Search

On the island of Guåhan (Guam) native and endemic species are an integral part of the CHamoru language, rituals, and practices. They are interconnected with their culture and honored together with the ocean, the land, and their ancestors. Presently, this spiritual connection is being jeopardized as military expansion threatens the sacred lands of Tailalo' and Litekyan. Phylogenetic and ethnographic research, connected to the principles of environmental justice, has brought attention to the social movement to protect the last håyun lågu tree (Serianthes nelsonii) at Tailalo'. This opinion piece is a rallying cry to safeguard the last håyun lågu and to confront the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act and the U.S. Endangered Species Act, as its regulations do not mirror the island's social and cultural system and fail to incorporate Indigenous and scientific perspectives to protect Indigenous biocultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside production and consumption, bio-waste management is central to the food systems debate. To achieve sustainable food systems—an essential component of the Sustainable Development Goals and the world they envision—public authorities must address the shortage of current bio-waste-management policies and strive towards a new paradigm of bio-waste management, where environmental justice primarily informs policy design and decision making. In order to achieve fair environmental policies, particularly in the context of food systems and bio-waste management, it is essential to understand what drives public policy in these matters. In the present review, we seek to contribute by closing a gap in the literature by proposing a set of bio-waste-management drivers in the European context. Moreover, we focus on the "policy and legislation" driver, hoping to examine its main components and understand both their limitations and the opportunities they provide. Finally, we explore the role that co-creation can play as a facilitator of a public-governance paradigm that promotes sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development examines issues related to the environmental policy of public interest enterprises and the usefulness of its disclosure in the required non-financial declaration. The regulatory framework in the context of the environment is discussed. Conceptual views were defined according to certain eight criteria. The latter are specified on the basis of the guidelines drawn up in the Ministry of Finance Directive in connection with the implementation of Chapter Seven "Annual Reports", Section III "Non-Financial Statement" and Section IV "Consolidated Non-Financial Statement" of the Accounting Law. The criteria determine the risks that can reduce the sustainability of the global economy. It emphasizes the concept of long-term profitability combined with social justice and environmental protection. An empirical study of a representative sample of companies in various sectors has been carried out, and specific results have been disclosed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As our planet faces more frequent and severe environmental threats due to climate change (including threats to biodiversity), environmental justice will be essential to ensure that the costs and burdens of combating these threats are shared equally, borne by all people worldwide in a fair and equitable manner. If the past is any indicator, however, environmental problems—and their "solutions"—disproportionately affect poor communities and communities of color, including Indigenous communities. Despite these past injustices, Indigenous lands, which make up only 20 percent of the Earth's territory, contain 80 percent of the world's remaining biodiversity—evidence that Indigenous peoples are among the most effective stewards of the environment. A primary reason for this remarkable statistic is the use and practice of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge; ecological wisdom which has been passed down for generations and has been shown to strengthen community resilience in response to the multiple stressors of global environmental change. While the United States government has been slow to acknowledge the value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, it has recently begun to incorporate that knowledge into environmental policy in response to the worldwide climate crisis. Continuing the integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge into government environmental policy will ensure that such policies will be more effective at the federal, state, and local levels and more equitable in their application. Western scientists, government officials, and global leaders need to build trusting and co-equal relationships with Indigenous communities by actively listening to all cultures and respecting the many kinds of knowledge systems required to conserve the natural world and all living beings. This paper will address how incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge into U.S. policy would help safeguard the environment from further biodiversity loss and other ecological destruction, and advance environmental justice to ensure the fair treatment of all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative governance involves convening of government and non-government actors in policy formulation and implementation. Motivating collaborative governance is the expectation that engagement of diverse arrays of stakeholders in the public policy process allows policymakers and administrators to draw on the expertise, resources, and perspectives of these stakeholders to develop more contextually appropriate and effective policies. Since collaborative governance is fundamentally premised on the representation of diverse stakeholders in collaborative processes, assessing the extent to which representation is actualized is paramount. This paper adds to recent scholarship that examines representation dynamics in collaborative governance arrangements, focusing specifically on: (i) how diverse stakeholders included in collaborative governance arrangements are descriptively and substantively represented; (ii) how substantively represented stakeholders are coordinating on informational and relationship building activities; (iii) how representation and coordination dynamics change over time; and (iv) the extent to which representation and coordination dynamics are indicative of collaboration life cycle stage. Additionally, in responding to this latter aim, the paper presents a novel approach for measuring life cycle stages. The paper reports on a comparative case study of environmental justice councils, which are collaborative governance arrangements convened by states to assist in the design and implementation of policies aimed at reducing environmental harms within low income and minority populated communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of the mechanism of green public consumption policy on environmental equity and provides a feasible reference for the rational formulation of corresponding policies for China. Establish a mediation effect model using the stepwise regression and bootstrap analysis method, this study explores the direct and indirect effects of fiscal expenditure intensity on environmental equity. The results revealed that increasing fiscal expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection cannot directly and significantly affect environmental equity, but it has a significant indirect positive impact on environmental equality through fiscal decentralization. It is also found that the impact of green public consumption policy on environmental equity varies in the eastern, central and western parts of China. Our findings indicated that the expenditure of energy conservation and environmental protection indirectly affects environmental equity through fiscal decentralization. The willingness of the government to protect the environment regulates the impact of green public consumption policies on environmental equity. The phenomenon of feeding the east from the west of resources and environment is obvious. According to the characteristics of regional development, we should formulate energy conservation and environmental protection policies and adjust the direction of policies to promote regional environmental equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green public procurement is a voluntary tool through which public procurers can contribute to the objectives of environmental policy. The legal framework and public policy of green procurement is covered by the European Union. The main goal is to contribute to the consideration of environmental characteristics in public purchases as well as environmental management and the life-cycle costs of the goods, services and work. However, the objectives of the legal framework and the policy to promote green public procurement are often not achieved due to the barriers posed by economic practice. The aim of the article is to analyze the local barriers in the effective use of green public procurement in Slovakia. The processing of results is based on the annual evaluation reports to the National Action Plan for Green Public Procurement in Slovakia for 2016-2020. Identified local barriers include financial constraints on contracting authorities and a preference for evaluating contracts based on the lowest price criterion, insufficiently built administrative (personal) capacity to implement green public procurement, fear of discrimination in incorporating environmental criteria into tender documents and subsequent sanctions from control bodies. Last but not least, the voluntary application of green public procurement at regional and local level is also included among the barriers in the efficient use of this tool in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Environmental Paradigm envisions a green social economy demanding substantial changes in the leadership and managerial attitude, public policy and governance framework, technological innovation, and mass communication and outreach. At the international level, the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals seek to address the global challenges related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, peace, and justice. Notwithstanding such ideological grandstanding, ecological entrepreneurs are often stranded at the margins of the mainstream economy. This study posits that the global aspiration for a paradigm shift to an eco-friendly mode of production and distribution founded upon socio-environmental justice cannot be possible as long as all the stakeholders of the mainstream economy including the global policy behemoths do not come forward through consensus and commitment to promote Ecological Entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volatile organic compounds (VOC) contributing to smog formation, have been an important indicator of atmospheric governance during China's "14th Five-Year Plan". VOC would be possibly incorporated into the scope of environmental protection tax, but previous studies have seldom explored impacts of VOC control policies at national and regional levels. Here, we design a national uniform VOC control policy, as well as two regionally differentiated policies based on regional disparities in PM 2.5 concentrations and energy intensity by using a cross-scale dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Our analysis is to assess the impacts of these policies on VOC, CO 2 , sulfur dioxide (SO 2), nitrogen oxides (NO X), and PM 2.5 emissions, air quality and environmental equity, and to estimate health benefits, policy costs and net benefits. We find that national and regionally differentiated VOC control policies generally lead to VOC emission reductions and generate co-benefits on emission reductions in CO 2 , SO 2 , NO X and PM 2.5 at national and provincial levels. However, regional emission leakage exists due to differences in the provincial costs of VOC mitigation. The regionally differentiated VOC pricing policies are found to be more effective to enhance environmental equity than the uniform policy. In particular, the regionally differentiated VOC control policy based on provincial energy efficiency is found to be superior to other policies in terms of improve air quality. Furthermore, the human health benefits associated with VOC pricing policies would partially offset policy costs at both the national and regional levels. Our results suggest that policymakers would pay attention to developing regions with low energy efficiency which have the great emission reduction potential. Advanced producing technology and further end-of-pipe control measures to reduce non-combustion PM 2.5 emissions are needed. VOC policy designed based on provincial energy efficiency provides great insights for environmental policy making to accomplish 2035 goal of building a Beautiful China. • National and regionally differentiated VOC tax policies are designed. • VOC tax generates climate co-benefits. • Regional emission leakage exists associated with regionally differentiated policies. • Regionally differentiated VOC tax are effective to enhance environmental equity. • Human health benefits associated with VOC tax partially offset policy costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of prospective environmental (in)justice (PEJ) is proposed to make sense of situations in which development proposals and the actions of state and market actors create injustices even before the development projects become a material reality. Through this concept and its application to two cases of opencast gold-mining, a broader conceptualization of socio-environmental (in)justice is invited that considers multiple forms of injustice of rural communities in Romania and Bulgaria during more than a decade of waiting for the 'actual harm' of mining to happen. The mere prospects of opencast gold-mining have, in fact, shed light on deep-seated and ongoing dimensions of socio-environmental injustice such as, land-grabbing, slow community disappearance and marginalization, daily psychological damage, disavowal of alternatives and disqualification as political subjects. These injustices experienced collectively could be seen as constitutive moments of systemic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the air pollution issue in Delhi framed by the news media and narrated by nonprofit organizations? To study news media framing, we employed an inductive approach based on automated text coding of news coverage of the issue. To study nonprofit organization narrations, a deductive approach guided by the Narrative Policy Framework was used to focus on the stories told via online documents as found on nonprofit websites. The findings confirm existing theory and empirical research regarding the leading causes and effects of air pollution; however, perceptions are mixed regarding the government's ability to implement policy. The combined deductive and inductive approaches provide a systematic and multi-method research study for understanding perceptions of air pollution in one of the largest cities in the world. The result is a depiction of the priorities that influence public opinions, political decisions, and eventually public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the unequal impacts of environmental harms and climate change have become apparent, environmental justice (EJ) is an increasingly salient matter in US environmental policy and impact assessments. The EJ impacts of important infrastructural decisions and investments are most often analyzed in environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—a globally influential piece of legislation—with significant discretion given to organizations on how to conduct these analyses. There is little systematic understanding of how these analyses are conducted and what the findings of these analyses tend to be. In this paper, we analyze a decade's worth of EJ analyses that appear in environmental impact statements conducted in the state of Arizona in the US as a first attempt to fill this gap in understanding. We find that throughout EJ analyses 11 different demographic indicators, ten different community boundaries, and eight different population thresholds are used with considerable variation to identify EJ communities. The variation in how these criteria are applied points to an inconsistent definition of an EJ community throughout the federal government. Still, analyses consistently do not find negative EJ impacts to be likely. While NEPA has promoted positive environmental outcomes in the past, it may currently be failing to do this for EJ. We highlight possible flaws in EJ analysis methods and shortcomings of the NEPA process itself that may cumulatively obstruct meaningful EJ consideration. With the widespread influence of NEPA on environmental impact assesment approaches globally, our findings raise questions that EJ analyses in environmental impact assesments outside the US could suffer from the same methodological shortcomings we identify. • The US federal government expressed environmental justice (EJ) goals in the Justice40 Initiative. • EJ impacts are most often analyzed in NEPA-required environmental impact statements; little is known about these analyses. • The federal government lacks a consistent understanding of identifying EJ communities or impacts. • EJ analyses may fail to identify EJ communities or impacts by using inappropriate analysis methods. • Our findings are relevant to global EJ-focused environmental impact analyses, given the widespread influence NEPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental justice is arguably a neglected aspect in the pursuit of transitional justice within post-conflict societies. The international and European institutional and legal frameworks that are currently applicable within Kosovo present a suitable backdrop against which to examine the different legal pathways towards providing for environmental justice within this transitional society. The implications of achieving environmental justice within the overall context of transitional justice in a fledgling state such as Kosovo will then be explored. In particular, the potential for transitional environmental justice to reconcile (if not resolve) deeper, more intrinsic ethnic and social divisions within Kosovo, as well as a means to reduce the negative environmental impacts of an overtly economic development agenda, is considered. A number of examples highlighting the potential of the international. European, and domestic legal frameworks for achieving environmental justice within Kosovo will be showcased as a possible exemplar model for transitional societies in general [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exploitation of shale gas resources is a significant issue of environmental justice. Uneven distributions of risks and social impacts to local site communities must be balanced against the economic benefits to gas users and developers; and unequal decision-making powers must be negotiated between local and central governments, communities and fracking site developers. These distributive and procedural elements are addressed in relation to UK policy, planning, regulatory and industry development. I adopt an explicitly normative framework of policy evaluation, addressing a research gap on the ethics of shale gas by operationalising Shrader-Frechette’s Principle of Prima Facie Political Equality. I conclude that UK fracking policy reveals inherent contradictions of environmental justice in relation to the Conservative Government’s localist and planning reform agendas. Early fracking policy protected communities from harm in the wake of seismic risk events, but these were quickly replaced with pro-industry economic stimulation and planning legislation that curtailed community empowerment in fracking decision-making, increased environmental risks to communities, transferred powers from local to central government and created the conditions of distributive injustices in the management of community benefit provisions. I argue that only by “re-localising” the scale of fracking governance can political equality be ensured and the distributive and procedural environmental injustices be ameliorated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Environmental justice, which seeks to achieve equity in the process and outcomes of environmental policy and decision-making, is a broadly recognized policy objective. As a foundational environmental regulation and opportunity for public engagement with federal decision-making, the United States' National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is frequently considered a promising venue for addressing environmental justice. While environmental justice has been a recognized consideration within the NEPA process since the 1990s, it is by no means a streamlined process. Understanding the barriers and opportunities to better incorporation of EJ principles in NEPA review processes is critical for understanding how to move from EJ as a concept to actual implementation. Drawing on interviews with federal agencies, project developers, nongovernmental organizations, and other organizations who contributed to NEPA reviews for projects across the US, this paper explores how environmental justice–specifically procedural, distributive, and recognition justice–is currently addressed in the preparation of Environmental Impact Statements and identifies barriers and opportunities for better inclusion. We find that many NEPA practitioners see NEPA as a valuable tool for achieving procedural and distributive justice. However, a number of institutional and organizational barriers exist, most prominently a structure that hinders opportunities for meaningful public engagement, ambiguity in how distributive justice is defined and implemented, and a lack of substantive requirements for potential distributional inequities to be addressed. • Procedural justice is considered a more primary goal of NEPA relative to distributive justice. • NEPA's design limits opportunities for meaningful public engagement. • Distributive justice is considered hard to define and subjective to implement. • NEPA's procedural focus limits requirements to mitigate identified EJ impacts. • Recognition justice is almost entirely absent from considerations around EJ in NEPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]