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Differences in problem framing and understanding are unavoidable in multi-actor decision-making processes, deeming ambiguous problem definitions and actions. The presence of ambiguity may have diverse implications. On the one hand, a diversity in frames can enhance the co-production of knowledge offering opportunities for innovative solutions. On the other hand, the presence of ambiguity can be a source of discrepancies or conflict in a group, hampering the implementation and/or reducing the effectiveness of environmental policy. This work demonstrates that neglecting ambiguity in problem framing leads decision-actors to simplify the interaction space by ignoring the role of some of the other decision-actors and/or making wrong assumptions about their mental models. Moreover, they act as if the system is as simple as the decision-actors presume it to be. To demonstrate these hypotheses, a Causal Loop Diagram method was implemented to investigate the policy resistance mechanisms hampering the implementation of sustainable groundwater abstraction policy in the Apulia Region (Southern Italy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of Green Tibetans connected to Buddhism and indigenous wisdom have been deployed by a variety of actors and persist in popular consciousness. Through interviews, participatory mapping and observation, we explored how these ideas relate to people's notions about the natural environment in a rural community on the Eastern Tibetan plateau, in Sichuan Province, China. We found people to be orienting themselves towards the environment by means of three interlinked religious notions: (1) local gods and spirits in the landscape, which have become the focus of conservation efforts in the form of 'sacred natural sites;' (2) sin and karma related to killing animals and plants; (3) Buddhist moral precepts especially non-violence. We highlight the gaps between externally generated representations and local understandings, but also the dynamic, contested and plural nature of local relationships with the environment, which have been influenced and reshaped by capitalist development and commodification of natural resources, state environmental policies, and Buddhist modernist ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China represents the third largest economy and the highest level of national carbon dioxide emissions when compared to other nations across the globe. Yet, little social science research has focused on the environmentally oriented behaviors of Chinese nationals, key to understanding levels of environmental impact. This study examines, in China, gender differences in environmentally oriented behaviors, environmental knowledge, and general environmental concern. Making use of path analyses, we identify a pattern of gender differences similar to common findings in the West: women demonstrated greater participation in environmental behaviors inside of the home (e.g., recycling), while outside of the home (e.g., environmental organization donations) no gendered patterns were exhibited. However, Chinese women expressed lower levels of concern than men—a finding opposite of most Western studies. Also distinct from other settings, in China, higher levels of knowledge regarding environmental issues did, indeed, translate into pro-environmental behaviors—thereby not exhibiting the knowledge-behavior gap demonstrated elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

large number of ‘environmental justice’ studies show that wealthier people are less affected by environmental burdens and also consume more resources than poorer people. Given this double inequity, we ask, to what extent are affluent people prepared to pay to protect the environment? The analyses are couched within the compensation/affluence hypothesis, which states that wealthier persons are able to spend more for environmental protection than their poorer counterparts. Further, we take into account various competing economic, psychological and sociological determinants of individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for both public environmental goods (e.g., general environmental protection) and quasi-private environmental goods (e.g., CO-neutral cars). Such a comprehensive approach contrasts with most other studies in this field that focus on a limited number of determinants and goods. Multivariate analyses are based on a general population survey in Switzerland ( N = 3,369). Although income has a positive and significant effect on WTP supporting the compensation hypothesis, determinants such as generalized interpersonal trust that is assumed to be positively associated with civic engagement and environmental concern prove to be equally important. Moreover, we demonstrate for the first time that time preferences can considerably influence survey-based WTP for environmental goods; since investments in the environment typically pay off in the distant future, persons with a high subjective discount rate are less likely to commit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global chemical industry has a rich history of investment in campaigns to educate the public about what it does. Beginning in the 1930s, first Dupont then the industry overall promised ''Better Living Through Chemistry.'' In the 1990s, the industry promoted its own environmentalism. The 2005 launch of the American Chemistry Council's essential2life campaign was yet another update. This essay examines the shifting logics of chemical industry public education campaigns, focusing particularly on the disavowals of the essential2life campaign. The essay also raises questions about forms of collective deliberation-among scientists, among activists and within industry-that reduce vulnerability to what Kirsch and Benson call ''corporate oxymorons,'' facilitating critical awareness of ways vested interests shape articulations of history and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a thematic approach to review the existing literature (in both Chinese and English) of environmental politics in the broad context of China studies. Examined themes include state and environmental governance, public awareness and environmental social activism, and environmental foreign relations. Findings and arguments are assessed with two important questions in mind: What differentiates the environmental arena from Chinese politics in general? What new insights into Chinese politics can be gained from case studies of environmental protection? Scholarship on environmental politics contributes not only empirical findings, but also critical challenges to the conventional knowledge and frameworks of Chinese politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMS) have helped us over the past decade to understand the interactions between the environment and the economy in the context of climate change. Although it has also long been recognized that adaptation is a powerful and necessary tool to combat the adverse effects of climate change, most IAMS have not explicitly included the option of adaptation in combating climate change. This paper adds to the IAM and climate change literature by explicitly including adaptation in an IAM, thereby making the trade-offs between adaptation and mitigation visible. Specifically, a theoretical framework is created and used to implement adaptation as a decision variable into the DICE model. We use our new AD-DICE model to derive the adaptation cost functions implicit in the DICE model. In our set-up, adaptation and mitigation decisions are separable and AD-DICE can mimic DICE when adaptation is optimal. We find that our specification of the adaptation costs is robust with respect to the mitigation policy scenarios and parameter values. Our numerical results show that adaptation is a powerful option to combat climate change, as it reduces most of the potential costs of climate change in earlier periods, while mitigation does so in later periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overintensification and subsidies have long made American commodity farmers the enemy of conservationists. Yet, environmental conditions are improving in the Mississippi Delta where farmer-based groups, water management districts and conservation organizations have improved environmental quality and redefined the role of agriculture in environmental preservation. This work is all the more remarkable given the region’s deeply conservative politics that discourage regulation. This paper examines this mainstreaming of environmental values in light of debates on the role of the state in fostering environmental subjectivities. Following cultural examinations of the state, we caution that the presence or retreat of the state is insufficient to understanding environmental subjectivities. Instead, an ethnographic focus is necessary to identify connections between the state and particular human-environment relations. In the Delta, this focus shows that local environmentalism is consonant with a politics of unsustainability, one that simultaneously advances radical ecological change and defense of the region’s social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, as a background to the development of high temperature environmental protection coating technology, the structural transformation of vacuum-plasma sprayed NiCrAlY coating has been studied, including the oxidation behavior, elastic modulus, microhardness, and surface roughness. Coating was oxidized isothermally at a 1,273 K for different time periods up to 1,000 h in order to form the oxide scale layer. The results showed that the oxide scale and weight gain increased proportional to the exposure time. The surface roughness and hardness decreased after isothermal exposure, but they are not proportional to the exposure time. The oxide scale growth was concentrated in the valleys of the surface at the early 1 h exposure (decreasing surface roughness), whereas the oxide scales over a longer perspective (time period), grew on the convex surface (increasing surface roughness). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lake Balaton, one of the largest lakes in Europe, is an important centre for summer tourism in Hungary. The appearance of the water is, however, influenced by a number of physical and biological factors such as the frequency of storms, the hydrological balance, the water level and the growth of algae. Here we report the results of a survey designed to test the reaction of the local population to these seasonal and inter-annual variations. This survey was based on a questionnaire completed by 960 permanent inhabitants of the shoreline villages and was designed to explore their awareness of the local and regional factors responsible for the changes. About one-quarter of the respondents considered that the drying effects of global climate change had already had an effect on the Lake Balaton area. Although younger (16–26) and middle-aged (27–50) respondents benefit most from good water quality, those in the oldest age group (51–92) were more concerned about the quality of the water and broader issues such as biodiversity and the conservation of the landscape. Considering that the future of the lake depends on the youngest generation, this suggests that their environmental education could be improved to strengthen their understanding of environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the turbulent flow structure over the ripples at the bed of open channel was investigated experimentally. An analysis of bursting process was used to recognize the susceptible regions for sediment entrainment and deposition over the ripples. Two artificial ripples were built according to the ripples, formed by nature. Three different configurations of ripples were used by changing the wavelength. According to analysis of bursting event it was found that at the stoss side of ripples, quadrants (II) and (IV) were dominant to the quadrants (I) and (III) and at the lee side of the ripple it was vice versa. Also the transition probabilities of the bursting events were determined. The results showed that stable organizations of each class of the events had highest transition probabilities whereas cross organizations had lowest transition probabilities. Additionally, an effort was made to find the average inclination angle of the bursting events in quadrants (II) and (IV). The results showed that the mean angle of events in quadrants (II) and (IV) increases at the downstream of stoss side to the crest in each experimental test. Also, at the lee side where the sediment particles were deposited, the inclination angles had the highest values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial presents an exploration into the issues of individual and social discounting phenomena in terms of macroeconomic principles and group psychology. The author presents an explanation of cost-benefit analysis and discounting behavior along with emphasis on the distinctions evident between individual and larger social-group instances of this phenomenon. The implications of ethical decisions and environmental policy and behavior on human perception of future uncertainty risk are examined in detail.

The article reports on the continuous inventory collection of radioactive waste products in nuclear power industry involving its radiation risk to future generations in the U.S. The administration of the permanent respiratory for radioactive waste products has been encountering delayed in technical difficulties and political controversy. The federal Environmental Protection Agency announces the revision of proposed standards including the ten years radioactive waste storage and the period of ten thousand years into the future. The storage facility includes overlying vegetation as its physical characteristics and integrity.

Nomadism has received surprisingly little attention in the ecological literature, and further work in this area is needed. The results of Woinarski’s reanalysis of our research findings are broadly similar to our own, and they support our original interpretation. However, his presentation is confusing and difficult to interpret.We used an information-theoretic approach to multimodel selection. We a priori defined plausible candidate models relating the variables described in our original paper or Woinarski’s reanalysis to the phenomenon of nomadism. We tested models that investigate nomadism as a function of nectivory, granivory, diet diversity, mixed diet, distance to body mass aggregation edge, mass, interactions between distance to edge and nectivory, distance to edge and mass, mass and nectivory, or mass and the interaction of edge and nectivory. There is consistency in our results across all sets of models, suggesting that mass, distance to body mass aggregation (scale breaks), and diet (nectivory) are all important factors in determining nomadism. In no case was nectivory or any other diet variable supported in a single-variable model. Given the same data and similar results, we and Woinarski reach fundamentally different conclusions. Woinarski views nomadism as an easily understandable result given knowledge of the proper single mechanistic variable, and he discounts interactions with structural features of the landscape and scaling. We conclude that nomadism is a fundamentally complex phenomenon without a single source of causation, and that it is the interaction of species, species attributes, and landscapes that is responsible for nomadic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of climate change and the need for sustainable water systems, water management has changed considerably in recent years, from river management to basin management. This change is illustrated for both the main Dutch river system and a small, representative regional water system in the Netherlands. This change results in four major challenges, (1) creating an effective regional administration which functions as a network authority, (2) increasing collaboration with other water managers, (3) increasing efficiency and achieving goals at minimum cost, and (4) communicating in an open manner with stakeholders. The article outlines the way in which water managers try to address these challenges. Special attention is given to the need for increased coordination between environmental policies and water policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of studies examining racial and socioeconomic disparities in the geographic distribution of environmental hazards and locally unwanted land uses has grown considerably over the past decade. Most studies have found statistically significant racial and socioeconomic disparities associated with hazardous sites. However there is considerable variation in the magnitude of racial and socioeconomic disparities found; indeed, some studies have found none. Uncertainties also exist about the underlying causes of the disparities. Many of these uncertainties can be attributed to the failure of the most widely used method for assessing environmental disparities to adequately account for proximity between the hazard under investigation and nearby residential populations. In this article, we identify the reasons for and consequences of this failure and demonstrate ways of overcoming these shortcomings by using alternate, distance-based methods. Through the application of such methods, we show how assessments about the magnitude and causes of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of hazardous sites are changed. In addition to research on environmental inequality, we discuss how distance-based methods can be usefully applied to other areas of demographic research that explore the effects of neighborhood context on a range of social outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eco-Efficiency has been variously defined and analytically implemented by several workers. In most cases, Eco-Efficiency is taken to mean the ecological optimization of overall systems while not disregarding economic factors. Eco-Efficiency should increase the positive ecological performance of a commercial company in relation to economic value creation—or to reduce negative effects. Several companies use Eco-Efficiency Analysis for decision-making processes; and industrial examples of best practices in developing and implementing Eco-Efficiency have been reviewed. They clearly demonstrate the environmental and business benefits of Eco-Efficiency. An instrument for the early recognition and systematic detection of economic and environmental opportunities and risks for production processes in the chemical industry began use in 1997, since when different new features have been developed, leading to many examples. This powerful Eco-Efficiency Analysis allows a feasibility evaluation of existing and future business activities and is applied by BASF. In many cases, decision-makers are able to choose among alternative processes for making a product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the intersection between environmental hazards and community demographics have concluded that environmental inequality is prevalent in communities across the United States. While these studies offer persuasive indicators of environmental inequality, we still have little understanding of the social forces involved in the production of these unequal outcomes. Drawing on a case study of a community of color facing illegal dumping, I propose an environmental justice framework to explain the social dynamics that produced this outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the impact of the international institutional framework embodied in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on Canada's response to climate change. Norms of liberal environmentalism in the compromise of the Kyoto Protocol; International and domestic institutional context for Canada's climate change policy; Evolution of Canada's global role in addressing climate change.

Discusses the concept of environmental justice as a political and social movement that emerged in the 1980s in the U.S. Goal of environmental justice; Components of the concern over environmental inequity; Examples of environmental justice cases; Evolution of the definition of environmental justice.

The article reports on the U.S. Congress legislative bill concerning the protection of coral reefs, damaged by divers, pollution and climate change in the U.S. The bill, Tropical Forest and Coral Conservation Act of 2007, would cancel foreign debt in developing countries in exchange for coral reef and rainforest conservation. U.S. Congress passed a similar bill in 1998 that has channelled $137 million to protect rainforests in developing countries such as Panama, Bangladesh and Botswana. Under the deal, countries in debt to the U.S. Agency for International Development give money to local conservation groups. In return, the U.S. cancels the same amount of debt.

The article presents that policy decisions on science and environment need contributions from official bodies, pressure groups, the media and scientists in all countries. The Centre for Science and Environment(CSE) based in New Delhi is concerned with environmental issues. The Indian scientists do not agree to CSE's stance on environmental issues and refrain from policymaking discussions. It is suggested that the Indian scientists must join in policy preparation on environmental regulation.

Focuses on the plans surrounding the five year anniversary of the Earth Summit that took place in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The event planned for March 1997 called RIO+5; Comments from Maurice Strong, the secretary-general of the Earth Summit; The track records of developed countries in terms of their environmental programs in 1997.