeling strategies have been developed which can distribute grid resolution and resources based on resolution requirements and research goals. Here, several strategies for resolving the mesoscale using multiscale methods are described and the results of their implementation with the Finite volumE Sea ice Ocean Model (FESOM) are reported. In the first application, FESOM participates in CMIP6 with the strategy of concentrating computational resources on the major eddy-rich regions of the ocean. The resulting simulations are able to reproduce between 51 and 82% of observed eddy kinetic energy (EKE) in each region and project substantial climate change impacts on mesoscale activity for the first time at such a scale. The results include a poleward shift of eddy activity in most western boundary currents; EKE intensification in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), Brazil and Malvinas Currents, and Kuroshio Current; EKE decline in the Gulf Stream; and intensification of Agulhas leakage. In a second application, FESOM is used to concentrate computational resources in the Southern Ocean and cost-reducing modeling strategies are used to enable fully eddy-resolving climate change projections with the regionally focused grid. The simulations faithfully reproduce EKE in the Southern Ocean and project intensified eddy activity in line with the CMIP6 analysis. The climate change signal is difficult to reliably discern from natural variability after 1 °C of warming, but becomes clear after 4 °C. Finally, the high-resolution Southern Ocean simulations are used to investigate high-latitude eddy activity where ice cover and low eddy size make observations and traditional modeling methods difficult. Detailed, near circumpolar mesoscale activity is detected and related to gyre circulation, the Antarctic Slope Current, and bathymetry. There is a strong seasonal cycle which suppresses winter eddy activity at the surface and selectively dampens cyclonic eddies. After prolonged anthropogenic warming, broad intensification of eddy activity occurs alongside regional decline, ACC eddy activity encroaches further into the high latitudes, and the seasonal cycle is diminished. Collectively, this work demonstrates the effectiveness of multiscale modeling in reducing the cost of resolving mesoscale ocean activity, facilitating the study of eddy activity and its interactions with the broader climate in previously unachievable contexts.