Webinar Collection

CRES Webinar (01/2021) -Visualising Energy Resilience in Nepal

Chair
Dr. Katie Chong
Speakers
Dr. Long Seng To
Dr. Louise Reardon
Dr. Xinfang Wang
Dr. Asha Singh

Event Time and Date
20 May 2021, 3PM (GMT+1)

A Participatory Approach for Visualising Energy Resilience in Nepal from a Whole-System Perspective

Understanding how and in what ways to foster resilience within energy systems is a complex issue, encapsulating a diversity of factors. This complexity creates barriers to effective decision-making towards resilience, where a whole-systems approach is required amidst a relatively siloed governance landscape.

To support decision making in this area, this talk discussed how a bottom-up participatory approach can be valuable in enabling decision-makers and key stakeholders to visualise the complexity of energy systems resilience, and in turn help facilitate the application of a whole-systems approach to the design of sustainable policy interventions towards more resilient systems.

The talk outlined the participatory causal loop mapping approach, highlight the method’s value in identifying the variables and visualising interconnections affecting energy resilience in Nepal, as a case study. Nepal has experienced energy supply disruption from both long-term energy supply deficiency and short-term shocks. The outcomes of our bottom-up participatory workshop with key stakeholders show the significant benefit of using this approach to enable participants visualising the complexity of energy systems resilience and creating a shared understanding of ways in which resilience can be improved.

CRES Webinar (02/2021) – Plastics: Friend or Foe?

Chair
Dr. David Tompkins
Speaker
Dr. Marloes Peeters

Event Time and Date
6 July 2021, 3PM (GMT+1)

Plastics: Friend or Foe? Polymers for monitoring of environmental contaminants

Understanding how and in what ways to foster resilience within energy systems is a complex Molecularly Imprinted Polymers (MIPs) are porous materials that enable specific binding of their respective target molecules; while they mimic the affinity of natural recognition elements, they are low-cost, robust (can withstand extremes of pH and T), and can be used for templates as small as ions to large macromolecules. Furthermore, MIPs are produced using animal-free technology, an important aspect considering still 1 million animals are used in the EU per year and there is a current ban on use of animal-derived antibodies.

In this talk, I will show how we can integrate MIPs into modified screen-printed electrodes (MIP-modified SPEs) and use them for sensing of environmental contaminants. Specifically, I will talk about aspects of reusability and use of paper as substrate material to promote sustainability. The sensors are used to measure caffeine, an anthropogenic marker of water contamination, a range of antibiotics, and microorganisms to provide information about water quality. I will demonstrate both our standalone thermal sensor platform that is used for rapid screening of samples to more common techniques involving electrochemical detection. Our sensors can be used for fast and low-cost detection performed on-site considering the enhanced stability of the MIPs, which holds great potential for the determination of contaminants in environmental samples. Moreover, this is a platform technology and can be adapted to an array format containing a range of markers.