Gernot Stoeglehner

BOKU University | boku · Institute of Spatial Planning and Rural Development

Most of the world’s rivers are shaped by interacting social and natural processes. As Industrialised Riverine Landscapes (IRLs), they have become part of our critical infrastructure, vital for the water-energy-food nexus, but also subject to extreme events and vulnerable to biodiversity loss in the wake of global change. This situation poses major...

Zusammenfassung Das Ziel dieses Kap. 7 erfüllt eine wichtige Forderung aus dem letzten Klimawandelsachstandsbericht – nämlich, intensiv zu den Zusammenhängen zwischen Raumplanung und Klimawandel zu berichten. Denn die klimapolitisch bedenkliche Zunahme versiegelter Flächen in Österreich, die von den Expert_innen (z. B. Schindegger, 2020; Umweltbund...

Zusammenfassung Die Technische Zusammenfassung des APCC-Sonderberichts ″Landnutzung und Klimawandel in Österreich″ umfasst die Kernbotschaften der Kapitel 1–9. In ihr sind die Hauptaussagen zu den sozioökonomischen und klimatischen Treibern der Landnutzungsänderungen, zu den Auswirkungen von Landnutzung und -bewirtschaftung auf den Klimawandel, zu...

Zusammenfassung Die Zusammenfassung für Entscheidungstragende fasst die Inhalte des APCC Special Report „Landnutzung und Klimawandel in Österreich“ in komprimierter Form zusammen. Im Lichte des Zusammenhanges von Landnutzung, Klimawandel und gesellschaftlichem Wohlergehen werden die gegenwärtige Situation und zukünftige Entwicklungen in Österreich...

The successive upsurge in the penetration rate of battery electric vehicles (BEV) in the transport sector stresses electricity grids. Concurrently, batteries in BEVs add flexibility, while the reintroduction of battery swapping stations challenges home charging with regards to added flexibility. To address research gaps regarding the role of BEV ch...

Methodical and content related aspects of individual subject areas of spatial planning are presented, in particular on the subject of location in space, open space and green space development, building land development, infrastructure development and transport. Es werden methodische und inhaltliche Aspekte zu den einzelnen Sachbereichen der Raumpla...

Over the last 10 to 15 years, bioeconomy (BE) has evolved to a widely accepted alternative to the dominant use of finite raw materials around the globe. One of the essential prerequisites for the sustainable implementation of this future-oriented economic system is the consideration of spatial framework conditions. This review assesses whether spat...

Land is the key asset in the agricultural sector and hence land policy is one of the key elements that determine whether SDGs are achieved in developing counties or not. In developing countries, land titling programs have been seen as a strategy for addressing SDGs. Even though the government of Ethiopia launched the rural land registration and cer...

Well-implemented and functioning land administration systems are able to improve the wellbeing of rural households and support the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As cadastral data are an essential part of a modern land administration system for documenting and securing the boundaries of parcels, Ethiopia recently embarked on o...

This comprehensive review covers currently applied concepts and related spatio-temporal energy modeling tools for integrated demand-supply analyses of urban energy systems at district and city scales. The review introduces an assessment method that aims to determine the suitability of selected concepts and tools to provide decision support regardin...

In 2018 the European Union has recognized wastewater as a renewable energy source, particularly due to its thermal energy content. To create and further develop knowledge on the possible role that wastewater could play in the energy transition, this article pursues two objectives: 1) it presents an overview on the electric and thermal energy potent...

To counteract climate change, the application of renewable energy sources and their efficient use are of crucial importance. In this context, wastewater has also gained increased attention in recent years. For decades, wastewater treatment plants have applied the heat from digester gas combustion to supply internal demands. However, in the context...

Zusammenfassung Das Offene Technologielabor (Otelo) ist ein themenoffenes Treffpunktkonzept, welches gemäß dem Konzept nach Oldenburg (1989) den Dritten Orten zugeordnet werden kann. Die Besonderheit des Otelo-Konzepts liegt darin, dass es die Förderung von Innovation und Kreativwirtschaft in ländlichen Gemeinden und deren zukunftsfähige wirtschaft...

In view of advancing global warming, climate change adaptation and mitigation measures for buildings are becoming increasingly important. The following article discusses the question of whether current urban planning principles still provide a suitable framework for this purpose. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify and quantify the main...

River systems have undergone a massive transformation since the Anthropocene. The natural properties of river systems have been drastically altered and reshaped, limiting the use of management frameworks, their scientific knowledge base and their ability to provide adequate solutions for current problems and those of the future, such as climate cha...

In light of global warming and the energy turn, sector coupling has gained increasing interest in recent years, from both the scientific community and politics. In the following article it is hypothesized that efficient multifaceted sector coupling solutions depend on detailed spatial and temporal characteristics of energy demand and supply. Hence,...

Multiple pressures as urbanization, densification and climate change lead to the need for adaptation of sewer systems within urban environments. To increase the adaptive capacity of stormwater management systems, there is a shift towards decentralized nature-based solutions (NBS). Especially in densely built areas the availability of land can be a...

The mono-incineration of sewage sludge offers new opportunities to develop wastewater infrastructure as regional energy cells and resource recovery sites. At the moment, the most important products of this technology are electric energy and heat from combined heat and power plants, as well as ash for the recovery of phosphorus. With spatial analysi...

The implementation of the bioeconomy, i.e., the conversion of an economic system from fossil to biogenic, renewable resources, is seen as an important component of sustainable development by many bioeconomy strategies. What has hardly been taken into account and investigated are the spatial requirements for a sustainable transition to this new syst...

Digitalisation, referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, is gradually becoming part of all areas of life. The progressing digitalisation inspires new business models, restructures production processes and provides new revenue and value-producing opportunities. Simultaneously jobs are becoming abdicable and livelihoods can get threatened. To...

Climate protection targets call for a transition towards sustainable energy systems based on energy saving, more energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. The options for energy strategies are highly shaped by local and regional spatial contexts like urban, suburban or rural areas or small towns embedded in rural or suburban areas. Both energ...

Ökosysteme setzen sich aus belebten (biotischen) und unbelebten (abiotischen) Komponenten zusammen, die über Ökosystemprozesse miteinander verbunden sind. Hier stehen also Organismen (Pflanzen, Tiere, Mikroorganismen) in Wechselbeziehung mit ihrer Umwelt. Die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen den verschiedenen Komponenten können sich gegenseitig positiv...

In December 2018, wastewater was officially recognized by the European Union as a renewable source of energy, thus wastewater heat recovery can be included in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Given the fact that wastewater treatment plants can generate enormous heat surpluses, this decision gives leeway to couple the wastewater infrastru...

Environmental problems like climate change, loss of bio-productive land or loss of biodiversity are very likely to become the main drivers for environmental protection and are “strategic” by themselves, as they cannot be examined and solved on single use cases applying location and technical alternatives of projects – as normally applied for projec...

Agroforestry is attracting considerable attention in Ethiopia because of its potential for sustainable land use practices. As land tenure insecurity is a major limiting factor for sustainable land use practices in Ethiopia and developing countries in general, the Ethiopian government launched a rural land certification program to secure land tenure...

In recent years, most cities have experienced rapid population growth. Concurrently, international policies have called for substantial reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the resilience of energy-supply systems has become more important. Consequently, solutions to exhaust locally-available sources must be developed to minimize th...

Es werden methodische und inhaltliche Aspekte zu den einzelnen Sachbereichen der Raumplanung dargestellt, insbesondere zum Thema Lage im Raum, Freiraum- bzw. Grünraumentwicklung, Baulandentwicklung, Infrastrukturentwicklung sowie Verkehr. Methodical and content-related aspects of the individual subject areas of spatial planning are presented, in pa...

While climate agreements are made on an international level, the measures for mitigating climate change must be executed on a local scale. Designing energy and climate related strategies on the level of municipalities has been hampered by the lack of comprehensive data on the current status of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissi...

Background District heating systems have been gaining importance in the last years. However, local circumstances, e.g. regarding heat demand and available heat sources, are diverse and new technologies especially in the low-temperature sector arise. Central aim of this research is to identify the impact of integrated spatial and energy planning on...

Background In the past two centuries, energy consumption per capita has significantly increased. At the same time the fundamentals of energy provision have continuously developed towards fossil energy sources. This extended use of finite, unequally distributed and emission-intensive energy sources poses a challenge to both the energy, the climate a...

Background District heating is widely used for thermal energy supply and offers a broad range of benefits like the possibility to integrate decentral heat supply technologies or to foster the utilisation of renewable energy sources. Thus, district heating has the potential to gradually contribute to a more sustainable thermal energy supply and to c...

Living conditions and development perspectives are influenced by territorial inequalities. In this study, an assessment of long-term local and regional resilience was conducted in order to understand the structural strengths and weaknesses in spatial development in Austria. To gain new insights into the known development patterns, a new resilience-...

Quality discourses help to legitimate professions. This article therefore addresses the crucial question of how quality can be framed in spatial planning. Based on the context of spatial planning in Austria, this article introduces a normative framework for quality in spatial planning that considers the four dimensions of content, planning methodol...

Climate change is one of the great challenges of our times. In the search for renewable energy sources, wastewater has received increasing attention in recent years. This is due to the fact that it can serve as a source of electricity and heat supply, as well as a substitute for natural gas. The current literature frequently addresses more technica...

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Albania and Kosovo have invested considerable efforts to tackle present regional sustainability challenges on a research-based and strategic level. This happened through their traditional role as a provider of research and education. Additional activities fostering HEIs as a driver for sustainable regional de...

The transformation of the energy system to a renewable one is crucial to enable sustainable development for mankind. The integration of high shares of renewable energy sources (RES) in the energy matrix is, however, a major challenge due to the low energy density per area unit and the stochastic temporal patterns in which RES are available. Distrib...

In der Bewirtschaftung von Niederschlagswasser setzt sich in den letzten Jahren ein Trend in Richtung dezentraler, flexibler Lösungen und grüner Infrastruktur durch, um besser an künftige Herausforderungen wie den Klimawandel oder die Urbanisierung angepasst zu sein. Bei der Erweiterung oder Neuerschließungen von Siedlungsgebieten wird zunehmend de...

Die Planung der Wärmeversorgung eines Ortsteils oder einer Stadt bringt Heraus-forderungen, die mithilfe eines GIS gelöst werden können. In der Literatur finden sich dabei zwei The-men, die bis dato separat betrachtet wurden: die räumliche Gestaltung eines Fernwärmenetzes (FWN) sowie die Nutzung von Solarthermie-Anlagen zur Versorgung von bestehend...

The secure and affordable provision of energy considering social and climate goals poses a major challenge as studies confirm that global energy consumption and the dependency on fossil fuels increase annually. This leads to unwanted global uncertainties, interdependencies and environmental impacts due to the limitedness and unevenly distributed fo...

Resilience in the light of an energy crisis is the capacity to successfully deal with energy related disruptions while continuing to deliver affordable energy services to society. A resilient energy system can rapidly recover from a shock as it is able to reinvent itself. But what happens if an energy crisis hits us? Which functions and structures...

The main purpose of wastewater treatment plants concerns water pollution control. However, recent research has shown, that wastewater treatment plants also seem to be interesting from an energetic point of view, as they have high potentials for heat generation beyond common digester gas combustion. Focusing on a case study we intend to feed the ava...

This chapter shows how integrated spatial and energy planning is connected to further issues relevant to climate protection and the energy turn. It is discussed how consistent decision making can be organized and which actors have to be addressed in implementing integrated spatial and energy planning. As core of this chapter, 7 normative principles...

Based on a system analysis of elements dealing with spatial structures, energy demand, and energy supply, the most effective regulatory elements for integrated spatial and energy planning are identified. Based on these regulatory elements, the connections between energy efficiency and spatial structures, renewable energy provision and spatial struc...

The local and regional level are extremely important, not only because of potential solutions tied to regional and local spatial contexts, but also because of the multiple actors to be involved in the planning processes. In order to break down the visions for the spatial archetypes and the fields of action for everyday integrated spatial and energy...

So far, we have extensively discussed how the elements of a joint spatial and energy planning system are intertwined and how their effectiveness for proceeding toward the energy turn can be judged; we have drawn visions for integrated spatial and energy planning, described fields of action and principles as well as measures to achieve energy effici...

Spatial structures and spatial planning decisions have considerable influence on the realization of the energy turn as they shape energy demand on the one hand and potentials of renewable resource-based energy provision on the other hand. Spatial planning has the task of setting frameworks for the energy turn by securing and shaping energy-optimize...

This book focuses on spatial planning – an important determinant of energy saving and renewable energy supply. Revealing the key driving forces for spatial development supporting the shift towards energy efficiency and renewable energy supplies, it shows the importance of integrated spatial and energy planning approaches for a timely and sustainabl...

Although the main function of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) is to remove various constituents from wastewater it can also serve as a source of energy and other materials. The generated resources can be used either on-site at the WWTP or elsewhere at an adjacent infrastructure. In the course of a current national research project, the possibil...

Wastewater heat recovery via heat exchangers and heat pumps constitutes an environmentally friendly, approved and economically competitive, but often underestimated technology. By introducing the spatial dimension in feasibility studies, the results of calculations change considerably. This paper presents a methodology to estimate thermal energy re...

Integrated spatial and energy planning has become a major field of interest to meet the current renewable energy share expansion and CO2 emissions reduction targets. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a considerable role in supporting decision making in this field. Solar potential maps are a popular strategy to promote renewable energy gener...

This paper introduces the concepts, methods and the implementation of a calculator for the energetic long term analysis of residential settlement structures (ELAS). The freely available online tool addresses, on the one hand, the complexity of the environmental impacts of buildings and settlements including embodied energy and on the other hand, th...

The political agenda on wind power usage intends its further expansion in a large scale. As most energy sources, wind power can have negative impacts on humans and environment; this expansion can be accompanied by land use conflicts with land uses sensitive to disturbance. During operation, disturbances from noise, shadow, or ice throw can occur. D...

In recent years, overuse of natural resources has been perceived as a serious danger for society. Being among the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions, road freight transport plays an important role in this respect. Reducing the environmental impact in this domain would therefore yield substantial benefits for the general public and help to imp...

Waste water treatment plants not only treat waste water, they can also act as a source of energy. The produced energy is either used to fulfil in-house energy requirements or fed into public energy distribution grids. Research in Austria and other countries has shown that waste water treatment has high energy potential which is yet unexploited. The...

This paper explores opportunities for universities to contribute to local and regional development processes, apart from classical knowledge transfer within education and lifelong learning. In order to draft an analytical framework for the university-society relationship in regional development processes, we introduce three theoretical frameworks:...

In addition to the natural-physical aspects of landscape, the public perception of landscapes is of central importance for a comprehensive understanding of landscape. This paper reflects different landscape perceptions on the basis of a photo competition and school workshops. These were conducted in the VITAL LANDSCAPES project as part of a regiona...

Summary Human impacts on landscapes pose serious threats to Central European landscapes (e.g. ur ban sprawl, land consumption and loss of landscape diversity and biodiversity) and consequently, influence quality of life as landscapes are a key factor in individual and social wellbeing and affect everybody. Therefore, public participation is an issu...

According to “Directive 2001/42/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on the Assessment of the Effects of Certain Plans and Programmes on the Environment” (SEA Directive), a strategic environmental assessment (SEA) has to be implemented in the national laws of EU member states by July 2004. Furthermore, in the context of the fifth UN-ECE co...

The aim of this paper is to discuss potentials of biofuels to contribute to environmentally sustainable energy supplies based on the Sustainable Process Index (SPI), an alternative calculation method for ecological footprints. The paper focuses on energy demand for transport. Comparing biofuels with fossil fuels it can be seen that "conventional" f...

The turn to sustainable energy system is a major societal goal at the global level. In this paper, we argue that this radical shift in energy provision towards increased energy efficiency and the use of renewable resources can only be achieved if its spatial dimensions are taken into consideration. Spatial structures have considerable influence on...

This paper introduces a new methodological approach of the ecological footprint explicitly addressing the sustainability of water supplies, which we call the water supply footprint (WSF). The WSF calculates the catchment area or water supply hinterland of a certain society and can serve as a strategic planning tool for local or regional water suppl...

Austrian and Australian approaches to strategic environmental assessment (SEA) are compared with particular emphasis upon the legal basis for the initial phase of agreement/screening and the final stage of SEA decision-making and implementation. In Austrian SEA, screening is compulsory and the outcome leads only to recommendations, meaning that the...

Ecological footprinting is widely accepted as a tool for environmental education and public awareness raising. However, it is often argued that ecological footprints do not allow shaping of policies and programmes. Therefore, several methodological improvements have been made, for instance, in the energy sector, or similar approaches have been intr...