Public Investment and Environmental Sustainability of Agricultural Production in China

The excessive application of fertilizer and pesticides in grain production in China has posed a threat to the environmental sustainability of agricultural production. One of the major reasons of the increasing usage of chemical inputs by farmers is their trying to reach higher yields, especially in absence of adequate public inputs, such as development and extension of appropriate technology and necessary production infrastructure, etc. Based on the crop specific data of the past 20 years, this paper examines how the public investments in agricultural researches could impact on the reduction of farmers' private material inputs of major grain crops in China. It manifests that the increased investments in public sector, especially in agricultural researches, is a favorable and effective way to reduce farmers' private material inputs and should be given a priority consideration in the policy emendation to increase yields and improve production sustainability.     

Relations between Environmental Right for Citizens and the Right to Use Environmental Resources owned by Company and Enterprise

Company and enterprise have to consume a certain amount of environmental resources during producing process and discharge pollutants into environment. No matter how advanced technologies for management are taken, company and enterprise will unavoidably lower quality of environmental public goods. In fact, current environmental problems and a decline in environmental quality are mainly caused by actions of company and enterprise. Whatever environmental right for citizens is, either as a right i…     

Sustainability and intergenerational equity: do past injustices matter?

Intergenerational equity is a core concept of sustainability, typically expressed as a concern for future generations. We contend in this review paper that intergenerational equity can also reflect a concern for past generations. Within the study and practice of social justice, significant concern is paid to remedying injustices suffered by past generations, sometimes called “restorative justice,” because these injustices do not end with the past, but remain embedded in the social, economic, and ecological fabrics of our present-day society. We ask: what roles do past injustices play in our understanding of intergenerational justice, and what roles can this understanding play in sustainability thought and practice? We weave together reviews from justice and legal studies and environmental ethics. Several short cases illustrate how restorative justice in practice results in benefits for sustainability, including improved resource management and social cohesion and governance. Our review of sustainability literature shows that while only few of the conceptions of intergenerational equity hint at a concern for historical issues, its concern for intra-generational equity may be a place where restorative issues can be addressed. Within sustainability science approaches, restorative issues may also arise in the assessment of the current state as well as in the appreciation of contextual norms and histories of the places attempting to become more sustainable.     

Sweden-China:Education for Environment and Sustainability

Education for Environment and Sustainability Adbanced International Training Programme 'Education for Environment and Sustainability' Sweden-China was run for the third time in 2007 exclusively for Chinese participants. This advanced international training program is supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)     

Forging New Directions in Science and Environmental Politics and Policy: How Can Co-operation, Deliberation and Decision be Brought Together?

Science, politics and environmental policy have for several years been encountering social and institutional as well as scientific challenges, national and international. The normative basis of all sciences is pressurised from three sides: by awareness of the public, who claims more transparency and sensibility from the scientific institutions regarding factual or possible impacts of science-based industrial progress; by the industries, which try to speed up and intensify the industrialisation of knowledge; and by the public policies, which want to see the sciences engaged in ways to mitigate unintended consequences of economic, ecological and social developments. At the same time, environmental policy is undergoing a tremendous sea change both in conceptual and practical matters. Since the Brundtland Report in 1987 and accelerated after UNCED 1992, environmental policy has been struggling to become a groundbreaking new paradigm for the capacity of resolving social and political issues as well. Any successful attempt to alter traditional institutional and mental structures in policy-making toward sustainability presupposes a renewed association of co-operation, deliberation and decision making. Results from theory of democracy, studies in science and technology, and evaluation studies in environmental policy and politics can be utilised for this context.     

“Measuring Sustainability”: A Multi-Criterion Framework

So far, the elementary question of whether one country’s or region’s economy is moving towards sustainability or away from it cannot be answered with unanimous consensus on the ‘measuring rod(s)’ to be employed. The main assumption of this article is that sustainability assessment needs a set of multi-dimensional indicators. From this assumption a question arises: how could such indicators be aggregated? Often, some indicators improve while others deteriorate. For instance, when incomes grow, SO₂ might go down while CO₂ increases. It has to be noted that this is the classical conflictual situation studied in multi-criteria decision theory. The use of a multi-criterion framework for making operational the ‘measuring of sustainability’ is discussed here by means of illustrative examples and more formal arguments.     

Objectivity as Trained Judgment: How Environmental Reporters Pioneered Journalism for a “Post-truth” Era

Amid debate about the role and practices of journalism in the era of Presidents Trump and Putin, this commentary argues that environmental journalism offers a conceptual model and guide to action for all journalists in the “post-truth” or “post-fact” era. Since the specialism was formed in the 1960s, environmental journalists have reported on politically partisan issues where facts are contested, expertise is challenged, and uncertainty is heightened. To deal with these and other challenges, environmental journalism, this commentary argues, has reassessed and reconfigured the foundational journalistic concept of objectivity. The specialism has come to view objectivity as the implementation of a transparent method, as the pluralistic search for consensus, and, most importantly, as trained judgment. By developing these definitions through the reporting of several science policy controversies, environmental journalists have pioneered journalism for the “post-truth” era.     

How Do Groups Solve Local Commons Dilemmas? Lessons from Experimental Economics in the Field

The use of experimental settings to observe human behaviour in a controlled environment of incentives, rules and institutions, has been widely used by the behavioural sciences for sometime now, particularly by psychology and economics. In most cases the subjects are college students recruited for one to two hour decision making exercises in which, depending on their choices, they earn cash averaging US$ 20. In such exercises players face a set of feasible actions, rules and incentives (payoffs) involving different forms of social exchange with other people, and that in most cases involve some kind of externalities with incomplete contracts, such as in the case of common-pool resources situations. Depending on the ecological and institutional settings, the resource users face a set of feasible levels of extraction, a set of rules regarding the control or monitoring of individual use, and sometimes ways of imposing material or non-material costs or rewards to those breaking or following the rules. We brought the experimental lab to the field and invited about two hundred users of natural resources in three Colombian rural villages to participate in such decision making exercises and through these and other research instruments we learned about the ways they solve - or fail to - tragedies of the commons with different social institutions. Further, bringing the lab to the field allowed us to explore some of the limitations of existing models about human behaviour and its consequences for designing policies for conserving ecosystems and improving social welfare.     

Environmental fate and ecotoxicity of lanthanides: Are they a uniform group beyond chemistry?

Lanthanides are a chemically uniform group of metals (La–Lu) that, together with yttrium (Y) and scandium (Sc), form the group of rare earth elements (REEs). Because of their many applications (e.g., agriculture, medicine, motor industry), their global production has increased exponentially in the last decades and their biogeochemical cycles are being disrupted by human uses (e.g., gadolinium anomalies in freshwater and tap water, REEs enrichment of soils as a consequence of agricultural practices). However, ecotoxicological effects and mechanism of action of these elements are still poorly understood. In particular, there is no consensus as to lanthanides showing a coherent and predictable pattern of (eco)toxicity in the same way as their atomic properties. For aquatic organisms, contradictory conclusions on this issue can be found in the bibliography. This review shows that the variable composition of culture media used in ecotoxicology, and the associated differences in lanthanide's speciation, are the most likely cause for such discrepancies. In particular, the formation of insoluble species in some highly complexing media likely leads to changes in the soluble concentration of lanthanide during some tests; with the potential for a generalized underestimation of their toxicity at the present state of knowledge. For terrestrial organisms, suitable studies to establish trends in lanthanides' toxicity are practically nonexistent; with most research focusing on the effects of REE mixtures. Molecular level studies to elucidate the mechanisms of action of lanthanides are essentially limited to La, pointing to the need for further research to identify common mechanisms of action or modes of action across lanthanides. Overall, agreement on the correct procedures to follow to obtain reliable and comparable data for individual lanthanide is the first action to take in order to arrive at a reliable risk assessment for this group of elements in both aquatic and terrestrial systems.     

Narratives,Rhetorical Genres,and Environmental Conflict: Responses to Schwarze's “Environmental Melodrama”

The appearance of Steven Schwarze's essay, “Environmental Melodrama” (Schwarze, 2006) as the lead article in a recent issue of The Quarterly Journal of Speech marks an important moment of recognition for environmental communication scholarship. Schwarze's essay demonstrates how studies of environmental rhetoric can contribute to rhetorical theory more generally, while addressing practical questions regarding the rhetorical aspects of environmental conflict. The contributors to this forum respond to Schwarze's arguments, drawing in part upon their own case studies of rhetorical action and narrative in environmental conflict.     

Australia and Russia: How do their environmental policy processes differ?

This paper focuses on comparative review and analysis of the systems of environmental protection, national environmental strategies and fundamentals of environmental legislation in Australia and the Russian Federation. These countries have many socioeconomic similarities, such as low population densities and richness in natural resources which are largely exported. The main disparity between Australia and Russia is in the types of economy. This paper ‘continues’ the sequence of recent scholarly publications on comparison of various features of environmental policies in the countries from all over the world. Comparative analysis in this research has been based on examination of scholarly publications, legislation, government documents, mass media sources and NGO responses. The analysis has revealed a number of differences including top-down implementation of policies in Russia whereas in Australia, each State (Territory) implements policies with significant independence from the Commonwealth Government. At the same time, similarities between the countries have been identified: for example, in deficits in the budget of local environmental authorities and in the presence of contradictions in legislation at national and regional levels of government. Suggestions resulting from this analysis include further integration of sustainable development strategies at all levels of Australian government to encourage further protection of the environment and, for Russia, creating a separate Ministry of Environmental Protection. These approaches should assist facilitation of sustainable development for both nations. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Environmental feedbacks in temperate aquatic ecosystems under global change: why do we need to consider chemical stressors?

Regional Environmental Change - Globally increasing temperature and modifications in precipitation patterns induce major environmental alterations in aquatic ecosystems. Particularly profound...     

Economic growth in selected G20 countries: How do different pollution emissions matter?

Environment, Development and Sustainability - This study incorporates pollutant emissions into the growth model with the presence of institutional quality and exports as control variables. The...     

Sustainability assessment in the Brazilian Amazon: the municipalities of the state of Amapá

Environment, Development and Sustainability - Although sustainability assessment is widely discussed at Brazil, in Brazilian Amazon its use is still little applied, considering this territory is...     

Seeking for Your Own Sake: Chinese Citizens’ Motivations for Information Seeking About Air Pollution

Based on data from a Qualtrics panel, this study examines Chinese citizens’ motivations for information seeking about air pollution. Results from structural equation modelling indicate that information insufficiency, negative affect, attitudes toward seeking, and perceived information gathering capacity are positively related to information seeking. Informational subjective norms, however, were not significantly related to information seeking. Further, participants with more knowledge and higher risk perception were more likely to desire more information about air pollution. These results suggest that communication campaigns should highlight individuals’ personal risks and self-efficacy to encourage greater information seeking about air pollution among Chinese citizens. Emotional appeal may serve as an effective strategy as well.     

Sustainability education and a new master’s degree, the master of sustainability science: the Graduate Program in Sustainability Science (GPSS) at the University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo started its Graduate Program in Sustainability Science (GPSS), offering a master of sustainability science degree, in 2007. The GPSS curriculum consists of: (1) knowledge and concept oriented courses, which cover sustainability-related subjects from a holistic viewpoint; (2) experiential learning and skills oriented practical courses, which offer practical exercises to acquire the skills and sensibility required of future leaders; and (3) the Master’s thesis, for which students are encouraged to address complex sustainability problems through a transdisciplinary approach. Sustainability science is not a discipline that can be defined simply by the subjects it deals with, but is an academic field characterized by core principles that include holistic thinking, transdisciplinarity, and respect for diversity. The GPSS has been designed so that students may gain the capacity to understand and practice these principles. The present paper describes how the GPSS has defined sustainability education and designed its curriculum accordingly.     

How much could a tanker spill cost British Columbians?

Ocean-based industries provide employment for nearly 30 % of the population in the North Coast region of British Columbia. Marine resource dependence has raised concerns about the possible economic impacts of a tanker spill along the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway shipping route, which would export 525,000 barrels (bbls) per day of oil, bitumen, and condensate from Kitimat, British Columbia, to international markets. This study uses current and projected future values of four ocean-based industries and the Enbridge Northern Gateway project to estimate total (i.e., direct, indirect, and induced) economic effects on total output, employment, and gross domestic product (GDP) and impacts on the regional economy over a 50-year period under three potential spill scenarios: no impact (no spill), medium impact (a 63,000-bbl spill), and high impact (a 257,000-bbl spill). The proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway project could produce total positive economic effects of $600 million in output, 5,700–8,400 person years (PYs) of employment, and $300 million in GDP in the North Coast region. A medium impact tanker spill could cause losses of $40–$190 million in output, 400–1,500 PYs of employment, and $20–$100 million in GDP, and a high-impact spill could cause losses of $90–$300 million in output, 1,650–4,500 PYs of employment, and $70–$200 million in GDP.