Energy and Environment Encyclopedias Articles

Frequent and severe heat waves, increased droughts, always more violent and sudden thunderstorms, and hailstorms: extreme weather events are multiplying as climate change intensifies, affecting more and more societies. How can science adapt its tools to better observe and predict these phenomena and help manage their impacts?

In the current energy transition context, geothermal energy represents a prime source of renewable and local energy for heating and cooling buildings. To harness this energy, energy geostructures are an innovative solution. They allow a significant reduction in installation costs compared to conventional technologies, since they exploit structures that are an integral part of building construction. This technology, which is still under development, is starting to be deployed in Europe and could well see a significant boom in the coming years.

More and more voices are being raised to denounce the impacts of our societies on the environment and question past and current economic choices. The environment and the economy are pitted against each other. How do economic theories integrate (or not) environmental aspects? How have they evolved? Finally, are they now compatible with sustainable development?

The general principle of geothermal energy is well known: drawing heat from the ground to meet energy needs. Geothermal energy can be used for heating, either individually or in a district heating network, and even to produce electricity under certain conditions. Discover in this article the physical mechanisms at the origin of this underground heat, different existing techniques to exploit it, as well as a new lead that could considerably increase the geothermal potential in France in particular.

There are a multitude of different types of air pollutants, both man-made and natural. These have had, and continue to have, adverse effects ranging from local to global in scale. Discover through this synthetic article the main aspects of these atmospheric pollutions, their history, and their consequences on the environment and health.

At the national level or global level, there are environmental inequalities linked to the natural characteristics of living areas, the level of development of populations, exceptional climatic events, etc. The social impacts of these inequalities are thus very heterogeneous, and the implementation of policies can also increase or reduce them. What do these inequalities exactly overlap? What are the associated issues and the possible measures to address them?

Diesel engines and wood-burning fireplaces are regularly accused of causing numerous deaths through fine particles (PM 2.5). These volatile elements are a major component of air pollution and therefore a public health lever. However, there are various sources of fine particles as well as ultra-fine particles, such as those from petrol engines, which are difficult to quantify. The measurements now being carried out only provide an overall mass concentration in the air. Therefore, does the current harmfulness of these technologies really correspond to that perceived and communicated to the general public?

Carbon atoms are basic elements of all living things. Via photosynthesis, plants, algae and some bacteria use energy from the sun to pull CO2 from our atmosphere. Then, the processes of respiration and decomposition of all these living things returns the CO2 back to the atmosphere. Beyond this short life cycle is a longer, slower geological cycle, which stores carbon in limestone and in fossil hydrocarbons. Limestone comes from marine organisms’ shells. Meanwhile, hydrocarbons are the result of the burial of organic sediments. Burning fossil fuels today has the effect of short-circuiting this slow cycle, CO2 is released very faster than it is captured, overruling the natural regeneration processes, leading to the rapid accumulation of CO2 in our atmosphere, which then causes global warming, as well as ocean acidification, which disrupts marine life.

The purpose of environmental taxation is simple: to change people’s behaviour by increasing the cost of actions that hurt the environment. It has the added benefit of making people aware of the effects their actions have on biodiversity, natural resources and public health – just to name a few. Environmental taxation includes a wide variety of possible implementation measures, which highlights how useful a tool the tax system can be to protect the environment.

Imagine this: You are hiking across the magnificent Lubéron massif in Southern France. You pass a herd of sheep and a shepherd watching over them, but around the next corner on your path hides an industrial installation, lying quietly between two hills: offices, pumping stations, and wellheads (as you see in Figure 1). You probably do not realise that, at a depth of one kilometre under your feet, lies a significant portion of France’s strategic oil reserves. It’s nearly 10 million tonnes (almost two months’ consumption) spread throughout about 40 caves that are each several hundred metres high, in a subterranean layer of salt. In this article, we’ll explore the challenges, opportunities, risks and costs, of this type of formation.

Understand the “climate machine” with this introduction to the most important concepts, including how the climate system works, and what contributes to its complexity. What is the different between climate and meteorology or weather? What are the essential elements of the climate system? These and other basic questions are answered in this article. Additionally, we discuss both the internal and external causes of climate change by learning about forcing and feedback, the concept of climate predictability and different time scales, and briefly introduce climatology and related sciences (including physics, chemistry, biology and geology).

300,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 and $2 to 4 billion per year by 2030: this is the estimated impact of climate change, mainly through increased malnutrition, disease and heat-related stress. Agriculture is indeed very vulnerable to temperature variations while populations of virus-carrying insects will increase tenfold thanks to a more favourable environment. The radical change in living conditions, which differs from region to region, with the emergence of "climate refugees" (250 million expected in 2050), nevertheless makes the forecasting exercise difficult. Everyone remembers the 2003 heat wave in which 70,000 people died in Europe in August alone.