Producción Científica

This study aims to highlight the contribution made by different international institutions in the field of urban generation of renewable energy, as a key element to achieve sustainability. This has been possible through the use of the Scopus Elsevier database, and the application of bibliometric techniques through which the articles content published from 1977 to 2017 has been analysed. The results shown by Scopus (e.g., journal articles and conferences proceedings) have been taken into account for further analysis by using the following search pattern (TITLE-ABS-KEY ({Renewable energy} AND ({urban} OR ({cit*})). In order to carry out this study, key features of the publications have been taken into consideration, such as type of document, language, thematic area, type of publication, and keywords. As far as keywords are concerned, renewable energy, sustainability, sustainable development, urban areas, city, and energy efficiency, have been the most frequently used. The results found have been broken down both geographically and by institution, showing that China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and India are the main research countries and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ministry of Education China and Tsinghua University the major contributing institutes. With regard to the categories, Energy, Environmental Sciences, and Engineering are positioned as the most active categories. The scientific community agrees that the study of the renewable energy generation in cities is of vital importance to achieve more sustainable cities, and for the welfare of a growing urban population. Moreover, this is in line with the energy policies adopted by most of developed countries in order to mitigate climate change effects.

Over the last decade, the rapid expansion of hydroelectric power generation has required an intense collaboration process between stakeholders. These relationships between the primary stakeholders – governments and large energy corporations – contextualise the discussion regarding governance regimes from a territorial perspective. The different levels of intervention that companies can exercise at the local, regional and national levels influence the various territorially embedded scales, places and networks that enable large-scale energy production. Therefore, the evolving role of borders and boundaries across territorial social groups and material interests influences the reach and extent of conflict/collaboration dynamics. With the purpose of exploring the effects of territorial factors of governance regimes on hydropower sustainability, this study adopts a mixed-methods sequential design approach using content analysis preceded by bibliometric data recollection and processing with high-end visualisation of the similarities mapping technique. These territorial factors can be divided into three separate fields of enquiry: institutional arrangements and spatial fixes, which can be captured spatio-temporally, and the role of local culture; stakeholder interdependencies, which must be studied in terms of the diverse scales on which they must interact to understand territorial-level conflict/collaboration dynamics; and joint actions and adaptative mechanisms that help to explain why changes in hydropower business governance regimes are attached to the territorial context. If we can understand the evolution of corporate sustainability dimensions in certain contexts, we might be able to capture the structured coherence of governance regimes in terms of the action-impact-adaptation cycle in the hydropower industry.

Banana cultivation is a generator of large amounts of lignocellulosic residues. In Brazil, the fifth largest banana producer in the world, most of these residues are abandoned in plantations, being means of proliferation of vectors and sources of gases harmful to the environment. The cellulose extraction is an important alternative to allocate higher added value to these residues, promoting their reuse. The cellulose extraction process involves the removal of amorphous materials from lignocellulosic materials, especially the lignin. Thus, this study proposed to identify cellulose extraction processes, aiming to assist in the advancement of scientific research and projects that promote the use of cellulose present in these residues. For this purpose, a bibliometric research was conducted in the Science Direct and Springer databases. In the analysis of the material it was identified that the process used for the fragmentation of hemicellulose and lignin is hydrolysis (alkaline, acidic and enzymatic), under controlled conditions.