In the event of natural disasters, industrial production sites can be affected by both direct physical damage and indirect damage. The indirect damage, which often exceeds the direct ones in value, mainly arises from business interruptions resulting from the impairment of information and...

Economic systems are increasingly prone to complexity and uncertainty. Therefore, making well-informed decisions requires risk analysis, control and mitigation. In some areas such as finance, insurance, crisis management and health care, the importance of considering risk is largely acknowledged...

In many countries a large part of the building stock will have to be maintained, renovated, rehabilitated or even removed in the next few decades. Although profitability will be one of the major requirements to be met when these works are carried out, there will be more and more emphasis on the...

Livestock manure and crop residue can be processed in an environmentally acceptable way through anaerobic digestion to generate biogas, also, under an integrated production scheme, providing fertiliser and heat as by-products. The most valuable use of the produced biogas (i.e. for the generation...

In Chile, the energy that can potentially be obtained from the digestion of sludge generated from wastewater treatment processing (WwT) was calculated using a holistic approach. The different pathways of electricity generation via the direct combustion of biogas and upgraded biogas produced as...

The past 15 years has been characterized by a high density of record-breaking weather extremes in Europe. These include the extratropical cyclones Lothar, Kyrill and Xynthia across western and mid Europe; the major floods in the UK, Germany and eastern Europe; the heat waves in 2003 and 2007 and,...

This chapter explores the feasibility and possible benefits of amending the German Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) motorway toll system by adopting different pricing and revenue use rules. Economic efficiency and equity effects are assessed using the MOLINO partial equilibrium model and the ASTRA...

After a long period of political debate and technological difficulties, the German heavy goods vehicle (HGV) toll system was finally put into operation in January 2005. This paper is divided into two main parts. The first section discusses the German HGV toll in detail, with a focus on fee...