Environmental pollution in Africa

Mining and minerals industries are fast-growing, but at the same time, they have gained more attention due to their impacts over the environment and society. This research aims to provide new insights into the topic of perception and awareness toward sustainability in industrial mining in Brazil. The work included in-depth interviews with a set of companies’ managers/directors focusing in particular on aspects related to the social and environmental dimensions, including communication and relationship with the community, impact assessment and mitigation strategies. The knowledge and use of for formal indicators was also evaluated and analyzed through the proposed Model for Sustainability Assessment of Mining (SAoM model), which was applied to all participating companies. The results put in evidence the existing gap between large and small companies, with these last ones showing lower awareness for the impacts of their activities. The lack of community engagement and of local stakeholders’ involvement, as well as the disregard for actions to mitigate their environmental and social impacts, is the main challenges to be overcome by this sector. The sector has then a long path to go toward sustainability and an active involvement of public institutions is required to allow for its development without compromising locals welfare.     

Sharing Rules for Common-Pool Resources When Self-Insurance is Available

When a group of users who share a common-pool resource through a system of licenses is exposed to the risk of shortage, there is a need to establish a sharing rule. Such sharing rule is likely to impact the individual decisions to self-insure, i.e., to rely on a secure but costly resource instead of the free but uncertain common-pool resource. We determine the optimal sharing rule and the optimal diversification between the common-pool resource and the safe resource as a function of the agents’ individual characteristics, the distribution of the common-pool resource availability, and the cost of the safe resource. We find that, for a group of agents with heterogenous risk preferences, a perfectly informed regulator can obtain the optimal diversification level by imposing a rationing rule which shares the resource between agents proportionally to their relative risk tolerance. We illustrate and interpret our results in the context of water management in France.     

Traps in and of our minds: relationships between human logic,dialectical traps and social-ecological traps

Social-ecological traps are theorized to be present when human actions affect feedbacks and drivers in social-ecological systems, which, in turn, lead to regime shifts that may alter ecosystem capacity to generate services on which human wellbeing depends, and this, in turn, triggers societal responses, where actors and institutions interact with ecological dynamics and unwittingly lock development into a vulnerable pathway. The key dynamic in this theorization seems to be that human action often predicates or initiates the series of cascading affects that determine the presence of, and, perhaps, the effectiveness of, social-ecological traps. However, what drives human action in this context? What logic, assumptions, decisions, world views, and other processes are implicated in this configuration? This paper first briefly reviews ecological identity and the problems of anthropocentricism, human exceptionalism, and human exemptionalism and introduces the term ecological disenfranchisement. Building upon this, the author invokes Horn’s logic and dialectical traps as a lens for understanding human roles and the prevalence of issues with ecological identities, within social ecological traps. Drilling further down, the paper illustrates these traps with short vignettes, in each case, attempting to link the human logical traps with larger system dynamics. Finally, the author proposes a chain of reasoning to serve as an example of how the presence of human logic traps (or entrapment) in a number of different spheres has an impact upon the larger system, and, perhaps, even predicts entrapment of the larger system. Future efforts to either understand social-ecological traps or navigate away or out of them must first take stock of the human logical traps that actors within the systems are influenced by, and that influence the large system(s).This paper argues that failing to account for human traps within will render most efforts to avoid or escape social-ecological traps futile.     

Disaster risk from a macroeconomic perspective: a metric for fiscal vulnerability evaluation

The Disaster Deficit Index (DDI) measures macroeconomic and financial risk in a country according to possible catastrophic scenario events. Extreme disasters can generate financial deficit due to sudden and elevated need of resources to restore affected inventories. The DDI captures the relationship between the economic loss that a country could experience when a catastrophic event occurs and the availability of funds to address the situation. The proposed model utilises the procedures of the insurance industry in establishing probable losses, based on critical impacts during a given period of exposure; for economic resilience, the model allows one to calculate the country's financial ability to cope with a critical impact. There are limitations and costs associated with access to resources that one must consider as feasible values according to the country's macroeconomic and financial conditions. This paper presents the DDI model and the results of its application to 19 countries of the Americas and aims to guide governmental decision‐making in disaster risk reduction.     

Alternative methods for the pilot-scale production and characterization of chitosan nanoparticles

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - This work describes the production/characterization of low molar mass chitosan nanoparticles derived from waste shrimp shells (SSC), as well as from a...     

A New Rationale for Not Picking Low-Hanging Fruits: the Separation of Ownership and Control

Recent attempts at explaining the energy-efficiency gap rely on considerations related to organizational and behavioral/cognitive failures. In this paper, we build on the strategic delegation literature to advance a complementary explanation. We show that strategic market interaction may encourage business owners to instill a bias against energy efficiency in managerial compensation contracts. Since managers respond to financial incentives, their decisions will reflect this bias, resulting in a lack of investment.

     

Microbial Source Tracking Analysis Using Viral Indicators in Santa Lucía and Uruguay Rivers,Uruguay

The aim of this study was to determine the origin (human, bovine or porcine) and the concentration of the fecal sources of contamination in waters from Santa Lucía basin and Uruguay River in Uruguay by using host-specific viral markers (adenoviruses and polyomaviruses) as microbial source tracking (MST). Between June 2015 and May 2016, monthly collections of surface water samples were performed in six sites in Santa Lucía basin and four sites in Uruguay River (n = 120 samples). Viral concentration was carried out using an absorption-elution method. Detection and quantification of human and porcine adenovirus (HAdV and PAdV, respectively) and human and bovine polyomavirus (HPyV and BoPyV, respectively) were performed by quantitative PCR (qPCR). To evaluate the infectivity of circulating HAdV, an integrated cell culture-qPCR (ICC-qPCR) was used. A logistic regression analysis was carried out to estimate the influence of environmental variables on the virus presence in surface waters. Overall, HAdV was the prevalent (18%; 21/120) followed by BoPyV (11%; 13/120) and HPyV (3%; 3/120), whereas PAdV was not detected in this study. The mean concentration ranged from 1.5 × 10⁴ genomic copies/L (gc/L) for HAdV to 1.8 × 10² gc/L for HPyV. Infective HAdVs were observed in two out of ten analyzed samples. A significant effect of environmental temperature (p = 0.001) and river (p = 0.012) on the presence of human viruses was found. These results suggest that fecal contamination could affect the water quality of these rivers, showing deficiencies in the procedure of sewage discharge from regional cities, livestock and dairy farms.

     

An environmental game with coupling constraints

We consider a game where players face environmental constraints. We derive and compare noncooperative, cooperative and umbrella scenarios. In the latter, the players couple their environmental constraints and implement Rosen’s normalized equilibrium. It is shown that the cooperative outcome can be generated as a normalized equilibrium and that the results obtained in the literature do not necessarily generalize to this constrained setting.