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Wakes and the dynamic interactions of multiple wakes have been a focal point of numerous research endeavours. Traditionally, wake interaction studies have focused on wakes produced by similar bodies. In contrast, the present study positions a non-shedding porous disc adjacent to periodically shedding solid discs of varying diameters and dimensional shedding frequencies. Using hot-wire measurements, we explore the intriguing interaction between these wakes. Remarkably, our findings reveal that the wake of the non-shedding disc acquires oscillations from the wake of the shedding disc, irrespective of their distinct frequencies. We demonstrate high receptivity of the porous disc’s wake and connect our findings to real-life applications.
Recent geopolitical events remind us of the need for a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. This Commentary argues that a diverse, bottom-up approach is essential to ensure sustainability science progresses, even amid shifting political processes that threaten international collaboration and funding. Locally driven solutions that value diverse perspectives and knowledge systems are vital for resilience. By supporting community-led action, sharing ideas across regions, and recognising that sustainability means different things in different places, we can build a more flexible, inclusive, and resilient path toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in an uncertain world.
Technical summary
Recent geopolitical events provide a stark reminder of the need to build a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. Centralised, top-down models of sustainability science are likely to be vulnerable to disruptions, from pandemics to wars, that threaten progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and jeopardise decades of collaborative advancement that are needed to support future progress. We argue that a decentralised, community-empowered model provides the foundation needed for a resilient sustainability scientific effort. By prioritising local solutions, embracing diverse knowledge systems, and fostering horizontal knowledge exchange, we can create a more resilient and adaptable framework. Sustainability science initiatives need to elevate successful local initiatives, adopt transdisciplinary approaches that include underrepresented knowledge holders, build decentralised knowledge-sharing networks, and recognise that sustainability has different meanings across cultural and geographical contexts.
Social media summary
Decentralised sustainability science: local, diverse, and resilient in a fractious and unpredictable world.
Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive overview within the constraints of urban water management evolution. The chapter navigates through historical periods, including the municipal sanitary engineering period, stormwater quantity regulation period, and sustainable development period, showcasing the transitions in addressing urban water challenges. It delves into the strategies employed during each phase, outlining the progression from traditional approaches to contemporary sustainable practices. The chapter also examines the evolution of terminology related to urban drainage and elucidates various types of urban drainage systems. Furthermore, it explores the significance of low impact development (LID) facilities in controlling urban runoff, emphasising their role in sustainable water management. The management of flood risk is a focal point of the chapter, with insights into strategies and practices employed globally, offering a comparative analysis of flood risk management approaches in selected countries.
The inertial migration of neutrally buoyant spherical particles in viscoelastic fluids flowing through square channels is experimentally and numerically studied. In the experiments, using dilute aqueous solutions of polymers with various concentrations that have nearly constant viscosities, we measured the distribution of suspended particles in downstream cross-sections for the Reynolds number ($\textit{Re}$) up to 100 and the elasticity number ($El$) up to 0.07. There are several focusing patterns of the particles, such as four-point focusing near the centre of the channel faces on the midlines for low $\textit{El}$ and/or high $\textit{Re}$, four-point focusing on the diagonals for medium $\textit{El}$, single-point focusing at the channel centre for relatively high $\textit{El}$ and low $\textit{Re}$, and five-point focusing near the four corners and the channel centre for high $\textit{El}$ and very low $\textit{Re}$. Among these focusing patterns, various types of particle distributions suggesting the presence of a new equilibrium position located between the midline and the diagonal, and multistable states of different equilibrium positions were observed. In general, as $\textit{El}$ increases from 0 at a constant $\textit{Re}$, the particle focusing positions shift from the midline to the diagonal in the azimuthal direction first, and then inward in the radial direction to the channel centre. These focusing patterns and their transitions were numerically well reproduced based on a FENE-P model with measured values of viscosity and relaxation time. Using the numerical results, the experimentally observed focusing patterns of particles are elucidated in terms of the fluid elasticity-induced lift and the wall-induced elastic lift.
Chapter 9 investigates the unprecedented flooding of the Seine and Marne rivers in June 2016. Focussing on the core of Île-de-France, managed by SIAAP, the chapter assesses the flood’s impact on the sanitation system and subsequent effects on the quality of the Seine and Marne rivers. Drawing data from sanitation departments and SIAAP, it details the hydrographic network, rainfall and hydrological situations. The study evaluates the sanitation system’s operation, discharged volumes, sewage treatment plants and environmental impacts, emphasising water quality parameters such as nitrogen, orthophosphates, dissolved oxygen and bacteriology. Despite challenges, the assessment highlights effective management, treatment system performance and the importance of real-time control systems, providing insights for future flood response and urban sanitation planning.
Chapter 8 provides a comprehensive exploration of the challenges posed by urban flooding on water quality, focussing on the case study of Mumbai. With India’s rapid urbanisation, the strain on water infrastructure has led to issues such as dropping water tables, inadequate drainage and contamination of stormwater drains with raw sewage. The chapter delves into the aftermath of the severe flooding in Mumbai, particularly the 2005 mega flood, discussing its impacts on water quality and the outbreaks of diseases such as gastroenteritis, malaria and dengue. Mitigation measures and the government’s initiatives, like the AMRUT mission, are highlighted. The chapter underscores the importance of learning from Mumbai’s experience to develop effective strategies for other cities facing similar challenges in the context of urban flooding and water quality management.
The Earth is approaching irreversible tipping points. Markets, democracy, and technology alone cannot address these complex crises. Future Design (FD) tackles these challenges by activating human ability to prioritise future generations’ happiness over immediate gains. This research expands the FD framework and reviews a decade’s worth of studies, deepening our understanding of FD’s potential in creating mechanisms for long-term societal well-being and environmental sustainability.
Technical summary
The Earth is approaching irreversible tipping points across multiple domains. Despite advances in markets, democracy, and science, these systems systematically fail to prioritise future generations’ well-being – creating what we term ‘future failures’. New mechanisms are needed, such as FD. Originating in Japan in the early 2010s, FD aims to design, experiment with, and implement mechanisms that activate our futurability – the ability to prioritise the happiness of future generations over immediate gains – to tackle future failures. This paper introduces presentability and pastability alongside futurability, extending the FD framework. Placing various FD studies from the past decade within this framework, this study reviews mechanisms for activating these abilities and examines how activating one ability affects the others. These abilities are ‘leverage points’, as defined by Meadows. We explore the path to a paradigm shift by designing and using mechanisms that activate these points. This paper also highlights unknowns about FD and potential directions for its development, providing a comprehensive overview of its current state and future prospects in addressing global challenges.
Social media summary
Future Design: A new approach to global crises, prioritising future generations over immediate gains.
Flax plays an important role in art, especially for painters. Flax seeds are ground into linseed oil, which is used as binder for oil paints, and fibers are used to make linen canvas as a support for paintings. Because of the rapid growth of flax, linen canvas fiber and linseed oil are considered good candidates for the radiocarbon (14C) dating of paintings. However, the time necessary to transform flax into a linen canvas must be estimated in order to determine the completion date of paintings. Based on the paintings of the French painter Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), who titled his works with the day on which he considered them finished, the time elapsed between completion of the painting and harvesting of the flax was determined for 25 canvases and 13 oil binders. For the canvases, three periods can be distinguished between 1956 and 1981 with durations of 5±1 years in the 1950s, 3±2 years in the 1960s and 11±3 years for the paintings from the 1970s–1980s. For the oil, the time elapsed between the date indicated by the artist and the 14C calibrated date has a mean value of 3±2 years in the 1950s and 1960s and more than 15 years in the 1970s. These long time lags could be due to the massive change in flax processing, which was relocated, resulting in longer times between flax harvesting and canvas marketing. The determination of these time lags enables us to better interpret the 14C dating results for the paintings.
To date, the direct effects of complete glacier disappearance on the specialized fauna associated with this habitat have never been investigated in situ. The Trobio glacier, once the largest in the Bergamo Alps (Italy), completely vanished in 2023 due to climate-induced retreat. This study reconstructs Trobio glacier’s evolution from the Little Ice Age to its disappearance and assesses the impact of glacier extinction on two cryophilic endemic terrestrial arthropod species: the ground beetle Nebria tresignore and the springtail Desoria orobica. Historical maps, literature and recent field data were used to trace glacier changes, while biological surveys evaluated species occurrence to be compared with past (last 10 years) records. These data reveal a direct link between the recorded glacier retreat and species elevational shift: Nebria tresignore shifted upslope about 30 m a-1 following glacial retreat. Desoria orobica showed a dramatic population collapse, with average densities dropping from 80 to < 4 individuals per sample since 2020, likely due to the deeply modified glacial environment. These findings highlight the vulnerability of glacier-dependent biodiversity and the urgent need to document glacier extinction and to identify and protect microrefugia for cold-adapted species in rapidly changing alpine environments.
A partial differential equation governing the evolution of the joint probability distribution of multicomponent flow observations, drawn randomly from one or more control volumes, is derived and applied to examples involving irreversible mixing. Unlike local probability density methods, this work adopts an integral perspective by regarding a control volume as a sample space with an associated probability distribution. A natural and general definition for the boundary of such control volumes comes from the magnitude of the gradient of the sample space distribution, which can accommodate Eulerian or Lagrangian frames of reference as particular cases. The formulation exposes contributions made by uncertain or stochastic boundary fluxes and internal cross-gradient mixing in the equation governing the observables’ joint probability distribution. Advection and diffusion over a control volume’s boundary result in source and drift terms, respectively, whereas internal mixing, in general, corresponds to the sign-indefinite diffusion of probability density. Several typical circumstances for which the corresponding diffusion coefficient is negative semidefinite are identified and discussed in detail. The framework is a natural setting for examining available potential energy, the incorporation of uncertainty into bulk models, and establishing a link with the Feynman–Kac formula and Kolmogorov equations that are used to analyse stochastic processes.
This study is devoted to the analysis of capillary oscillations of a gas bubble in a liquid with an insoluble surfactant adsorbed on the surface. The influence of the Gibbs elasticity, the viscosities of the liquid and gas, as well as the shear and dilatational surface viscosities, on the damping of free oscillations is examined. Dependences of the frequency shift and the damping rate on the parameters of the problem are determined. In the limit of small viscosities and neglecting the surfactant surface diffusion, a simplified dispersion relation is obtained, which includes finite parameters of surface viscosities and Gibbs elasticity. From this relation, conditions are identified under which the damping of capillary oscillations can occur with a small frequency. Numerical solutions of the full dispersion relation demonstrate that a non-oscillatory regime is impossible for the considered configuration. An additional mode associated with Gibbs elasticity is discovered, characterized as a rule by low natural frequency and damping rate. Approximate relations for the complex natural frequency of bubble oscillations in a low-viscosity liquid in the presence of a surfactant are derived, including an estimate of the contribution of the gas inside the bubble to viscous dissipation. An original Lagrangian–Eulerian method is proposed and used to perform direct numerical simulations based on the full nonlinear Navier–Stokes equations and natural boundary conditions at the interface, accounting for shear and dilatational viscosities. The numerical data on the damping process confirm the results of the linear theory.
Chapter 10 provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges posed by rapid urbanisation in China and its impact on urban stormwater management. The chapter introduces the “Sponge City” initiative, whose implementation started by the Chinese government in 2013, as a strategic response to address these challenges. Drawing inspiration from low impact development (LID) and best management practices (BMPs), the Sponge City concept represents a paradigm shift from conventional rapid draining to a more sustainable and flexible stormwater management approach. The authors discuss the key concepts, implementation strategies and technical guidelines for Sponge City construction, supported by case studies from pilot cities such as Shenzhen, Tianjin and Xi’an. The Sponge City initiative reflects a harmonious blend of ancient Chinese wisdom and modern Western stormwater management concepts, offering a promising solution for sustainable urban development in the face of rapid urbanisation in China.
Chapter 7 addresses the challenges of water supply during floods focusing on flood relief/emergency relief operations settings rather than well-organised urban ones. The chapter outlines principles for planning, source identification, water development and quality control in emergency flood situations. It explores key aspects like potable water availability, including quantity, quality, sources, accessibility and reliability. The care and preparation of water supply systems from various sources are discussed, along with emergency preparedness, treatment plant operation, chemical conservation, water testing, bacteriological tests, and disinfection methods. The chapter concludes with insights into water purification techniques and overall management of water supply and quality issues during flood emergencies.
This study examines tephra layers from lacustrine sediment cores collected in Patagonian Andean Range, correlating them with volcanic sources from the southern segment of the Southern Volcanic Zone (SVZ). Ten distinct tephra layers, spanning approximately the last 2000 yr, were identified across four cores from Lakes Rivadavia, La Zeta, Brychan, and Theobald, from ∼42°S to 44°S. Mostly geochemical and mineralogical analyses of tephra components (pumice, glass shards, scoria) reveal that the Chaitén, Michinmahuida, and Huequi volcanoes are the main sources of tephra in the region. Identified eruptions include four from Chaitén (ca. 2008 CE, ca. twelfth, ca. eighth, and fourth to fifth centuries), two from Huequi (beginning of the nineteenth and, possibly, fourteenth centuries), and four from Michinmahuida (ca. seventeenth to eighteenth, thirteenth, eighth, and ca. second centuries). Four of these tephra layers also have potential as isochronous marker beds in the region, allowing a preliminary reconstruction of their regional dispersal patterns. Some tephras may represent previously undocumented or scarcely documented eruptions. These findings suggest that the eruptive frequency in the southern SVZ has been underestimated, emphasizing the need for further research to expand the eruptive history and more accurately assess the volcanic hazards associated with this region.
Embedding climate resilient development principles in planning, urban design, and architecture means ensuring that transformation of the built environment helps achieve carbon neutrality, effective adaptation, and well-being for people and nature. Planners, urban designers, and architects are called to bridge the domains of research and practice and evolve their agency and capacity, developing methods and tools consistent across spatial scales to ensure the convergence of outcomes towards targets. Shaping change necessitates an innovative action-driven framework with multi-scale analysis of urban climate factors and co-mapping, co-design, and co-evaluation with city stakeholders and communities. This Element provides analysis on how urban climate factors, system efficiency, form and layout, building envelope and surface materials, and green/blue infrastructure affect key metrics and indicators related to complementary aspects like greenhouse gas emissions, impacts of extreme weather events, spatial and environmental justice, and human comfort. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.