A game theoretic approach for interbasin water resources allocation considering the water quality issues

In this paper, a new game theoretic methodology is developed for interbasin water transfer management with regard to economic, equity, and environmental criteria. The main objective is to supply the competing users in a fair way, while the efficiency and environmental sustainability criteria are satisfied and the utilities of water users are incorporated. Firstly, an optimization model is developed to proportionally allocate water to the competing users in water donor and receiving basins based on their water demands. Secondly, for different coalitions of water users, the water shares of the coalitions are determined using an optimization model with economic objectives regarding the physical and environmental constraints of the system. In order to satisfy water-quality requirements, the impacts of decreasing the instream flow in donor basin are estimated using a water-quality simulation model, and the required treatment levels for effluents discharged into the river, downstream of the water transfer point are determined. Finally, to achieve equity and to provide sufficient incentives for water users to participate in the cooperation, some cooperative game theoretic approaches are utilized for reallocation of net benefits to water users. This model is applied to a large-scale interbasin water allocation problem including two different basins struggling with water scarcity in Iran. The results show that this model can be utilized as an effective tool for optimal interbasin water allocation management involving stakeholders with conflicting objectives subject to physical and environmental constraints.     

A Blending Problem in Copper Production

Well-known mathematical models related to blending problem are extended and adjusted to the specific blending problem in copper production. Certain constraints are deduced from the process of making copper as well as from the ecological aspects of the production process. The models are applied to the production experience at the copper-smelting plant RTB Bor. The implementation of introduced models was made in the programming package MATHEMATICA. Numerical results corresponding to the introduced mathematical model were compared with results obtained by implementing the classical mathematical models.     

Modeling Waste Incineration for Life-Cycle Inventory Analysis in Switzerland

This paper proposes a mathematical model for life-cycle inventory analysis (LCI) of waste incineration in Switzerland. In order to model conventional and new incineration technologies adequately, fundamental aspects of the different technologies relevant for the LCI are discussed. The environmental impact of these technologies strongly depends on the assessment of the long-term emissions of the solid incineration residues and is therefore related to value based decisions about the time horizon considered. The article illustrates that the choice of the landfill model has a significant influence on the results of life-cycle assessment of waste incineration.     

An LCA-based environmental impact assessment model for regulatory planning

Assessing the environmental impact (EI) of regulatory planning (a lower tier in the Chinese urban planning system) has significant implications for improving the environmental performance of the future built environment. Current environmental impact assessments generally focus on microscale and macroscale, while mesoscale studies at region level are lacking. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an LCA-based environmental impact assessment model for regulatory planning, which focuses on embodied EI of urban construction and operational EI associated with the operation of the built environment. To ensure the regulatory plans both meet the environmental limits and fit well with environmental policy requirements, this paper also presents a new impact analysis method by integrating environmental carrying capacity analysis and distance to target method. The Statutory Plan of Shenzhen Futian Free Trade Zone 03-T2 is used as a case study to test and demonstrate the applying process and functions of the proposed method. Results indicate that the proposed model can effectively quantify the future environmental impact associated with a regional development plan, and can potentially be used as a tool for urban administrators to make decisions on regulatory planning revision and provide references for environmental management.     

Water Conservation Versus Soil Salinity Control

This paper tackles the increasingly significant problem of irrigation-induced soil salinity within a groundwater management model. Irrigation can result not only in heavier salt concentrations but also in the removal of salt from the soil through return flows. Given these contradictory observations, we are interested in the effects on soil salt concentration if irrigation efficiency is improved. We develop a model of salt concentration patterns in both soil and groundwater. We introduce a negative externality to the production process by assuming that soil degradation due to higher soil salinity affects total factor productivity. Within this framework, we show that in the presence of this externality, increasing irrigation efficiency can lead to higher or lower soil salt concentration, depending on the social cost of transferring salt from one reservoir to another.     

Dynamical Allocation Method of Emission Rights of Pollutants by Viability Constraints Under Tychastic Uncertainty

This study proposes a method of dynamic decentralization by constraints and its associated software. It can be used to allocate pollutant emissions rights among the different polluters such that they achieve both given global and local emission thresholds not to be transgressed. Knowing the maximum growth rates of polluting emissions of each polluter in the worst case, this method provides the rule of a dynamic allocation of pollutant emissions rights as well as the required initial emissions of each polluters assuring that, whatever the growth rates of the emissions below the maximum growth rates, the resulting emissions will be, both globally and locally, under their thresholds. These guaranteed initial emissions supply each polluter with a measure of risk insurance. This problem, formulated as a “tychastic” regulated system with viability constraints, is solved with mathematical and algorithmic tools of viability theory and numerical results obtained by a dedicated software are presented.     

Urban water resource management for sustainable environment planning using artificial intelligence techniques

In the current era, water is a significant resource for socio-economic growth and the protection of healthy environments. Properly controlled water resources are considered a vital part of development, which reduces poverty and equity. Conventional Water system Management maximizes the existing water flows available to satisfy all competing demands, including on-site water and groundwater. Therefore, Climatic change would intensify the specific challenges in water resource management by contributing to uncertainty. Sustainable water resources management is an essential process for ensuring the earth's life and the future. Nonlinear effects, stochastic dynamics, and hydraulic constraints are challenging in ecological planning for sustainable water development. In this paper, Adaptive Intelligent Dynamic Water Resource Planning (AIDWRP) has been proposed to sustain the urban areas' water environment. Here, an adaptive intelligent approach is a subset of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique in which environmental planning for sustainable water development has been modeled effectively. Artificial intelligence modeling improves water efficiency by transforming information into a leaner process, improving decision-making based on data-driven by combining numeric AI tools and human intellectual skills. In AIDWRP, Markov Decision Process (MDP) discusses the dynamic water resource management issue with annual use and released locational constraints that develop sensitivity-driven methods to optimize several efficient environmental planning and management policies. Consequently, there is a specific relief from the engagement of supply and demand for water resources, and substantial improvements in local economic efficiency have been simulated with numerical outcomes.     

Playing Pollution Games with Thermal Electricity Generators

This paper discusses the economic and environmental implications of a stylised electricity market with transmission grid constraints and shared temporal pollution standards that restrict the joint strategy space of the agents. These are problematic to enforce if individual monitoring is impossible or very expensive. For such situations, we propose a time-dependent (or “open-loop dynamic”), game-theoretic model capable of analysing coupled constraints equilibria, also known as generalised Nash. We compute these equilibria for thermal generators subjected to annual pollution limits and instantaneous grid restrictions for a three-node dc model with a two-period load duration curve. The model illustrates the possibility that well-meaning environmental regulation might harm consumer surplus. It also highlights the cost to efficiency of regulatory attempts to ease the burden of compliance.     

Optimal charges on river effluent from lumped and distributed sources

We propose a modelling framework for the design of a Pigouvian effluent tax, in an environmental management problem implicating several economic agents located in a river basin. The proposed charging system allows for the agents' geographical position relative to the river's sections, at which environmental standards are to be enforced, and takes into account the possible different market structures within which the agents are operating. In particular, we consider industrial agents competing on an oligopolistic market, and a set of farmers acting as price takers on a large market. A regional authority's goal is to induce agents to some sort of cooperation which would result in the satisfaction of the common environmental constraints. The economic process on one side, and the pollution transport and accumulation on the other, constitute two dynamic processes in two different time scales. As the economic process is much slower than the other process we can neglect the latter's transients and concentrate on the time invariant steady state solutions to the transportation equation. The model thus constructed has some noncooperative game and optimal control problem's features with space being the ‘running’ variable. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

An Optimization Model for Integrated Coastal Management: Development and a Case Study Using Italy’s Comacchio Municipality

In this paper, I develop an optimization model for integrated coastal management in which decisions arise from an area-based algorithm that minimizes predicted damage caused by beach erosion and inshore flooding, while accounting for economic, social, and environmental losses. The model favors the involvement of stakeholders in coastal management, but does not use complicated assessment procedures for non-economic indicators or relative weights to combine economic, social, and environmental indicators. Instead, the integration between economic activities or properties and the environmental status and landscape is represented objectively and non-linearly by referring to initial and sustainability conditions, combined with budgetary and environmental constraints. The model successfully accounted for both human and environmental dynamics by depicting delayed effects, neighborhood externalities, and feedback effects. It calculated a single optimal value for each integrated coastal management strategy, which permitted the support of future decisions and the evaluation of past decisions. The model’s insights were based on reliable estimates, with reliability determined by calculating the confidence level. The model was successfully applied to Italy’s Comacchio coastal municipality, where it revealed the priorities for optimal beach nourishment, dune fixation, and residential and holiday housing development based on budget constraints, beach losses, flood damage, pollution impacts, and land-use constraints.     

Hydrologic–Economic Model for Managing Irrigation Intensity in Irrigation Areas under Watertable and Soil Salinity Targets

This paper gives mathematical details and sample applications of SWAGMAN Farm (SWAGMAN, Salt Water and Groundwater Management), a farm-scale hydrologic economic model that integrates agronomic, climatic, irrigation, hydrogeological and economic aspects of irrigated agriculture. The model is capable of determining optimum mix of land use to keep watertable and soil salinity within acceptable limits while maximising the economic returns. Alternatively, the model can simulate water and salt balance and economics of a given cropping preference. Web-based and Geographic Information Systems versions of the model are available for integration with the environmental reporting systems of the irrigation areas.     

Time value of emission and technology discounting rate for off-grid electricity generation in India using intermediate pyrolysis

The environmental impact assessment of a process over its entire operational lifespan is an important issue. Estimation of life cycle emission helps in predicting the contribution of a given process to abate (or to pollute) the environmental emission scenario. Considering diminishing and time-dependent effect of emission, assessment of the overall effect of emissions is very complex. The paper presents a generalized methodology for arriving at a single emission discounting number for a process option, using the concept of time value of carbon emission flow. This number incorporates the effect of the emission resulting from the process over the entire operational lifespan. The advantage of this method is its quantitative aspect as well as its flexible nature. It can be applied to any process. The method is demonstrated with the help of an Intermediate Pyrolysis process when used to generate off-grid electricity and opting biochar route for disposing straw residue. The scenarios of very high net emission to very high net carbon sequestration is generated using process by careful selection of process parameters for different scenarios. For these different scenarios, the process discounting rate was determined and its outcome is discussed. The paper also proposes a process specific eco-label that mentions the discounting rates.     

Relaxation algorithms to find Nash equilibria with economic applications

Recent theoretical studies have shown that a relaxation algorithm can be used to find noncooperative equilibria of synchronous infinite games with nonlinear payoff functions and coupled constraints. In this study, we introduce an improvement to the algorithm, such as the steepest-descent step-size control, for which the convergence of the algorithm is proved. The algorithm is then tested on several economic applications. In particular, a River Basin Pollution problem is considered where coupled environmental constraints are crucial for the relevant model definition. Numerical runs demonstrate fast convergence of the algorithm for a wide range of parameters. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

长株潭城市群经济社会发展与环境压力

长株潭城市群是湖南省的核心增长极,是"资源节约型社会、环境友好型社会"社会建设综合配套改革试验区,但伴随高速的工业化发展和城市化进程,长株潭面临着严峻的资源约束和环境压力。文章从土地利用格局、经济社会发展、环境质量状况、主要污染物排放和资源能源利用等方面入手,综合分析了长株潭城市群的环境压力,主要体现在长株潭城市群城市化与土地需求的矛盾凸显,"摊大饼"的扩张模式带来生态风险;重工业和污染排放集聚,累积性污染突出;环境空气质量和地表水环境质量形势不容乐观;资源能源利用方式粗放等。结合城市群区域规划,提出了长株潭城市群在新型城镇化建设中应采取的生态环境保护措施建议。     

Long-term use of galvanized steel in external applications. Aspects of patina formation, zinc runoff, barrier properties of surface treatments, and coatings and environmental fate

Galvanized steel structures are used in a large variety of external constructions in the modern urban society, and their beneficial properties from a corrosion and oxidation perspective are well known. Less investigated is the extent of their contribution to the diffuse dispersion of zinc in the society and also to the environmental fate of corrosion-induced released zinc. This paper presents long-term runoff rates of zinc from galvanized steel surfaces with main focus on hot-dipped galvanized steel exposed for up to 10 years at nonsheltered urban atmospheric conditions. The long-term capacities of a naturally formed patina and the presence of surface treatments and coatings to hinder and reduce corrosion-induced zinc runoff from galvanized steel are elucidated. The environmental interaction of zinc runoff and concrete surfaces in pavement and urban storm drain systems is highlighted and the high capacity of concrete to retain released zinc presented.     

The Challenge of Urban Growth and Sustainable Development for Asian Cities in the 21st Century

The challenges of urban growth for mega-cities in Asia, now and over the next few decades, are examined with particular reference to the ability or inability of those in charge of cities, elected officials and administrators, to provide for the legitimate demands of citizens. Issues such as population growth, industrialization, urbanization, financing, employment, health care, social services, public safety, transportation, water supply, waste disposal, and cultural and recreational facilities are included. While sustainable development of cities is advocated strongly by environmentalists and administrators, the past history of urban growth is quite often the opposite. Why? This paper examines the severe constraints that urban developments are subjected to, and might be possible to change in order to create a better future, with particular emphasis on Asia. Finally, the important contributions made by environmental scientists and engineers towards more sustainable development are placed in context with the reality of urban growth. The approach taken is my personal view, having lived for over a period of 62 years in Europe, North America and now Asia, and having practised as an engineer and educator for almost 40 years.     

属性识别理论模型在环境质量评价中的应用

把近来提出的属性识别理论模型引用到环境质量评价中,经实例分析,与模糊数学模型及综合指数法作了比较,表明属性识别理论模型评价环境质量是合理可行的。     

Neutrosophic multi-criteria evaluation of sustainable alternatives for the structure of single-family homes

This paper proposes a methodology for the assessment of the sustainability among three different structural design alternatives for a single-family home. The response associated with each alternative has been measured using 43 indicators considering all stages of the life cycle. A decision-making model is carried out on the basis of a neutrosophic group analytical hierarchy process (NAHP-G) capturing the maximum information in terms of credibility, inconsistency and indetermination. The 9 criteria on which an expert group intervenes are finally evaluated using VIKOR. The results show that non-probabilistic uncertainties influence the weights obtained, with maximum deviations in the criteria between 11.91% and 4.95%, if compared to conventional AHP. From the methodology it is obtained that the technological alternative with non-conventional concrete performs best in sustainable terms. Although the industrialized option has less environmental impact, only the simultaneous consideration of the economic, environmental and social pillars in a project will lead to appropriate sustainable designs.     

Modelling Environmental Risk Using the Upper Partial Moment: a Safety-First Approach

The objective of the paper is to model economic-environmental trade-offs using a safety-first approach. The novelty of the approach is in the use of the empirically estimated flexible production risk and environmental risk functions that create a clear link between the source of the pollution, the production risk due to input use and the environmental outcome. Simulated production data and an environmental indicator were used to estimate a production function and environmental response function for every production year. The response functions were incorporated into an upper partial moment model, which ensures compliance to the user-specified environmental goal by enforcing the environmental constraint. Production decisions are significantly impacted by the presence of an environmental constraint due to the substantial compliance costs. Any changes in the intensive and extensive margin made by risk-averse decision-makers impact the size of the compliance cost faced by producers. The presence of an environmental constraint impact production decisions significantly with substantial compliance costs. While, fertiliser application technique have very little effect on the size of compliance costs. The greatest difference in compliance cost is therefore due to changes in the use of fixed resources.