Sustainable development of energy, water and environment systems

Abstract

The SDEWES conference serves as a venue for world-wide scientists and specialists and those interested in learning about sustainability to present research progress and to discuss the state of the art, the future directions and priorities in the various areas of sustainable development. It is aimed at improvement and dissemination of knowledge on methods, policies and technologies for increasing the sustainability of development by de-coupling growth from natural resources and replacing them with knowledge based economy, taking into account its economic, environmental and social pillars, as well as methods for assessing and measuring the sustainability of development, regarding energy, transport, water, environment and food production systems and their many combinations.Coming back to Dubrovnik, the 8th SDEWES Conference peaked its success, attracting authors from 63 countries with 554 presented papers at 61 regular sessions, 10 special sessions and 5 poster sessions, 7 invited lectures and 2 panels.Two special issues of the 8th SDEWES are going to be published in the journals of Energy and Applied Energy.The Energy special issue includes 24 selected SDEWES papers which cover a variety of energy issues, starting from biomass, biofuels, wind and solar, geothermal energy, natural gas, synthetic fuels, through alternative energy conversion systems, storage and power system operation at energy supply side, as well as, heat engines, absorption refrigerators and heat exchanger networks, desalination units, modelling and greenhouse gases emissions reduction at energy demand side.Hence, the impact of subsidies on the wood biomass use for energy production in the EU is analyzed in Moiseyev et al. [1], while on the Latvian case, different policy strategies for promotion of wood fuel use specifically in district heating systems are evaluated in Romagnoli et al. [2].