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The Maldives, one of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) with great solar potential, is keen to promote renewable energy systems to reduce its heavy reliance on imported diesel for power generation. However, adopting renewable energy systems is still burdensome for the Maldives not only because of its high initial costs and insufficient financial resources but also because of a lack of understanding about whether the deployment of a renewable system is economically feasible. Therefore, the concept of grid parity is explored as an important concept in this paper to examine the possible timeframe for reaching it. A distinctive feature of the paper is that the paper used actual cost and technical information to analyze the levelized cost of energy (LCOEs) of the independent renewable system in a remote island and examined its timeframe for reaching the grid parity condition. Based on economic and technical information from a project for replacing existing diesel generator to photovoltaic (PV) with energy storage system (ESS) in Kuda Bandos Island in the Maldives, the paper considers three different system configurations and evaluates which configuration could result in the most optimal off-grid energy systems in this remote island. With sensitivity analysis on various uncertainties, the paper shows the range of the levelized costs of energy and the periods required for reaching grid parity for deploying solar photovoltaics and ESSs in Kuda Bandos Island, Maldives. The result indicates that the photovoltaic system is an economically feasible option for the resort, and that grid parity can be reached within the project lifetime. However, the result shows that the use of advanced ESSs is still an expensive option and would not be economically reasonable.

The demographic changes of East Asian countries have accelerated in recent years. With consideration of the linkage between human behavior and carbon emissions, it is necessary to consider demographic characteristics for the CO2 emission projections of these countries. This study examines how changes in the demographic structure affect the emission projections of three East Asian countries (South Korea, China, and Japan) by comparing two different vintages of population projections. The study constructed a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and applied the most up-to-date dataset of population prospects, GTAP 10, and the labor force participation rate. By comparing UN2010 and UN2019 projections, the study examined the impact of demographic changes on CO2 emission profiles of the three East Asian countries. The simulation result showed that GDP, which represents economic activity along with the population, is the direct channel of CO2 emission projections. Moreover, the scenario analysis suggested the population factor as one of the main drivers of the CO2 emission projection and a clear positive relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions, though CO2 emissions are generally inelastic in response to a GDP decrease in the three East Asian countries. The finding indirectly implies that not only the size of the population but also demographic composition should be considered to project CO2 emissions, as the labor participation rate is an important factor to determine the production function.

Based on actual measurement data from a resort in the Maldives, this paper explores the criteria for the optimal off-grid renewable energy systems that contribute to greenhouse gas mitigation and climate adaptation efforts from three perspectives: technical, economic and environmental. Using Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Electric Renewables software, the optimal technical combination of hybrid energy system is determined. Moreover, indicators such as levelized cost of energy and net present cost are considered as economic criteria to determine the financial feasibility of the off-grid renewable energy systems. Finally, CO2 emission level and renewable shares are reviewed from environmental perspective.

In this chapter, the authors suggest ways to achieve not only economic but also environmental development in North Korea and make policy proposals on the premise that North Korea eventually becomes a member of the global community through sincere denuclearization efforts. The authors suggest that North Korea prioritize climate adaptations plans at both the national and local level. To do so, financial as well as technical assistance and capacity building programs from the global community will be essential. Such international assistance will help North Korea to achieve the nationally determined contribution (NDC) submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The growth of dendrites on lithium metal electrodes is problematic because it causes irreversible capacity loss and safety hazards. Localised high-concentration electrolytes (LHCEs) can form a mechanically stable solid-electrolyte interphase and prevent uneven growth of lithium metal. However, the optimal physicochemical properties of LHCEs have not been clearly determined which limits the choice to fluorinated non-solvating cosolvents (FNSCs). Also, FNSCs in LHCEs raise environmental concerns, are costly, and may cause low cathodic stability owing to their low lowest unoccupied molecular orbital level, leading to unsatisfactory cycle life. Here, we spectroscopically measured the Li + solvation ability and miscibility of candidate non-fluorinated non-solvating cosolvents (NFNSCs) and identified the suitable physicochemical properties for non-solvating cosolvents. Using our design principle, we proposed NFNSCs that deliver a coulombic efficiency up to 99.0% over 1400 cycles. NMR spectra revealed that the designed NFNSCs were highly stable in electrolytes during extended cycles. In addition, solvation structure analysis by Raman spectroscopy and theoretical calculation of Li + binding energy suggested that the low ability of these NFNSCs to solvate Li + originates from the aromatic ring that allows delocalisation of electron pairs on the oxygen atom. Localised high-concentration electrolyte is key to prevent uneven growth of lithium metal by forming a mechanically stable solid-electrolyte interphase. Here, the authors identify the suitable physicochemical properties for non-solvating co-solvents that improve the performance of lithium metal battery.

Rechargeable calcium batteries have attracted increasing attention as promising multivalent ion battery systems due to the high abundance of calcium. However, the development has been hampered by the lack of suitable cathodes to accommodate the large and divalent Ca 2+ ions at a high redox potential with sufficiently fast ionic conduction. Herein, we report a new intercalation host which presents 500 cycles with a capacity retention of 90% and a remarkable power capability at ~3.2 V (vs. Ca/Ca 2+ ) in a calcium battery. The cathode material derived from Na 0.5 VPO 4.8 F 0.7 is demonstrated to reversibly accommodate a large amount of Ca 2+ ions, forming a series of Ca x Na 0.5 VPO 4.8 F 0.7 (0 <  x  < 0.5) phases without any noticeable structural degradation. The robust framework enables one of the smallest volume changes (1.4%) and the lowest diffusion barriers for Ca 2+ among the cathodes reported to date, offering the basis for the outstanding cycle life and power capability. Rechargeable calcium batteries are promising multivalent battery systems but the lack of suitable electrodes hampers their development. Here the authors report a cathode derived from polyanion framework that demonstrates uncommonly stable and fast intercalation behaviours of calcium ions.

Understanding the population genetic structure of marine decapods is essential for their effective conservation and management, particularly for species like the Chinese mitten crab ( ), which exhibits a complex life cycle and high invasive potential. In this study, we applied a population genomics approach using SLAF-seq to generate genome-wide SNP data from 120 unrelated individuals collected across six locations in China and Korea. We found a fine-scale but discernible level of genetic differentiation by regional populations correlated with geography. Individuals from Seocheon (Korea) and Wenzhou (southeastern China) exclusively share a distinct genetic ancestry component that makes them divergent from the rest, which we speculate may have been introduced by hybridization with congeneric species. We detected genetic outliers (9 out of 120 individuals) that show ongoing long-distance dispersal along the coastline of the Yellow Sea, likely happening during the planktonic larval phase. Collectively, our findings provide a genomic basis for delineating management strategies, supporting informed stock enhancement, and guiding region-specific conservation efforts for across East Asia.

The emergence of deep neural networks capable of revealing high-fidelity scene details from sparse 3D point clouds has raised significant privacy concerns in visual localization involving private maps. Lifting map points to randomly oriented 3D lines is a well-known approach for obstructing undesired recovery of the scene images, but these lines are vulnerable to a density-based attack that can recover the point cloud geometry by observing the neighborhood statistics of lines. With the aim of nullifying this attack, we present a new privacy-preserving scene representation called sphere cloud, which is constructed by lifting all points to 3D lines crossing the centroid of the map, resembling points on the unit sphere. Since lines are most dense at the map centroid, the sphere cloud mislead the density-based attack algorithm to incorrectly yield points at the centroid, effectively neutralizing the attack. Nevertheless, this advantage comes at the cost of i) a new type of attack that may directly recover images from this cloud representation and ii) unresolved translation scale for camera pose estimation. To address these issues, we introduce a simple yet effective cloud construction strategy to thwart new attack and propose an efficient localization framework to guide the translation scale by utilizing absolute depth maps acquired from on-device time-of-flight (ToF) sensors. Experimental results on public RGB-D datasets demonstrate sphere cloud achieves competitive privacy-preserving ability and localization runtime while not excessively compensating the pose estimation accuracy compared to other depth-guided localization methods.