Participatory Integrated Assessment in local level planning

The topic is introduced by a short but critical discussion of criteria and needs of Participatory Integrated Assessment (PIA) and participatory local planning. This paper depicts differences of participation in Integrated Assessment and in local level planning but provides also conditions and ideas how PIA can be used for local planning including implementation. A small review of PIA and participation in planning illustrates the relevance of PIA in a knowledge economy trying to adopt principles of good governance. A better incorporation of participatory research into local level planning seems to be crucial. The applicability of PIA in practices leading to participatory monitoring and evaluations are discussed. The outcomes of the paper show that possibilities exist for integrating PIA and participatory monitoring and evaluation into the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). PIA adds local information to water management planning and supports individual learning processes. The setting up of such a monitoring and evaluation system may contribute towards a transparent implementation of the WFD, it enhances commitment of citizens towards local government planning and eventually it increases self-determination of citizens, a major objective of good governance.

Green procurement in South Africa: perspectives on legislative provisions in metropolitan municipalities

This paper sets an objective to analyse legislative provisions for green procurement in South Africa’s metropolitan municipalities in the context of climate change and sustainable development. The main methods for data generation were interviews and document analysis. There were 30 interviews granted by among others, procurement officers, town planners and economic development specialists. In addition, 51 policy documents were retrieved, followed by a keyword search. The keywords were carefully selected and limited to those commonly used in green procurement terminology to include climate change, green procurement, renewable energy, energy efficiency, mitigation, clean technology, carbon footprint, sustainable development and green economy. The findings are that although all the metropolitan municipalities have procurement policies in place, only the City of Cape Town and eThekwini metropolitan have incorporated green procurement strategies into their supply chain management. The City of Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay metropolitan municipalities also emerged as the only ones with stand-alone green procurement strategies. To this end, the research concludes that legislative provisions mandating green procurement in South African metropolitan municipalities are not entirely lacking, although more work needs to be done to roll this out to cover all the existing metropolitan municipalities.     

Ethics, genetics and dynamics: an emerging systematic approach to radiation protection of the environment

There is now a general consensus of opinion that an explicit approach is necessary to demonstrate radiation protection of the environment, and that this approach needs to be developed in a systematic way. The framework that is emerging links ethical and moral issues (anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric) to broad-based principles and objectives of environmental protection (sustainable development, maintaining biological diversity, and habitat protection) and then links these, in turn, to the needs of current environmental management practices, such as environmental exploitation, pollution control, and nature conservation. The relevance of this to radiation is that its effects (such as causing early mortality, morbidity, reduced reproductive success, as well as resulting in observable (scorable) cytogenetic damage) are those that may have a bearing on these same environmental management practices. The devise that would appear to be most useful to bridge the gap between our disparate data on radiation effects and the needs of environmental management, is that of adding to the concept of Reference Man in the shape of a small set of Reference Animals and Plants. This approach has now been adopted by the ICRP, adding new dynamics-the motive forces, both moral and physical-to the subject. The way is now clear for rapid progress to be made on a number of fronts.     

Factors influencing the performance of faecal sludge management services: case study in Thailand municipalities

In most low- and middle-income countries, the service coverage of faecal sludge management is very limited resulting in uncontrolled disposal that directly impacts to water resources and public health. Similar to other countries, Thailand is facing faecal sludge management problems which lead to serious challenge to its local government authorities who are responsible for services provision. Local factors may strongly affect faecal sludge management services. Because of this problem, the management measures should be formulated in responding to significant factors affecting the performance of FSM services. This study aimed to evaluate existing faecal sludge management services in Thailand, their strengths, and weaknesses, and identify the significant factors influencing the performance of services. Based on data collected from 160 municipalities in Thailand, factors influencing the faecal sludge management services were identified using multiple regression analysis. The indicators involving operational efficiency, service performance, and treatment feasibility were used for the assessment of faecal sludge management performance. Significant factors encompassing technical, financial, social, and institutional aspects were identified based on each indicator. The findings identified the significant factors and proposed effective measures for improving faecal sludge management services such as providing technical assistance, implementing awareness programmes for private operators and households, and subsidizing investment and operation costs of faecal sludge management facilities.     

Linking global drivers with local and regional change: a social-ecological system approach in Chilika Lagoon,Bay of Bengal

Global scale drivers such as international markets for shrimp can trigger large changes at local and regional scales. But there is also a poorly appreciated reverse process, operating from the bottom up, with potential for triggering changes at higher scales. Thus, effects of drivers can be seen as a two-way process in which global drivers and local and regional drivers can potentially impact each other. Here, we argue that not only can global drivers impact the sustainability of local and regional social-ecological systems, but sustainability at higher scales can also be impacted by changes at the scale of local and regional social-ecological systems. Using Chilika, a large lagoon on the Bay of Bengal, Odisha State in India as a case, we show that traditional small-scale capture fisheries supporting 150 fisher villages with some 400,000 people were marginalized by aquaculture development for tiger prawn and by state-driven hydrological interventions, with impacts on the ecology of the lagoon. These changes, in turn, contribute to global poverty and food insecurity, making it difficult for India to meet international targets such as millennium development goals. The marginalized fisherfolk become part of environmental justice and other social movements. With large parts of the lagoon converted into a virtual monoculture for the production of tiger prawn, changes in Chilika (a Ramsar site) contribute to wetland habitat loss at the global scale, and biodiversity losses, possibly including IUCN red-listed species.     

Public Participation as Participatory Communication in Environmental Policy Decision-Making: From Concepts to Structured Conversations

This essay attempts to distinguish between traditional notions of public participation and participatory communication, particularly as currently practiced in non-US settings. In addition, specific tools for facilitating participatory communication are identified and discussed. The essay is based on the author's extensive experience as a conflict mediator and public participation consultant and scholar. For the past 15 years, the author has served as a consultant on matters of environmental conflict resolution, public participation, and community-based collaboration for federal and state agencies and NGOs, including the USDA Forest Service, the USDI Bureau of Land Management, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, and the Nature Conservancy.     

Land poverty and emerging ruralities in Cambodia: insights from Kampot province

Rural change in Cambodia manifests itself in rapidly declining land availability for the smallholder sector, posing the question of how farmers may be able to deal with limited access to land. In this paper, we discuss with a case study village and household livelihood strategies of smallholders currently operating under land-constrained conditions. Based on an integrated assessment of a smallholder village in Kampot province, we illustrate in quantitative terms how land shortage is creating problems of surplus generation and liquidity issues in monetary and non-monetary flows. At the household level, livelihood diversification based on the involvement of productive resources other than land may play an increasing role, particularly in the future, when levels of land shortage may increase. At the village level, smallholder may respond through institutional innovation, in particular through the establishment of a community banking system and a paddy rice bank to provide money and rice credits to overcome transitory shortages and to cover investment costs for additional productive resources. Thus, in this case, we observe the emergence of new patterns of livelihood in rural areas, based on the integration of non-land-based economic activities and new institutional settings.     

Participatory scenario planning for developing innovation in community adaptation responses: three contrasting examples from Latin America

Environmental change requires adaptive responses that are innovative, forward-looking and anticipatory, in order to meet goals for sustainability in socio-ecological systems. This implies transformative shifts in understanding as conceptualised by the idea of ‘double’- or ‘triple-loop learning’. Achieving this can be difficult as communities often rely on shorter-term coping mechanisms that purport to maintain the status quo. The use of participatory scenario planning to stimulate forward-looking social learning for adaptation was investigated through three contrasting community case studies on natural resource management in Latin America (in Mexico, Argentina and Colombia). Exploratory scenario narratives that synthesised local knowledge and future perceptions were used iteratively to define response options considered robust across multiple futures. Despite its intensive format, participants in each case agreed that scenario planning enabled a more systematic appraisal of the future. Scenarios facilitated innovation by providing scope to propose new types of responses and associated actions. Differences in local context meant that learning about future change developed in diverse ways, showing a need for a reflexive process. Reframing of key issues characteristic of double-loop learning did occur, albeit through different forms of interaction in each location. However, a shift towards transformative actions characteristic of triple-loop learning was less evident. Achieving this would appear to require ongoing use of scenarios to challenge social norms in light of changing drivers. Use of learning loops as a diagnostic to evaluate adaptive responses provided a useful reference framework although in practice both innovation and consolidative approaches can develop concurrently for responses to different issues.     

Monitoring and guiding development in rural Egypt: local sustainable development indicators and local Human Development Indices

This paper puts forward sustainable development indicators and an index appropriate for monitoring and guiding development planning in the villages of rural Egypt, as an improvement on the current approach which is informed by locally calculated Human Development Indices (HDI). This has two principal weaknesses. Firstly many of the issues of importance to villagers are not covered by the economic and social scope of the HDI. Secondly the HDI, along with international sustainable development indicator sets, fails to identify problems which are of importance in specific national or sub-national contexts. We have therefore worked from a simplified but holistic model of the socio-economic-environmental system of a rural Egyptian village, informed by the outputs of a participatory planning process. An indicator set based on a one-to-one correspondence between system components and indicators was created. This comprehensive set is detailed but consequently rather unwieldy, and a core set is selected and compared with the HDI indicators for a sample of villages to demonstrate the impact of considering environmental and institutional factors on establishing priority areas for government intervention. We conclude that a combination of a locally relevant index and an easily comprehended diagrammatic approach to presenting a small indicator set offers advantages to decision makers in comparison to local application of the HDI.     

Pathways of rural change: an integrated assessment of metabolic patterns in emerging ruralities

While rural transformations are nothing new in human history, current processes of rural change occur under multiple forces at an unprecedented pace, involving profound and unexpected changes in land use and users, and rapid transformations in the metabolic patterns of rural systems. The present special section aims to shed light on current drivers and pathways of rural change by analyzing, under a common conceptual and theoretical framework, examples of new ruralities that are emerging as responses across different world regions. Within this context, this introduction presents: (1) common research questions of the six presented cases of rural change; (2) the general theoretical and methodological framework of integrated assessment of societal metabolism adopted to analyze rural systems and (3) the main contributions and conclusions that could be drawn from six context-specific case studies from Asia, Latin America and Europe.     

Sustainability classifications in engineering: discipline and approach

In order to discuss how to advance sustainability in engineering, it is necessary to be clear as to what exactly is the science of sustainability. The linkage between sustainability philosophy and scientific principles has, in some ways, been acknowledged in the wider literature. Moreover, the recent scholarship on sustainability in international literature has focused on providing definitions, policies and methods, though from an engineering perspective, there is an obvious need for clarity on how the engineering and science community can integrate the science of sustainability into practice. Prima facie, this article provides an overview of the development of sustainability science through a textual analysis to collate the underlying discourse and ideology cited in literature. While the number one sustainability challenge is to mitigate climate change, compiling a definition genesis of sustainability will assist the engineering community in gaining an understanding in the underlying philosophical frames. The aim of this paper is to analyse sustainability information in the print press, journals, periodicals and textbooks since publication patterns contribute to our understanding of the cognitive aspects of scholarly knowledge development.     

Female territoriality in small rodents: Interrelations with local population persistence

Samples of small rodent populations inhabiting Crabapple Island on Beldany Lake in NE Poland revealed that Clethrionomys glareolus was continously present there, whereas Apodemus flavicollis and Microtus agrestis appeared, stayed for some period, vanished and reappeared. It appears that sexually mature females of the bank vole are strictly territorial, their numbers are limited, and immature individuals hardly disperse at high population size. Sexually mature females of the yellow-necked mouse seem to be territorial only at low population numbers, and their numbers increase linearly with population size. Sexually mature females of the field vole exhibit high level of aggregation, and their numbers increase in streight line with growing population size. We discuss the idea that different social organization of the rodent populations is connected with various strategies (sedentary and nomadic) supporting local population persistence.     

Anthropogenic radionuclides in the Japan Sea: their distributions and transport processes

The anthropogenic radionuclides, (90)Sr, (137)Cs and (239+240)Pu, were measured in the water column of the Japan Sea/East Sea during 1997-2000. The vertical profiles of radionuclide concentrations showed: exponential decrease with depth for (90)Sr and (137)Cs, and surface minimum/subsurface maximum for (239+240)Pu. These results do not differ substantially from results reported previously. The area-averaged concentrations of radionuclides in the Japan Sea are higher than those found in the Northwest Pacific Ocean below surface layer showing the accumulation of the radionuclides in the deep waters in the Japan Sea. Concerning spatial distributions, the area of high (137)Cs inventory extends from the Japan Basin into the Yamato Basin. It is suggested that wintertime convection of water, occurring mainly in the Japan Basin, causes the radionuclides to sink. The nuclides then advect into the Yamato Basin after detouring around the Yamato Rise.     

Woody vegetation change in Sahelian West Africa: evidence from local knowledge

Vegetation changes in Sahelian West Africa have been increasingly investigated since 1970 due to the catastrophic droughts in the early 1970s and 1980s and the following decades with below average precipitation. In most cases this was done by remote sensing and vegetation studies. In recent years, local knowledge of farmers and pastoralists about vegetation changes has been increasingly investigated. In this paper, information from different case studies in three West African countries (Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal) was used to analyse and evaluate vegetation changes in the Sahel. In total, data were analysed from 25 villages, where the local people were asked to mention plant species and qualify their present occurrence compared to the past. In total, 111 woody species were mentioned as having changed compared to the past, of which 79% were classified as having decreased or disappeared. For each single location 8–59 different woody species were mentioned. In most cases, these are valuable species of socio-economic importance. Only 11% of the species was classified as increasing or new (0–12 were mentioned per location), the later being mainly exotic species. Ten percent were categorised differently among villages. A comparison of local knowledge from different locations provide regional scale information on endangered species and thereby crucial information for making insightful priorities for assisted regeneration, reforestation and conservation strategies.     

In-field radon measurement in water: a novel approach

This paper presents a novel approach of measuring radon in-water in the field by inserting a MEDUSA gamma-ray detector into a 210 L or 1000 L container. The experimental measurements include investigating the effect of ambient background gamma-rays on in-field radon measurement, calibrating the detector efficiency using several amounts of KCl salt dissolved in tap water, and measuring radon in borehole water. The results showed that there is fairly good agreement between the field and laboratory measurements of radon in water, based on measurements with Marinelli beakers on a HPGe detector. The MDA of the method is 0.5 Bq L⁻¹ radon in-water.