Dan Van der Horst

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment

In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, utility-scale wind power developments are hotly contested. Steady local resistance is presented by indigenous and peasant "anti" wind power groups, whilst "pro" wind local stakeholders, including many landowners, are perceived as antagonistic to the arrival of wind power. Engaging the energy justice...

Suburban neighbourhoods pose challenges to decarbonisation, due to high car-dependency and relatively large and energy inefficient homes. Home ownership dominates suburbia, thus putting responsibility on households to adopt measures to decarbonise their domestic lives and transportation. This paper examines household perspectives on the feasibility...

This paper is the first to explore public perceptions about a particular market niche for hydrogen; mobile generators. By utilising a combined research approach including in-situ surveys and online focus groups, this paper explores what festival audience members and residents who live near festival sites think about the displacement of incumbent di...

Structural change in the agricultural economy may result in the abandonment of agricultural buildings, creating rural brownfield sites. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, post‐agricultural brownfields have become very common in Central and Eastern Europe. Our aim is to uncover and understand the reuse preferences for 16 reuse options, amon...

In the debate on the decarbonisation of heat, renewable electricity tends to play a much more dominant role than green gases, despite the potential advantages of gas in terms of utilising existing transportation networks and end-use appliances. Informed comparisons are hampered by information asymmetry; the renewable electricity has seen a huge gri...

The aim of this study is to better understand the recent changes in the feedstocks of anaerobic digestion plants, the driving forces behind these changes and consequent opportunities to strengthen closed-cycle energy production and promote the circular bioeconomy approaches. The study analyses Poland – a country with a highly diversified agrarian s...

Given the ambitious policy target to become net zero carbon by 2050, what role can local authorities play in the decarbonisation of housing? An examination is presented of six local authority energy service models relevant to housing retrofit in Britain. Local authorities have an important role, with local knowledge about housing stock and economic...

This CREDS working paper aims to identify and understand diversity in sub-national ambitions on climate action across the UK. Comparative analysis between sub-national governments helps to provide insights into the drivers and mechanisms by which geographically bounded institutions and actors, including partnerships between Local Authorities, Local...

The significance of using games for educational purposes is well documented in the literature. It has been argued that serious games can draw more engagement and user attention to topics when compared to conventional web or print media, including concepts around energy education. The Smarter Household project has deployed an energy indoor health mo...

Smart metering of domestic energy use allows consumer feedback through in-home displays (IHDs), websites or smart phone apps. Research has illustrated the need for additional 'sense-making' information to help households make informed energy-related decisions. This study investigates how household members respond when energy consumption data is int...

Engagement with students about social and environmental dilemmas can be an important pathway to help to transform attitudes and behaviours in society over time. This paper seeks to further the links between research on energy behaviour and demand-side management in the home with educational research about learning processes. We analyse ‘free-form’...

The current rollout of smart meters for gas and electricity, both in the UK and internationally, will help suppliers to better forecast demand and supply accurate bills to consumers. However, even with an in-home display (IHD), the benefits of a smart meter to a domestic customer are limited by the so-called ‘double invisibility’ of energy [1] and...

In response to climate change and limited fossil fuels, renewable energy is being heavily promoted throughout Europe. Despite general support for green energy, perceived landscape change and loss of landscape quality have featured heavily in opposition campaigns. The COST Action ‘Renewable Energy and Landscape Quality’ (RELY) systematically investi...

This paper includes our preliminary findings about user interface design of an interactive and engaging 'home energy dashboard' application to understand energy consumption and indoor environmental conditions while stimulating energy efficiency behaviour and learning to make smart choices. Social housing customers, a social housing provider and a U...

Policies and strategies to develop renewable energy and the rates of successful deployment vary from country to country. Academic literature is rife with examples of recurring problems and malpractice in the implementation of renewable energy projects. We could see each national and sectoral effort as an 'experiment' in the early phase of our attem...

Facilities for generating renewable energy form important elements in the rural landscape of the Czech Republic. The distribution of these facilities is highly uneven due to various natural and socioeconomic factors. In our paper, we are focusing our attention on one of the important facilities for the generation of renewable energy in the Czech Re...

Gender relations mediate access to the environment in a variety of ways, through formal institutions such as customary law or informal social norms operating at the household level. This is particularly so in rural areas of the global south that are highly dependent on natural resources for livelihoods. The environmental entitlements framework is u...

The development of renewable energy sources has been primarily justified on the ground of environmental policies and energy security, but new jobs opportunities and establishment of new economy sectors may be equally important co-benefits from investments in this sector. The main goal of this paper is to assess the employment benefits of investment...

The global economy relies heavily on oil and gas resources. However, hydrocarbon exploitation projects can cause significant impacts on the environment. But despite the production of numerous Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) to identify/mitigate such impacts, no study has specifically assessed the quality of EISs for both onshore and offshore...

The Rural Sustentável project aims to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, reduce poverty, and promote sustainable rural development in the Brazilian Amazon and Atlantic Forest biomes: by restoring deforested and degraded land, and by facilitating and promoting the uptake of low carbon agricultural technologies. The project offers farmers a) access t...

There is fundamental agreement about the environmental benefits of renewable energy technologies, but unintended consequences arising from their deployment are frequent sources of conflicts. The Czech Republic has committed itself to supply 13.5% of its electricity consumption from renewable sources by 2020. High state incentives for renewable ener...

In March 2012 the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion 'strongly endors[ing] the opportunity for Scotland to champion climate justice'. To date, discussions around climate justice within Scottish policy have largely focussed on international dimensions. Questions remain as to what climate justice means at home in Scotland. This article a...

“Energy literacy” is of great interest to those researching sustainable consumption, particularly with regard to its relationship to domestic energy use. This paper reflects on the pedagogic aspects of fieldwork recently carried out by undergraduate geography students in their own homes to assess energy-related technologies and practices, and how t...

Despite much rhetoric about the 'greening business' agenda and various initiatives to promote the valuation of ecosystem services and natural capital, the corporate sector has been slow to integrate social and environmental factors into core business models and to extend this integration across their supply chain. Our effort to narrow this thematic...

The issues of ecosystem services, flood control and its social and economic impacts rank among the most complex and difficult disciplines in environmental education. For an effective interpretation and education it is necessary to choose an appropriate teaching methods. This paper presents the game design and game use experience of a two interactiv...

This paper presents a tool created to support municipal energy saving policies; in particular the tool is used to map energy consumption of the residential building stock and visualise and evaluate various retrofitting interventions. Firstly, a database of the retrofit characteristics of the housing stock of the area is created by using statistical...

Peri-urban floodplains located in upstream reaches of urban areas play a key role in the resilience of social-ecological systems. The need to adapt to increasing flood risks by protecting these natural assets represents a huge challenge for many cities facing rapid expansion and limited financial resources for the mitigation of environmental impact...

Peri-urban floodplains located in upstream reaches of urban areas play a key role in the resilience of social-ecological systems. The need to adapt to increasing flood risks by protecting these natural assets represents a huge challenge for many cities facing rapid expansion and limited financial resources for the mitigation of environmental impact...

Renewable energy receives state support in most western countries, with the aim to reduce fossil fuel use and thus mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Communities may benefit from these subsidies by setting up community-owned renewable energy projects, but to date their overall contribution to UK renewable energy targets has been very small. The...

This paper proposes a set of criteria for evaluation of serious games (SGs) which are intended as effective methods of engaging energy users and lowering consumption. We discuss opportunities for using SGs in energy research which go beyond existing feedback mechanisms, including use of immersive virtual worlds for learning and testing behaviours,...

We argue that reading the local agricultural landscape is a prerequisite to understanding the plausible local impacts of external drivers for change, such as the introduction of new crops and technologies. Initially driven by a desire to understand the potential for small-scale farmers to produce jatropha biodiesel in a sustainable way, we started...

Classical conservation approaches focus on the man-made degradation of ecosystems and tend to neglect the social-ecological values that human land uses have imprinted on many environments. Throughout the world, ingenious land-use practices have generated unique cultural landscapes, but these are under pressure from agricultural intensification, lan...

A key reason why some ecosystem services are undervalued is because they are not easily perceived both by beneficiaries and potential providers. Hydrological modeling allows us to assess, quantify, and visualize the causal link between a particular human intervention and the positive or negative impacts this has on flooding. This study uses such a...

The deliberate damaging of oil pipelines (interdiction) is a key problem in the global petroleum industry and tends to have a strong spatial identity. It also has local, national and international implications for energy security and susceptible environmental receptors. This paper specifically focuses on Nigeria, a country often affected by complex...

In 1961, the Canadian geographer John D. Chapman recognized the rapid growth in demand for inanimate energy and the role geographers could be playing in explaining its patterns and importance in the growing world economy (Chapman, 1961). Fifty years later, Karl Zimmerer (2011) introduced a Special Issue of the Annals of the Association of American...

The quest for sustainable energy, one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, calls for more input from academics than 'simply' producing good science. Geographical imaginations are as old as storytelling and mapmaking, but this essay is neither about 'long ago and far away', nor about utopian energy futures. This is a call to geographers t...

Renewable sources of energies and its support have been recently experiencing wide public debate in the Czech Republic that varies from agreement to complete denial. Nevertheless support from national and EU sources is factor that heavily influenced dynamic development of this sector in last decade. Anaerobic digestion plants are one of options...

Význam energie generované z obnovitelných zdrojů v České republice neustále stoupá. Jedním ze sektorů obnovitelných zdrojů energií, který se v posledních letech dynamicky rozvíjí, je produkce bioplynu. Počet bioplynových stanic a jejich instalovaný výkon zaznamenal v poslední dekádě dramatický růst (z 11 instalací o výkonu 4,19 MW v roce 2002 na...

The book focuses on three areas of development driving the significant structural and functional changes that have been appearing in and shaping rural spaces: development of renewable energy, multifunctional agriculture, and rural tourism. In the rural context these three phenomena are related and significantly influence each other – or better to s...

Renewable sources of energies and its support have been recently experiencing wide public debate in the Czech Republic that varies from agreement to complete denial. Nevertheless support from national and EU sources is factor that heavily infl uenced dynamic development of this sector in last decade. Anaerobic digesti-on plants are one of options f...

The investment of private money in technological innovation is driven by the expectation of successful market penetration. This decision to invest is less risky when the innovation represents gradual improvement of existing technologies. The term disruptive innovation is used to describe the opposite case, i.e. innovations that are so different tha...

Landscape researchers have devoted relatively little attention to ordinary or everyday landscapes. This paper investigates differences in opinion about the attractiveness of these landscapes between groups of people according to their linguistic area and other socio-demographic charac-teristics. A survey of 1,542 Dutch and French speakers in Belgiu...

There is now a substantive body of academic literature which focuses on protests against local infrastructural developments. This literature is often characterised by the key words ‘NIMBY’ or (facility-) ‘siting controversies’. The rapid development of renewable energy technologies – which are largely sited in rural areas – has created a new versio...

To stand a chance of reclaiming their pre-colonial rights, indigenous peoples often have to deploy the tools and logic of the colonial state. Through a case study of community conservancy in Namibia, we demonstrate that the same holds for the practice of participatory mapping. We engage with J.B. Harley's deconstruction of maps and use our ethnogra...

A consequence of the increased requirements for renewable energy is likely to be allocation of more land to bio-energy crop production. Recent regulatory changes in England, as in other parts of the UK, mean that changes in land-use are increasingly subject to screening through Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). This paper reviews these regulat...

High fuel prices and concerns about energy security and anthropogenic climate change are encouraging a transition towards a low carbon economy. Although energy policy is typically set at a national level, tools are needed for people to engage with energy policy at regional and local levels, and to guide decisions regarding land use, distributed gen...

Oil spills pose significant environmental risks to river resources and ecosystem services, particularly at Pipeline River crossing locations. Flow duration curves (FDC) can provide useful information for water resource and environmental managers to support mainly river oil spill contingency planning and possibly, response efforts. Yet, no study app...

Every year 90 million tonnes of housed livestock manures are produced in the UK. This is a valuable reservoir of global phosphorus (P) and a point in the cycle where it is vulnerable to being lost from the terrestrial system. Improved manure management for the effective reuse of phosphorus is vital to simultaneously tackle a major source of water p...

Energy policy is an increasingly influential driver for landscape change in the Global North and in rapidly industrializing nations. The renewable energy industry and the large utilities installing wind farms are increasingly powerful actors in the global economy, and their activities are giving rise to a growing number of energy-landscape conflict...

The prospect of biofuels going ‘mainstream’ has drawn more attention to the social impacts of the production and use of transport biofuels. Since 2007, many media stories have appeared about alleged negative impacts of biofuels, notably the price of food going up or land-grab by plantation developers. These stories stand in stark contrast with the...

Many governments are now offering incentive payments to private land owners to adapt their management of the land in such a way as to safeguard or enhance ecosystem service provision. These payments are offered to individual land owners, whose decisions may be influenced by economic rationality, but also other factors. Understanding factors such as...

Understanding oil slick migration in rivers is important for effective spill response because rivers provide essential services for household purposes e.g. fisheries, water supply, transport, socio-cultural activities and recreation. Rivers constitute the second most important source of household water supply in Nigeria. Yet rivers are major recept...

Environmental Impact Assessment (ElA) is designed to anticipate and mitigate project impacts starting from the front-end engineering design stage to decommissioning. To further our understanding of the gaps between EIA predictions and the actual impacts of oil and gas projects, it may be plausible to independently review the quality of projects' EI...

10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2010.02.009 We suggest here an improved spatial connectivity approach (a network connectivity matrix model) and apply it to the oil pipeline network in Nigeria, as one measure of the robustness of such a network. Parts of the distribution network for oil supply have been disrupted in many parts of the world by incidents of delibe...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2011.07.012 In countries with insufficient investments in infrastructure and weak environmental governance, oil leakage from pipelines often occurs as a result of poor management and maintenance. Nigeria has its share of such incidents, but also, it suffers a large number of deliberate attacks (‘interdictions’) on...

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is designed to anticipate and mitigate project impacts starting from the planning to engineering design stage and construction. However, there is very little published literature on the quality of the resultant Environmental Impact Statements (EISs), especially for the hydrocarbon exploitation industries. The o...

A comprehensive protection and enhancement of ecosystem services cannot be limited to the management of designated protected areas. Much of the earth is privately owned and many governments are now offering incentive payments to these owners (farmers or other land managers) to adapt their management of the land in such a way as to enhance ecosystem...

The atmosphere is one of the most valuable resources on the planet and yet because it is largely invisible it tends to be taken for granted and is increasingly being exploited and commodified. This paper presents 12 Atmospheric Services that are vital to human well-being and the existence of the biosphere. The Total Economic Value of the atmosphere...

Despite broad public support for wind energy in principle, windfarm developments are often met with local opposition. There is theoretical, case-based and anecdotal evidence to suggest that ‘the local’ is relevant for planning process outcomes, but the nature and extent of this relevance is not so clear. We embark on an initial exploration of local...

Renewable energy is currently undergoing a renaissance. Efforts to achieve national targets that have announced forward invariably impact on the appearance of the physical landscape, and raise issues of spatial planning. Proponents of renewable energy—sometimes, planners themselves—have often taken the support of environmental NGOs and the wider pu...

The greatest proportion (83%) of renewable energy in the UK is derived from biomass. Despite this there has been little debate over the potential landscape impacts of biomass, and the sector is characterized by considerable levels of uncertainty. This paper explores the ways in which biomass is framed within the carbon debate, interrogating the tra...

The international Kyoto process and the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have progressively presented the evidence of global warming as the future and most urgent challenge for humanity. National and supra-national renewable energy policies are at the core of the strategies developed in order to face it. The ongoing cha...

Author Posting. (c) 'Copyright Holder', 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of 'Copyright Holder' for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Landscape Research, Volume 35 Issue 2, April 2010. doi:10.1080/01426390903557964 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01426390903557964)