Preface

Introduction to the International Study of Civic and Citizenship Education

“…• Worldwide, the impact of human activity on the environment (especially on the global climate) as well as concern over the long-term sustainability of development have increasingly become key issues in debates about future political, social, and economic development (Dringer, 2013;Edenhofer et al, 2014). In many societies, awareness of the environment and its long-term protection are now widely regarded as integral to responsible citizenship and therefore has implications for the development of civic and citizenship curricula (Lotz-Sisitka, Fien, & Ketlhoilwe, 2013).…”

Life cycle assessment (LCA) of electricity generation technologies: Overview, comparability and limitations

“…Krauter [62] calculated GHG emissions one order of magnitude lower for Brazil than for Germany for the production of the same PV system in 2003, due to the cleaner Brazilian electricity mix (with an emission factor of 70 kg CO 2 -eq/MWh) compared with the German mix (530 kg CO 2 -eq/MWh). Furthermore, rapidly growing technologies such as wind or solar PV are subject to constant development [19], meaning that recent and up-to-date LCI data should be used to obtain consistent and realistic results. As mentioned in Section 2, a harmonization of technical parameters is available for LCA of nuclear power [25], solar PV [26,27] and wind power [28,29].…”

“…Two authors [46,55] proposed a solution to overcome this discrepancy by modeling the intermittent source with a storage system so that the services provided by the two alternatives are technically identical. Examples of other specific services provided by individual technologies that should be addressed in the functional unit are irrigation and flood control, regulation, voltage control, system black-start capability, and operating reserve [19,33,46].…”

“…In Section 5.1, the importance of considering acidification and eutrophication in addition to global warming was addressed. Other environmental burdens that could be relevant to electricity technologies, but not often included in an LCA, are noise (could be relevant for wind power, for example), odor (e.g., biomass), risk associated with long-term storage of nuclear waste, alteration of ecosystems and natural habitats (e.g., biomass and hydroelectric power), induced risk of seismicity and subsidence (e.g., extraction of fossil fuels and hydroelectric power) [19], water consumption and scarcity (e.g., biomass and hydroelectric power), and resource scarcity (e.g., rare earth metals in photovoltaic).…”

“…However, despite the importance of data reliability and the large number of studies that assess electricity generation, significant discrepancies can be found among LCI datasets for similar electricity technologies. Edenhofer et al [19] attributed these differences to technology characteristics, local conditions and LCA methodological aspects. Over the past two decades, LCA guidelines (e.g., ISO 14040 [20] and the ILCD handbook [21]) have been developed in an attempt to ensure coherence and comparability among LCA studies.…”