Teil I: Braucht die Landwirtschaft Umweltmanagementsysteme?

The farming community is today faced with requests by various interest groups to implement environmental management systems (EMS). The series of items shows principle theoretical questions of the method and the advantages of EMS (part I and II), presents the practical outcome (part III) and give a recommendation for potential users of EMS in agricultural systems (part IV). The study conducted outlines the method of the implementing an EMS according to the Environmental Management and Audit System (EMAS) and ISO 14001. Further advantages and disadvantages for the agricultural industry are addressed. Even though terms such as site can not easily be defined or problems with open material cycles and structural particularity of agricultural farms there appears to be a benefit to implement. The transparency and documentation of the material flow as well as the economical benefits of an optimized organization count towards the EMS. Further EMS can be a means to strengthen the argumentative position for example with the public, authorities, banks or insurance. This concurs with minimizing company liabilities and obtaining governmental privileges (deregulation).     

Teil II: Lösungsansätze für den landwirtschaftlichen Betrieb bei der Implementierung eines Umweltmanagementsystems

The registration of the present situation regarding environmental investigation is the basis for efficiently proceeding in the course of the implementation of environmental management systems (EMS). The basic analysis is found on the individual elements: reaction audit, management audit and compliance audit. Via an optimal performance of an environmental investigation while implementing an EMS, the basis for a maximum utilization has been created for the user as well for agriculture. Utilization for the company is provided by documentation of the organizational structure showing a transparency of procedures with regard to efficiency. Furthermore, an EMS is useful in the course of external tasks, e.g. public approach, business partners, position to authorities, deregulation or minimization of liability.     

Development of environmental policy,objectives, and targets

This paper describes a process to develop and establish an environmental policy and its associated environmental targets, objectives, and management programmes. The environmental policy is defined in a statement which addresses the company expectations for programmes that are important to assure adequate environmental protection and define its future commitment towards preventing pollution and continuously improving the effectiveness of its environmental protection programmes. A set of environmental objectives, derived from the policy, define the overall goals which will ensure that the company's environmental performance will remain consistent with the commitment identified in its policy when its environmental management system (EMS) is implemented, Environmental targets reflect the requirements and standards that the company must strive to achieve each objective and minimize any harmful environmental impacts from its production and manufacturing processes or other activities. In addition to defining specific targets, environmental management programmes are also used to guide EMS implementation. These programmes, however, must provide the company with the necessary flexibility to select the most appropriate technologies to enhance its own processes and prudently allocate its available financial resources in areas that return the greatest overall environmental benefit.Though they are expected to allow some discretion in the allocation of resources targeted towards environmental protection, EMS programmes must also provide assurance that the corporation environmental policy, objectives, targets, and management programmes do not result in a facility failure to adhere to all of its certification requirements. The principle and factors described in this article should be considered to the extent that they are necessary and practical.     

Is ISO 14001 a gateway to more advanced voluntary action? The case of green supply chain management

Using Japanese facility-level data, we estimate the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of more advanced practices, namely green supply chain management (GSCM). Our results show that ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices. Facilities with environmental management systems (EMS) certified to ISO 14001 are 40% more likely to assess their suppliers' environmental performance and 50% more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. Further, government programs that encourage voluntary EMS adoption indirectly promote GSCM practices. These programs increase the probabilities that facilities will assess their suppliers' environmental performance and require suppliers to undertake specific environmental practices by 7% and 8%, respectively. Combined, these findings suggest that there may be significant but previously unnoticed spillover effects of ISO 14001 and government promotion of voluntary action.     

How long can fisheries management delay action in response to ecosystem and climate change?

Sustainable management of fisheries is often compromised by management delaying implementation of regulations that reduce harvest, in order to maintain higher catches in the short-term. Decreases or increases in fish population growth rate driven by environmental change, including ecosystem and climate change, affect the harvest that can be taken sustainably. If not acted on rapidly, environmental change could result in unsustainable fishing or missed opportunity for higher catches. Using simulation models of harvested fish populations influenced by environmental change, we explore how long fisheries managers can afford to wait before changing harvest regulations in response to changes in population growth. If environmental change causes population declines, delays greater than five years increase the probability of population collapse. Species with fast and highly variable population growth rates are more susceptible to collapse under delays and should be a priority for revised management where delays occur. Generally, the long-term cost of delay, in terms of lost fishing opportunity, exceeds the short-term benefits of overfishing. Lowering harvest limits and monitoring for environmental change can alleviate the impact of delays; however, these measures may be more costly than reducing delays. We recommend that management systems that allow rapid responses to population growth changes be enacted for fisheries management to adapt to ecosystem and climate change.     

Testing for thresholds of ecosystem collapse in seagrass meadows

Although the public desire for healthy environments is clear‐cut, the science and management of ecosystem health has not been as simple. Ecological systems can be dynamic and can shift abruptly from one ecosystem state to another. Such unpredictable shifts result when ecological thresholds are crossed; that is, small cumulative increases in an environmental stressor drive a much greater change than could be predicted from linear effects, suggesting an unforeseen tipping point is crossed. In coastal waters, broad‐scale seagrass loss often occurs as a sudden event associated with human‐driven nutrient enrichment (eutrophication). We tested whether the response of seagrass ecosystems to coastal nutrient enrichment is subject to a threshold effect. We exposed seagrass plots to different levels of nutrient enrichment (dissolved inorganic nitrogen) for 10 months and measured net production. Seagrass response exhibited a threshold pattern when nutrient enrichment exceeded moderate levels: there was an abrupt and large shift from positive to negative net leaf production (from approximately 0.04 leaf production to 0.02 leaf loss per day). Epiphyte load also increased as nutrient enrichment increased, which may have driven the shift in leaf production. Inadvertently crossing such thresholds, as can occur through ineffective management of land‐derived inputs such as wastewater and stormwater runoff along urbanized coasts, may account for the widely observed sudden loss of seagrass meadows. Identification of tipping points may improve not only adaptive‐management monitoring that seeks to avoid threshold effects, but also restoration approaches in systems that have crossed them.     

Making central-local relations work: Comparing America and China environmental governance systems

The challenge of making central requirements work at local levels is a common problem for environmental governance throughout the world. Countries can learn from one another's approaches, but must understand the local context in which they are set. This paper compares the features of the China and US environmental governance systems that need be understood by those working between the systems. Key features include: (1) common values which shape the environmental governance choices in both countries, but which may have different practical meanings in each country; (2) America's common law-based environmental governance system, and China's civil law system, which involves plan(s) as well as law; (3) America's Federal central-local system, and China's unitary central local system. This paper concludes by suggesting areas in which further comparative understanding may be of value, including: (1) better understanding of the role of plan and law in China's governance system; (2) comparing the American Federal-state agreement system for implementation of environmental law with the China central-local system of target responsibility agreements for plan implementation; (3) improving understanding of nongovernmental resources needed to assure compliance with environmental laws and plans; (4) identifying institutions that can coordinate central-local and cross-border environmental governance.     

Betriebliche Umweltinformationssysteme (BUIS) Anforderungen und struktureller Aufbau

Appropriate organization structures, environmental controlling systems, and corporate environmental information systems (CEIS) are generally considered to be the essential instruments of a modern environmental management. Frequently, acceptance problems have been observed with respect to the installation of a CEIS due to the facts that there are no legal demands to implement such a system and, on the other hand, that theoretically based definitions of standards and structural principles of an CEIS are not yet available. As a consequence, different isolated solutions with rather low efficiency were hurriedly implemented by various companies. Regarding more precise request profiles for CEI systems, the present paper deals with the structural environment and the priority targets of an enterprise and with the organizational integration of environmental tasks. The operationalization into typical function fields yields tools to derive rough enterprise models, to analyze information streams and to select enviromentally relevant information as well as the routes which they tend to go. Based on these fundamental instruments, a CEIS architecture (structure and organization) can be developed whose realization is eventually supported by a ten-step plan. Existing EDP solutions are deliberately excluded in order to verify the general validity of the system architecture and to encourage creative potentials. The CEIS concept presented here, however, requires a transformation into operative practices, i.e. adjustment, completion, and combination of the elements concerning the detailed conditions of the enterprise under study.     

Community Conservation and the Future of Africa's Wildlife

Abstract: The term community-based conservation (CBC) refers to wildlife conservation efforts that involve rural people as an integral part of a wildlife conservation policy. The key elements of such programs are that local communities participate in resource planning and management and that they gain economically from wildlife utilization. In part, CBC is seen as an alternative to the more exclusionary protectionist policies of the past, which often alienated rural people from conservation efforts. The new approach acts to make rural people a constituency for wildlife and therefore active backers of wildlife protection. Africans, however, are struggling with severe social and economic problems such as poverty, long-standing economic stagnation, rapid population growth, and environmental deterioration. Because of the pressures that Africans face in making a living, the application of CBC may not occur as readily or as successfully as its advocates would hope. It may also be that the approach is being oversold. I use brief case studies from Madagascar, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland to highlight the possible conflicts between rural people's economic needs and the implementation of community conservation. In addition, the CBC literature treats the role of protection vaguely, as it does the question of what might happen if CBC fails to achieve wildlife conservation goals. Community-based conservation is an obvious advance over past practices because of its inclusive philosophy, but if rural people accept CBC because of its economic benefits, they may reject it at some point in the future if a better economic alternative is presented. Thus, CBC programs can work to produce a better relationship between wildlife and people, but only a vast improvement in the lives of rural Africans will ultimately produce a more secure future for the continent's wildlife.     

建立区域ISO 14001环境管理体系技术要点

以区域为范围进行环境管理体系认证是国家环保总局在我国推行ISO 14000标准的一项重要举措，其目的是将环境管理与行政管理充分有效的结合，借助区域管理机构的管理职能将ISO 14000这一科学的管理手段有效的实施，从而达到环境保护全社会参与，推动该区域各类组织积极自觉地实施ISO 14000标准。本文就区域类型环境管理体系建立与实施的有关技术要点，从经验的角度做了一些探讨。     

Self-contamination of aquaculture cages in shallow water

Fish farms, which initially colonized quiet and protected natural coastal areas, are now frequently installed in open flow zones, due to the lack of space along coasts and to the emergence of new environmental constraints. For the past two decades, a salmon fish farm has been located inside the roadstead of Cherbourg (France) to benefit from both sea protection and tide currents which regularly refresh the water. In spite of these favourable environmental conditions, periods of non-negligible fish mortalities have been observed to occur without clear evidence of their origin. This motivated the turbidity measurements and the numerical simulations presented in this paper. Firstly, it is shown that high turbidities in the farm site under study are mainly due to the flow acceleration under the cages, which causes the re-suspension of sediments and bio-deposits. Secondly, particles which enter the fishnet can have different origins (external source, bottom, or the net itself). Numerical simulations, based on the Reynolds equations and on the discrete random walk model for particle dispersion, suggest that the rear area of the net can be reached by particles emerging from below the net. It is observed that turbulent dispersion is a key ingredient for such a behaviour, as it can lead particles towards a large recirculation cell behind the net. Dispersion by realistic unsteady vortices has also been analysed by means of a Lattice-Boltzmann model. Though these computations involve smaller Reynolds numbers, they confirm qualitatively the observations of the random walk model. In addition, they suggest that vortex shedding and unsteady recirculation cells near the bottom can force particles from the sand bed to be lifted up and reach the rear of the net.     

Need for sustainable development awareness management in Cuba

The present paper acknowledges the need for sustainable development education in Cuba, after a short review of their national health status and educational system. The environmental situation of the island is outlined, including the role played by environmental education (EE) in the current environment system. The-EE in Cuba is presented, and the problems related to its implementation are analyzed. Recommendations and possible solutions towards the use of education for sustainability as a tool for environmental management are presented, so as to prove the need for environmental awareness management in Cuba.     

Effects of Land-Use and Tsetse Fly Control on Bird Species Richness in Southwestern Ethiopia

Successful control of tsetse (Glossina spp.)-transmitted trypanosomiasis in the Ghibe Valley, Ethiopia, appears to have accelerated conversion of wooded grassland into cropland. Land conversion, in turn, may have fragmented wildlife habitat. Our objective was to assess the influence of the expansion of agricultural land-use, brought about by tsetse control, on ecological properties by using bird species richness and composition as indicators of environmental impacts. We sampled bird species richness and composition (using Timed-Species counts) and habitat structure (using field sampling and remote sensing) in four land cover/land-use types in areas subjected to tsetse fly control and adjacent areas without control. At the height of the growing season bird species numbers and vegetative complexity were greater in the small-holder, oxen-plowed fields and riparian woodlands than in wooded grasslands or in large-holder, tractor-plowed fields. Species composition was highly dissimilar (40–70% dissimilarity) comparing among land-use types, with many species found only in a single type. This implies that trypanosomiasis control that results in land conversion from wooded grasslands to small-holder farming in this region may have no adverse impacts on bird species numbers but will alter composition. These results also suggest that moderate land-use by humans (e.g., small-holder field mosaics) increases habitat heterogeneity and bird species richness relative to high levels of use (e.g., tractor-plowed fields). Tsetse control may be indirectly maintaining species richness in the valley by encouraging the differential spread of these small-scale, heterogeneous farms in place of large-scale, homogeneous farms. Nevertheless, if the extent of small-holder farms significantly exceeds that of present levels, negative impacts on bird species richness and large shifts in species composition may occur.     

Teil I: Das Osnabrücker Umweltmanagement-Modell für Hochschulen

Through their use of energy and materials, universities cause a great deal of environmental pollution which could be reduced considerably by an effective choice of organizational and technical measures. There are some examples for environmental protection measures at several universities, but a professional environmental management system (EMS) for universities with a systematic approach to reduce the consumption of resources is lacking. At the University of Osnabrück, the basis for an EMS applicable for a university has been developed for the first time in Germany and the use of this system can also be transferred to other universities. The EMS is composed of ten building blocks, for example, alteration of the administration’s organizational structure, adoption of environmental guidelines, analysis of the energy and material flows which result in an eco-balance, an environmental program or measures to inform the staff and to help to involve them in environmental management. Over the next months, these ten building blocks will gradually be implemented at the University of Osnabrück. Five articles will provide an overview about the EMS developed for the University of Osnabrück as a whole and will describe parts of the material and energy flow analysis, and the planned environmental information system.

Part I: An Environmental Management Model for Universities: From Environmental Guidelines to the Involvement of Employees

Part II: The Energy Balance of the University of Osnabrück: Analysis of the Energy Flows and Conclusions

Part III: The Traffic Balance of the University of Osnabrück: Calculation of the Environmental Pollution which is caused by the University’s Commuters and Business Trips

Part IV: A Concept of Waste Reduction for the University of Osnabrück: Constructing the Waste Balance and Measures to Inform and Involve the Staff

Part V: The Planned Environmental Information System of the University of Osnabrück: Concept and Integration into the Management Information System

     

Integral projection models for finite populations in a stochastic environment

Continuous types of population structure occur when continuous variables such as body size or habitat quality affect the vital parameters of individuals. These structures can give rise to complex population dynamics and interact with environmental conditions. Here we present a model for continuously structured populations with finite size, including both demographic and environmental stochasticity in the dynamics. Using recent methods developed for discrete age-structured models we derive the demographic and environmental variance of the population growth as functions of a continuous state variable. These two parameters, together with the expected population growth rate, are used to define a one-dimensional diffusion approximation of the population dynamics. Thus, a substantial reduction in complexity is achieved as the dynamics of the complex structured model can be described by only three population parameters. We provide methods for numerical calculation of the model parameters and demonstrate the accuracy of the diffusion approximation by computer simulation of specific examples. The general modeling framework makes it possible to analyze and predict future dynamics and extinction risk of populations with various types of structure, and to explore consequences of changes in demography caused by, e.g., climate change or different management decisions. Our results are especially relevant for small populations that are often of conservation concern.     

Preferred conservation policies of shark researchers

There is increasing concern about the conservation status of sharks. However, the presence of numerous different (and potentially mutually exclusive) policies complicates management implementation and public understanding of the process. We distributed an online survey to members of the largest professional shark and ray research societies to assess member knowledge of and attitudes toward different conservation policies. Questions covered society member opinions on conservation and management policies, personal histories of involvement in advocacy and management, and perceptions of the approach of conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to shark conservation. One hundred and two surveys were completed (overall response rate 21%). Respondents considered themselves knowledgeable about and actively involved in conservation and management policy; a majority believed scientists have a responsibility to advocate for conservation (75%), and majorities have sent formal public comments to policymakers (54%) and included policy suggestions in their papers (53%). They believe sustainable shark fisheries are possible, are currently happening today (in a few places), and should be the goal instead of banning fisheries. Respondents were generally less supportive of newer limit‐based (i.e., policies that ban exploitation entirely without a species‐specific focus) conservation policy tools, such as shark sanctuaries and bans on the sale of shark fins, than of target‐based fisheries management tools (i.e., policies that allow for sustainable harvest of species whose populations can withstand it), such as fishing quotas. Respondents were generally supportive of environmental NGO efforts to conserve sharks but raised concerns about some NGOs that they perceived as using incorrect information and focusing on the wrong problems. Our results show there is an ongoing debate in shark conservation and management circles relative to environmental policy on target‐based natural resources management tools versus limit‐based conservation tools. They also suggest that closer communication between the scientific and environmental NGO communities may be needed to recognize and reconcile differing values and objectives between these groups.     

The effects of landscape structure on space competition and alternative stable states

Many species that compete for space live on heterogeneous landscapes and interact at local scales. The quality, amount, and structure of landscapes may have considerable impact on the ability of species to compete or coexist, yet basic models of space competition do not include that level of detail. We model space competition between two species with positive feedback through recruitment facilitation, which creates the potential for alternative stable states to occur. We compare the predictions of a spatially implicit model with a simulation model that includes explicit space and landscape structure. We create structured landscapes in which we specify the amount of habitat and degree of fragmentation and ask how landscape structure, dispersal strategy, and scale affect the presence of alternative stable states, or bistability. We find that structured landscapes can reduce the range of parameter values that lead to bistability in our model, but they do not eliminate bistability. The type of landscape and the dispersal distance for each species also influence the amount of environmental change needed for abrupt community shifts to occur. Coexistence of the two competitors is possible under certain conditions when connectivity is low. Consequently, landscape structure may lead to considerable disparity between the predictions of simple models and actual dynamics on complex landscapes during environmental change.     

Teil II: Stoffstromnetze für Fruchtfolgen

The general results of material flow analyses for agricultural farms presented in Part I are now specified for three farms in Lower Saxony. For this, the existing material flow net for winter wheat is extended by the crops of winter barley, winter rye, summer barley, rape, sugar beets and potatoes. The assessment is essentially done regarding the impact categories of resource depletion, cumulated energy demand (CED) and emissions to atmosphere. Besides the assessment of single farms or crops, also the comparison, of different agricultural production systems is possible, whereby the choice of the functional unit and the basis of comparison (with reference to input or output) is of major importance. Additionally, as for agricultural means of production, the material flows and emissions resulting from the provision of carbolime — an often employed carbonate fertiliser as for sugar-beet cultivation — are derived completely within this article. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses on the subject of detail intensity of agricultural basic data are presented for the example of machine employment. The material flow nets are regarded as transferable to other farms with similar crop rotation systems, with an appropriate expenditure of information gathering and parameterisation. The complete net can be used as a module within further investigations, e.g. of the industrial processing of food, as a pre-production chain for agricultural resources being part of the production process (winter wheat — mill, brewing barley — brewery, sugar beets — sugar-factory).