This review details the groundwork made in the most recent years on the development of TENGs for wave energy conversion systems and discusses future perspectives in the scope of autonomous, self-powered sensor buoys and other offshore floating platforms.

The escalation in both frequency and severity of drought events has significantly amplified the vulnerability of numerous countries, particularly in developing ones, imposing substantial economic, environmental, and social pressures. This article presents a systematic review of drought occurrences in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), examining historical trends, current impacts, and projected future implications. Through this comprehensive assessment, a clear trend of intensifying drought phenomena emerges across SSA, leading to crop failures, drying of water sources, loss of pasture, food shortages, and an increase in food prices. This review also highlights the concerning potential for worsening conditions in certain regions, resulting in consequences such as migration, food insecurity, malnutrition, family disintegration, crop losses, and increased disease prevalence, notably HIV/AIDS. This study further reveals that current adaptation measures by governments and NGOs should be improved to effectively adapt to the diverse impacts of drought, and it contributes to a deeper understanding of drought dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa and assesses its critical impacts on food security and social well-being. It also evaluates adaptation measures across different countries, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses and enabling quick identification of areas for improvement. Additionally, it informs resilience-building efforts in vulnerable communities.

The offshore wind is the sector of marine renewable energy with the highest commercial development at present. The margin to optimise offshore wind foundations is considerable, thus attracting both the scientific and the industrial community. Due to the complexity of the marine environment, the foundation of an offshore wind turbine represents a considerable portion of the overall investment. An important part of the foundation’s costs relates to the scour protections, which prevent scour effects that can lead the structure to reach the ultimate and service limit states. Presently, the advances in scour protections design and its optimisation for marine environments face many challenges, and the latest findings are often bounded by stakeholder’s strict confidential policies. Therefore, this paper provides a broad overview of the latest improvements acquired on this topic, which would otherwise be difficult to obtain by the scientific and general professional community. In addition, this paper summarises the key challenges and recent advances related to offshore wind turbine scour protections. Knowledge gaps, recent findings and prospective research goals are critically analysed, including the study of potential synergies with other marine renewable energy technologies, as wave and tidal energy. This research shows that scour protections are a field of study quite challenging and still with numerous questions to be answered. Thus, optimisation of scour protections in the marine environment represents a meaningful opportunity to further increase the competitiveness of marine renewable energies.

Seaports are at the forefront of global trade networks, serving as hubs for maritime logistics and the transportation of goods and people. To meet the requirements of such networks, seaport authorities are investing in advanced technologies to enhance the efficiency and reliability of port infrastructures. This can be achieved through the digitalization and automation of core systems, aimed at optimizing the management and handling of both goods and people. Furthermore, a significant effort is being made towards a green energy transition at seaports, which can be supported through marine renewable sources. This promotes energy-mix diversification and autonomy, whilst reducing the noteworthy environmental footprint of seaport activities. By analyzing these pertinent topics under the scope of a review of container-terminal case studies, and these ports’ respective contexts, this paper seeks to identify pioneering smart seaports in the fields of automation, real-time management, connectivity and accessibility control. To foster the sustainable development of seaports, from an energy perspective, the potential integration with marine renewable-energy systems is considered, as well as their capabilities for meeting, even if only partially, the energy demands of seaports. By combining these fields, we attempt to construct a holistic proposal for a “model port” representing the expected evolution towards the seaports of the future.