For David Bollier, cities are at a crossroads. As smart city initiatives and data collection increases, it’s essential that citizens use the ideas of the commons to retain control of the services that matter to them, and to ensure these work for the people of the city, not just for business or bureaucracy, he argues.

Do young people know what a smart city is? Do they care about saving energy and preserving the Earth’s resources? “Rooting sustainability starts on the benches of schools,” affirmed UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova at the recent UN Climate Change Conference ( COP22 ) in Marrakech, Morocco.

Like every year, December 3 will be a United Nations sanctioned International Day of People with Disability (IDPwD) . The aim is to increase public awareness of the conditions of disabled people and, at the same time, to celebrate their achievements and contributions.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

Part of the issue with small-scale, home-based renewable energy systems is that initial setup costs can be high. This puts such installations out of reach for some sectors of society, even if they could benefit financial in the long run with lower household bills.

As more and more cities launch projects to become smart, a substantial need is emerging: the ability to share the various models across the world so that they can be replicated anywhere.

Suburbs are often spaces of poverty, unemployment and urban decay. But now many peripheral areas are becoming laboratories of innovation , hosting initiatives for a sustainable future.

It's a brand new sector: the first steps date back to 2012. Today energy crowdfunding is a way of financing solar panel or wind turbine projects.

In the wake of the Brussels bombings, the French blogger Francis Pisani addressed the quandaries of modern, connected European cities facing terrorist threats .

Over recent decades, research on innovative food processing technologies has been carried out to identify ways to combat pathogens while reducing the need for chemical preservatives and improving the nutritional properties of the food at the same time.

The European construction industry and home-builder citizens are increasingly aware of sustainable choices. Some solutions can be more expensive than others, although sometimes this only concerns the construction phase.

In January 2005, a severe storm swept across Northern Europe, from Ireland to Russia. More than 500,000 homes were left without power, with Denmark and Southern Sweden being particularly hard-hit.

All too often, conversations on renewable energy meander toward the same end: green technology is a nice thing, though it has to become economically viable before widespread adoption becomes the norm. ...

Bioenergy represents two-thirds of the energy produced from renewable sources in Europe, though biomass sustainability is not taken for granted.

Traditionally our electricity grids were designed to move power from large nuclear and fossil fuel power plants to consumers, but renewable energy will see changes to allow smaller power generation from wind and solar to be hooked up to the grid.

Cooling and heating public buildings remains an expensive and a mostly unresolved issue in Europe. According to the not-for-profit think-tank Buildings Performance Institute Europe , Spain has about 11.

“The building sector is responsible for more than 30% of global energy demand and round about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions”, says Peter Graham from the Global Buildings Performance Network in Paris.

In Europe, households are responsible for 32% of greenhouse gas emissions and 42% of energy. Cement production alone contributes to 5% of manmade CO 2 emissions .

The worldwide energy consumption of buildings is expected to grow by 45% from 2002 to 2025, according to the SMART 2020 study carried out by the international NGO The Climate Group.

Noise pollution is one of the main public concerns associated with operating wind turbines. To tackle this problem, technicians at a Spanish windfarm near Burgos are assembling a new device on the blades.