Correction to: Quantifying carbon footprint for ecological river restoration

Environment, Development and Sustainability - The article “Quantifying carbon footprint for ecological river restoration”, written by “Yiwen Chiu, Yi Yang and Cody Morse”,...     

A “measurable” definition of sustainable development based on closed cycles of resources and its application to energy systems

Human society consumes resources that it is not able to reproduce. Human activities are still based on “open cycles,” starting from a condition of natural environmental balance and reaching an environmental imbalance. The challenging scope of scientific and technological research towards sustainability appears clear if it is based on this analysis: to find development systems based on “closed cycles” of resources. The challenging objective of realizing closed cycles leads to a definition of sustainability that indicates the path to sustainable development, as well as stating the general principle. It also provides a key to the qualitative measurement of sustainability. This means that the sustainability level of a system can be measured by measuring its capacity to avoid the consumption of resources. Zero consumption is a necessary condition for sustainability, and brings about as a side effect the highly desired “zero-waste” result. Materials entering the proposed endless scheme pass through the process of usefulness without losing their capacity to feed the system again after being used. Thus, the concept of “consumption” itself is replaced by one of “use” when resources are inserted into closed loops capable of feeding human development. The application of the closed cycle sustainability criterion particularly displays its feasibility, and a theoretical guiding role, in the energy sector. Energy vectors such as hydrogen and electricity enable the closure of the energy resources loop by effectively approaching the objective of “zero consumption” (and the side result of “zero waste”) through already demonstrated technological solutions.     

Design considerations for environmental sustainability in high density development: a case study of Hong Kong

This study has indicated that there is close relationship between development density and environmental quality; therefore, it is necessary to decide the form of development carefully beforehand. The form of development is shaped either by new development or urban renewal which is a major tactic nowadays adopted by the Hong Kong Government to improve the living condition of the citizens and the quality of the built environment. This study is limited to urban renewal and aims to find out the major urban design considerations for sustaining the environment. Through a questionnaire survey carried out in Hong Kong, the opinions of architects, planners, property development managers, and local citizens were sought and evaluated, and critical design factors for enhancing environmental sustainability of urban renewal projects are highlighted. The results derived from factor analysis indicated that certain design considerations should be incorporated for sustaining the urban environment. “Land Use Planning”, “Quality of Life”, “Conservation & Preservation”, “Integrated Design”, “Provision of Welfare Facilities”, and “Conservation of Existing Properties” were believed to be the significant underlying factors for achieving environmental sustainability of local urban renewal projects. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

A New Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Development

A critical review of the multidisciplinary literature on sustainable development reveals a lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding sustainable development and its complexities. A critical review shows that the definitions of sustainable development are vague; there is a lack of operative definitions and disagreement over what should be sustained; the concept is unclear in terms of emotional commitment; and it “remains a confused topic”, “fraught with contradictions”. This article aims to theoretically synthesize the interdisciplinary literature on sustainable development, and then identify the results by broad categories. Therefore, this article uses conceptual analysis, which reviews multidisciplinary literature on sustainable development, which recognizes patterns and similarities within the literature, then it synthesizes the patterns to different categories and independent concepts, where each concept has distinctive meanings and represents close ideas on sustainability. The analytical process elaborates seven concepts that together assemble the theoretical framework of ‘sustainable development’ and each concept represents distinctive meanings of the theoretical framework.     

Macroethical systems and sustainability science

The Industrial Revolution and associated economic, demographic, technological and cultural changes have resulted in what many scientists are beginning to refer to as “the Anthropocene” – roughly translated, the Age of Humans. One response to this development is the nascent field of “sustainability science,” a multidisciplinary and systemic attempt to perceive and understand this new era. In doing so, however, methodologies and intellectual frameworks must be developed which extend beyond existing, dominantly reductionist, approaches, and are intended to address emergent characteristics of complex systems that integrate cultural and social systems, the engineered and built environment and natural systems. In the area of ethics, this requires developing a capability for “macroethics,” or ethical systems and processes capable of addressing issues arising from the emergent behavior of the complicated systems that characterize the Anthropocene.     

Experience in mapping the ecological state of the plant cover

Objectives and methods of mapping the ecological state of the plant cover at different spatial levels—federal, regional, and local—are analyzed. The maps used as examples are as follows: at the federal level, “Ecological State of Rangelands in Russia” (1:10 000 000); at the regional level, “Vegetation of Moscow Oblast” (1:200 000); and at the local level, “Vegetation of Narofominskii Raion” and “Current State of the Plant Cover in Narofominskii Raion” (1:50 000).     

Mapping the global supply and demand structure of rice

Rice plays a major role in the global supply and demand for sustainable food production. The constraints of maintaining sustainable rice production are closely linked to the relationship between the distribution patterns of human activity on the planet and economic growth. Global patterns of rice production can be mapped by using various criteria linked to domestic income, population patterns, and associated satellite brightness data of rice-producing regions. Prosperous regions have more electric lighting, and there are documented correlations between gross domestic product (GDP) and nighttime light. We chose to examine global rice production patterns on a geographical basis. For the purposes of this study, each country is considered to be made up of regions, and rice production is discussed in terms of regional distribution. A region is delineated by its administrative boundaries; the number of regions where rice is produced is about 13,839. We used gridded spatial population distribution data overlain by nocturnal light imagery derived from satellite imagery. The resultant relationship revealed a correlation between regional income (nominal values of GDP were used) and rice production in the world. The following criteria were used to examine the supply and demand structure of rice. Global rice consumption = “caloric rice consumption per capita per day” multiplied by “regional population values”. Regional rice yields = “country-based production” divided by “harvested area” (multiple harvests are taken into account). Regional rice production = “regional harvested areas” multiplied by “rice yield values”. We compared regional rice consumption and production values according to these methods. Analysis of the data sets generated a map of rice supply and demand. Inter-regional shipping costs were not accounted for. This map can contribute to the understanding of food security issues in rice-producing regions and to estimating potential population values in such regions.     

Impacts of climatic disasters in coastal Bangladesh: why does private adaptive capacity differ?

This paper quantitatively assesses the influences of various demographic and socio-economic factors, past adaptive behavioral factors, access to weather/climate information, and spatial/locational factors on coastal populations’ perceived adaptive capacity against major impacts of hydro-meteorological disasters on their livelihood. A total of 285 respondents from three coastal villages in Bangladesh were randomly interviewed between January and April 2009. Respondents rated their perceived adaptive capacity against 25 anticipated impacts of sea-level rise (SLR)-induced events on their livelihood. By employing the principal component analysis (PCA), perceived adaptive capacity was grouped into five major categories. Then, an adaptive capacity index for each of five major impacts, namely, “infrastructure damage and disrupted mobility,” “food and nutritional insecurity,” “low earning and higher cost of maintenance,” “loss of employment in offshore activities,” and “crisis of potable water and public health risk,” was prepared. How adaptive capacity against each of these major five categories of impacts differs due to the influence of various factors was assessed by employing the multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) technique. The MANOVAs show that age, sex, level of education, type of occupation, farmland holdings, past adaptive behavior against rainfall, salinity intrusion, freshwater crises, use of radio for weather information, and the distance of the homestead from the shoreline have varying levels of influence on respondents’ perceived adaptive capacity against each of the five major categories of impacts. Others factors have moderate to limited influences. The policy implication is that specific programs, rather than a generic one-size fits all program, must be initiated for enhancement of adaptive capacity against specific impacts.     

Remarks on fair wealth accumulation in Russia

The paper addresses the topic of wealth accumulation in Russia. This phenomenon plays an important role for the understanding and forecasting the future economic and social development of the country. The “westernized” paradigm calls for hard honest work during the life and approves getting a reward in a form of wealth in the end. When brought to Russia, this paradigm faces the orthodox traditions and rules together with the post-soviet mental patterns. In this paper, we consider how the pattern “first accumulate wealth, then consume it” competes with its opposition, the pattern “first consume wealth, then accumulate it” in Russia. We base our discussion on the consumers’ simple optimization problem, which exhibits a bifurcation between those two patterns depending on the relation between the consumption “impatience” and the wealth growth rate. We also suggest a framework to model the phenomenon of unfair wealth through impulse type of wealth development.     

Social cost of environmental pollution and application of counter measures through clean development mechanism: in the context of developing countries

The developing countries i.e., the non-Annex-I countries (parties to the Kyoto Protocol but not responsible to any reduction target yet) in the Kyoto Protocol whose economies are in transition are also allowed to reduce GHG emissions. Among these, the countries that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol may be benefited from CDM projects to promote sustainable development. The developed countries i.e., the Annex-I countries (that have signed the Kyoto Protocol & are responsible to have specific GHG emission reduction target) or the investing countries, in return, have privilege to purchase CER credits (in units equivalent to one tonne of CO₂ gas emission reduction) to meet the emission target as specified in the Kyoto Protocol. The key step in understanding about CDM is to grasp the concept of “baseline” and “additionality”. The “Baseline” is the emissions level that would have existed if a CDM project had not happened. The feature of an approved CDM project is that the planned reductions would not occur without the additional incentive provided by emission reduction credits; this concept is known as “Additionality”. According to environmental additionality concept, baseline emission minus project emission is equal to emissions reduction. “Investment Additionality,” ultimately rejected during negotiation of the “Marrakech Accords” and “Financial Additionality,” are the two important concepts. The concept of trading of CER matches to the idea of Pigovian tax (equal to the negative externality and which is considered one of the “traditional” means of bringing a modicum of market forces) in Economics, making pollution more costly to the polluter, as the polluters have negative cost since they save money by polluting; hence, there are supposed negative externalities associated with the market activity. Economic theory predicts that in an economy where the cost of reaching mutual agreement between parties is high and where pollution is diffuse, Pigovian tax will be an efficient way to promote the public interest and will lead to an improvement of the quality of life measured by the Genuine Progress Indicator and other human economic indicators, as well as higher gross domestic product growth. We can seek a level of pollution such that the marginal savings (MS) to one polluting unit from pollution (−MC) is equal to marginal damage (MD) from pollution over the entire population, since pollution is a public bad i.e., MS (x*) = ∑MD_i (x*) where ∑D_i (x) is the total damage. Though the responsibility of reduction in emission does not lie on the non-Annex-I countries, still effort of maintaining global emission balance can be expected equally from developed and developing countries. The responsibilities of Kyoto Protocol are (a) to reduce global GHG emissions, (b) to bring about sustainable development in the developing countries lie on above two groups since its effect on February 16, 2005. Different polluters have different costs of pollution control. The least costly way of controlling pollution from various sources that reflects different costs of pollution control making the set of environmental regulations to achieve the emission target at the lowest cost makes the regulation cost-effective. Though efficiency is not attainable for many regulations, cost-effectiveness is attainable.     

A normative model of balanced nature management

The risk of erroneous regulation in multilevel normative environmental chains, at the federal, regional, and lower levels, down to the corporate one, has been studied. This risk has been demonstrated to increase unacceptably rapidly in the framework of the existing system of “unconditional acceptance” of normative standards. To mend the situation, it is necessary to use the “conditional acceptance” model by regarding post hoc decisions made at higher levels as a priori ones at the next (lower) levels. A strategy of environmentally and economically balanced corporate regulation of nature management through minimization of the losses resulting from both excessive caution and breaching the existing regulations has been proposed. This system, combined with the European approach to nature conservation, requires that the “riskless” regulation should be abandoned and is expected to improve the parameters of nature management quality by three to four orders of magnitude.     

Using unexplained variation in the chemical composition of organisms for identification of xenobiotics in ecological studies

The contents of ten metals in the bone and muscle tissues were studied in three fish species from a water body located in the impact zone of a copper smelter. In the course of principal component analysis with “tissue” and “species” taken as instrumental variables (IVs), a high proportion of unexplained IV variance was revealed for xenobiotic elements, and the procedure of optimal scaling by the CATPCA method allowed their pattern to be estimated. It is proposed to use the unexplained variance of multidimensional data on the chemical composition of organisms for identifying the pattern of xenobiotics in environmental objects.     

Biocultural diversity in traditional rice-based agroecosystems: indigenous research and conservation of mavo (Oryza sativa L.) upland rice landraces of eastern Indonesia

Traditional crop landraces play dynamic roles in the expression of native biological and cultural diversity via their central position in the genetic resource base, agroecosystems and social heritage of indigenous peoples. Farmer varieties provide farmers with an “agricultural survival kit” for household welfare and for adaptation to changing conditions. These varieties meet local cultural practices and environmental constraints, and play an intrinsic role in cultural survival by constituting a living repository of ancestral customs including cultivar-specific recipes, songs, handicrafts, stories of origin, and unique planting, harvesting, processing, and storage rituals and techniques. The centrality of rice in Southeast Asian agricultural and social systems, contrasted with the significant erosion of rice-based biological and cultural diversity in native communities, calls for increased attention to the links between traditional rice varieties and indigenous rice-based customs. This study represents the research efforts of rice farmers pertaining to the Tado clan, a Kempo Manggarai community on Flores␣Island, in association with USA academicians. Research results demonstrate: (i) a complex suite of upland rice-based ethnobotanical traditions; (ii) significant and␣dynamic regional flux and dissemination of “old” and “new” landraces; (iii)␣community-level maintenance of distinct genotypes across a range of microenvironments; (iv) localized “extinctions” of ancestral landraces within 1–2 generations and a concomitant loss of related traditions; and (v) the contributions of a collaborative (indigenous and academic) approach to ethnographic and agronomic research.     

Beyond fishermen’s tales: contributions of fishers’ local ecological knowledge to fish ecology and fisheries management

Studies investigating the local ecological knowledge (LEK) held by fishermen about the fishing resources have indicated that fishermen’s LEK may have the potential to improve fishery management, by providing new information about the ecology, behavior and abundance trends of fish and other aquatic animals. Our major aim is to undertake a brief review of published ethnoichthyological studies with a focus on coastal Brazilian fisheries and freshwater fisheries in both Brazil and Southeast Asia. Based on such review, we provide 29 hypotheses on fish ecology based on fishermen’s LEK and compare them with what is already known from the biological literature, using an arbitrary ‘likelihood’ measure: “Low likelihood” corresponded to unexpected hypotheses, which contradict existing biological data. “Medium likelihood” corresponded to hypotheses that could not be compared to available scientific knowledge. Hypotheses that agree with scientific data were considered as “High likelihood”. We therefore discuss these three categories of hypotheses about several distinct topics, such as migration, reproduction, feeding habits, abundance patterns, ecological relationships between fish and their predators, and fishing pressure. Our results may contribute to the fisheries management and research in the studied regions and other similar places, besides raising the interest of biologists to properly include fishermen’s LEK when planning and conducting fisheries surveys. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Autocenosis and democenosis as individual- and population-level ecological categories in terms of symbiogenesis and systems approach

According to the basic concept of the theory dealt with in this study, autocenosis, i.e., a self-regulatory host-symbiont system, rather than an individual, is the individual-level unit. Then, democenosis, which is a system of autocenoses, corresponds to the population level. Therefore, natural selection of autocenoses rather than individuals occurs in a democenosis, and auto- and democenoses, rather than “individuals” and “populations,” are components of food chains and webs. However, the symbiotic approach does not exclude the population paradigm and will be developed in parallel with it.     

Development paths of drylands: thresholds and sustainability

Drylands (41 and 35% of global land and population, respectively) have the lowest biological productivity of any ecosystem, contain populations with the highest growth rates on earth, and share a significant fraction of global poverty for which desertification is implicated. A global assessment of the available information indicates that the inherent low productivity of drylands, when combined with other adverse factors, can generate poverty. It additionally indicates that while the drylands may exist in a locally stable and sustainable state, this is readily destabilized by non-linear, threshold-crossing transitions to an alternative steady-state leading to desertification, poverty and conflicts. The “desertification paradigm” (human and climatological pressures driving overexploitation of land resources, leading to desertification, poverty and reduced security) is challenged by its “counter-paradigm” (adversity elicits innovation, leading to ingenuous solutions for avoiding desertification). But the latter does not account for the inevitability of continued and increasing pressure on the finite dryland resources, expected to be further exacerbated by a globally increasing need for agricultural land. A companion paper points out that this situation can be avoided by reducing dependence on land productivity, through adoption of “alternative livelihoods.” These livelihoods, while economically advantageous, reduce pressure on land resources.     

Soil erosion tolerance and water runoff control: minimum environmental standards

Council Regulations (EC) No 1257/1999 and the EU Soil Thematic Strategy give great importance to soil and land conservation to develop knowledge driven governance for rural development. In the hilly areas of Italy cultivated intensively, and especially in the ones devoted to viticulture, agricultural practices determine high loss of soil with consequent degradation of the soil resource. In addition to it, offsite effects of soil erosion can be unsustainable, due to sediment transfer to the channel network and infrastructures. In order to achieve a sustainable rural development there is a need for tools and instruments to allow European regional administrations, to develop, implement, manage and monitor rural development plans. To counteract the environmental threats intensified by agricultural activity, the environmental functions “soil erosion control” and “water runoff control” were investigated in the Chianti area by using GIS. To determine the EMR (Environmental Minimum Requirements) values for soil erosion the “regeneration” capability of soils was considered, and the value of estimated soil loss was compared with the value of soil reformation. A scenario analysis was also performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the agroenvironmental measure “grass cover” in reducing erosion. The concept of tolerable erosion based on soil productivity and soil reformation rate only is reductive and off-site effects of soil erosion should be also taken into account. For this reason, it was proposed to extend the concept of hydrogeological risk to soil erosion by implementing the notion of soil erosion tolerance (T) with the new concept of environmental risk of soil erosion (ERSE). The new ERSE index takes into account all the in- and off-farm externalities of soil erosion. For this reason, it can be considered an aggregated environmental indicator that enables policy makers to evaluate the impacts of soil erosion by following an holistic approach.     

Sustainable metal management exemplified by copper in the USA

A sustainable management of non-renewable metals calls for scientific-ecological understanding of the regional material household. The copper household in the USA between 1900 and 2100 was chosen to illustrate mathematical modelling of such systems. Relatively limited and inaccurate sets of data already allow a first approximation of the metal management system. The copper fluxes of the 20th century have contributed to the formation of two new ore deposits of the same order of magnitude as the currently still available reservoir (90 million tons), i.e. copper stock in consumption products (approx. 70 million tons) and in landfills (approx. 40 million tons). The “landfill”, therefore, contains copper whose potential use is lost due to dilution. The long-term copper consumption stock is greater than the short-term stock. Scenarios show that the current economically mineable Cu-stocks will be exhausted in 30 to 50 years if a change in the existing management system does not occur. In case of a reorientation, the use of copper as a “new resource” in the consumption stocks appears to be the most promising strategy. The future waste management processes will have to increase their copper recycling rates. Received: 24 February 1999 · Accepted: 8 June 1999     

The origin and development of nature conservation: A view from the boundary between millennia

A concise but informative “Calendar of Events in Nature Conservation” is presented in order to illustrate the complex process of Man's realization of his place in Nature.     

Storm surges: perspectives and options

This review paper attempts to summarize the scattered and fragmented knowledge about past and possible future changing storm-surge statistics using the particularly well-studied case of the North Sea as an example. For this region, a complete and robust analysis methodology has been developed in recent years. This methodology is based on dynamical and statistical models. Using the concept of dynamical downscaling, development during recent decades, when sufficiently good and homogeneous weather data exist, has been “reconstructed,” and scenarios of possible future change are described. “Localization” allows estimation of changes at specific sites, e.g., harbors. As local water-level statistics depend not only on climate variations but also on local modifications of the local bathymetry, new options for adaptation emerge. For the case of Hamburg, an option for such future adaptations is discussed.