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In December 2019, the European Commission published the European Green Deal (EGD), an overarching policy framework to achieve climate neutrality in Europe by 2050. This thematic issue aims to understand the origins, form, development, and scope of the EGD and its policy areas. It uses the concept of turbulence to explore and assess the emergence of the EGD and the policy and governance choices associated with it. Focusing on different levels of governance, different policy domains, and different stages of policymaking, each contribution raises pertinent questions about the necessity of identifying sources of turbulence and of understanding how to govern with such turbulence, rather than against it. Overall, the articles in this issue demonstrate that, while specifying contextual factors, researching the sources of and responses to turbulence provides useful insights into the development, direction, and potential durability or advancement of EU climate governance.

Because of some of their diverse benefits, intelligent textiles have attracted a great deal of interest among specialists over the past decade. This paper describes a novel approach to the manufacture of intelligent piezoelectric polymer-based textiles with enhanced piezoelectric responses for applications that extract biomechanical energy. Here we report a highly scalable and ultrafast production of smart textile piezoelectric containing graphene oxide nanosheets (GONS) dispersed in polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). In this work, Cotton textiles (CT) were functionalized and by graphene oxide (GO), using PVDF as a binder to obtain a CT-PVDF-GO material. Tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) was further grafted as a coating layer to improve the surface compatibility, resulting in the CT-PVDF-GO-TEOS composite. The research results show that the addition of GONS significantly improves PVDF's overall crystallization rate on CT. More specifically, the piezoelectric β-phase content (100 % higher F[β]) and crystallinity degree on the piezoelectric properties of composite cotton fiber has been improved effectively. Consequently, this fabricated piezo-smart textile has a glorious piezoelectricity even with comparatively low coating content of PVDF-GONS-TEOS. Based on it, the as-fabricated piezoelectric textile device has resulted in the output voltage of up to 13 mV for a given frequency (fm = 8 Hz) at fixed strain amplitude value (0.5 %). It is believed that this research may further reveal the field of energy harvesting for possible applications in the future.. In addition, the set of experimental results that illustrate the smart textile was carried out and discussed, and how it can be used as a wearable device source for this smart textile. Finally, the approach described in this study can also be used to construct other desirable designs, for a wearable low-consumption sensor, etc.

This Special Issue presents the work of 30 scientists of 11 countries. It confirms that the impacts of global change, resulting from both climate change and increasing anthropogenic pressure, are huge on worldwide coastal areas (and very particularly on some islands of the Pacific Ocean), with highly negative effects on coastal groundwater resources, widely affected by seawater intrusion. Some improved research methods are proposed in the contributions: using innovative hydrogeological, geophysical, and geochemical monitoring; assessing impacts of the changing environment on the coastal groundwater resources in terms of quantity and quality; and using modelling, especially to improve management approaches. The scientific research needed to face these challenges must continue to be deployed by different approaches based on the monitoring, modeling, and management of groundwater resources. Novel and more efficient methods must be developed to keep up with the accelerating pace of global change.