On September 15, 2025, at 5:00 pm, the first seminar of the series Meet the STEP-CHANGErs – A Series of Voices Shaping Sustainable Change will be held in Alpha Room (Building 24).

This seminar series offers a platform to explore cutting-edge research in sustainability through the work of PhD students in the Science, Technology, and Policy for Sustainable Change program. Each session highlights how emerging research addresses real-world sustainability challenges, providing insights into innovative solutions and fostering a broader conversation on the pathways to systemic change. The series also offers PhD students a valuable opportunity for networking, with an aperitif to follow each session.

Teresa Bonserio will hold a speech titled Multi-sector assessment of climate change mitigation policies on the African energy system. In this talk, the urgency of implementing robust climate change mitigation strategies, as emphasized by the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, will be examined with a particular focus on the energy sector and the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. The discussion will highlight the complex methodological and policy-related challenges that arise when applying such strategies in developing regions, especially in Africa, where energy security and political stability are deeply interconnected.

The first part of the talk will introduce a political risk evaluation framework developed for application to the African continent using the OSeMOSYS-TEMBA AHA model. This framework assesses the vulnerability of future power trade strategies to governance risks, particularly political instability, under diverse socio-economic, climatic, and hydrological scenarios, while identifying temporal and spatial hotspots of energy insecurity.

The second part of the talk will present an integrated assessment approach to evaluate the consistency of African climate pledges under the Paris Agreement with long-term mitigation pathways. This is achieved through the soft-linking of GCAM and OSeMOSYS-TEMBA AHA, enabling a spatially refined analysis of the impacts of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategies (LT-LEDS) on African energy system development.

Marianna Alghisi will hold a speech titled Future Navigation Systems: 5G and LEO-PNT as Complements to GNSS to Improve Precise Positioning in Urban Environment. In this talk, the challenges of achieving high-accuracy positioning in urban environments will be examined, with a focus on the limitations of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), the global standard for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. Buildings, vegetation, and reflective surfaces obstruct GNSS signals, generating non-line-of-sight (NLoS) and multipath effects that significantly reduce reliability. These challenges hinder the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) systems for civilian applications and slow the transition to smart cities.

The presentation will explore a multi-layered approach to overcoming these limitations by hybridizing GNSS with complementary technologies. Specifically, it will introduce the integration of GNSS with 5G, which provides advanced positioning services, and Low Earth Orbit Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (LEO-PNT) satellites, the next generation of constellations designed for high-accuracy PNT.

The work will further present the development of a software platform capable of jointly processing real GNSS measurements with field-collected 5G observations and synthetic LEO data using a positioning engine based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Tests under varying environmental conditions and processing methods demonstrate the improvements achievable through this hybrid approach. Results confirm that integrating GNSS with 5G and LEO-PNT significantly enhances positioning accuracy and reliability, particularly in the context of Precise Point Positioning (PPP).

Please register here to attend.