Deep mining of coal and land-use planning: technical change and technical competence

Although deep-mined coal is a long-established energy source, recent technical advances mean that land-use planners in areas where mining already occurs or is possibly to be developed are confronted with the need for considerable technical competence in identifying the impacts of mining activities on the physical environment and economic and social circumstances of the areas affected.Even more problematically, they are often expected to construct long-term plans, or to permit an individual development, on the basis of the predicted outcome of the applications of future technical developments. To build up this technical competence, land-use planners require relevant, comprehensiveinformation, detailed knowledge for itsinterpretation and the ability to applyinterdisciplinary perspectives to this interpretation, if the full range of potential consequences is to be identified.Although various forms of inter-authority co-operation and national overview studies may be of considerable help to land-use planners, there is no substitute for a high level of in-house expertise, particularly because deep-mined coal extraction tends to be a very long-standing activity at a location.Land-use planners need to be able to evaluate authoritatively the overall national energy supply context of an individual development, the operational economics of the development, its direct environmental and employment impacts and a wide range of secondary economic and social consequences.The second part of this paper identifies some particular technical developments whose diffusion could significantly influence one or more of these considerations. The argument is developed that it will be sequential developments of existing technologies, especially the interaction of several of these, rather than spectacular technical breakthroughs, which will have the greatest influence in the short- and medium-term future.Currently on leave of absence as Environmental Team Leader, Economic Assessment Service, International Energy Agency Coal Research, London, England. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author alone.     

Adjustment costs from environmental change

The paper is concerned with the case whereby the distribution of a firm's productivity shocks changes without the knowledge of the firm. Over time the firm learns about the nature and extent of the change in the distribution of the shock and adjusts, incurring adjustment costs in the process. The long-run loss in profits (±) due to the shift in the distribution we term the equilibrium response. The transitory loss in profits, incurred while the firm is learning about the distribution shift, is termed the adjustment cost. The theory is then applied to the problem of measuring adjustment costs in the face of imperfectly observed climate change in agriculture. The empirical part of the paper involves estimating a restricted profit function for agricultural land in a five-state region of the Midwest US as a function of prices, land characteristics, actual weather realizations and expected weather. We then simulate the effect of an unobserved climate shock, where learning about the climate shock is by observing the weather and updating prior knowledge using Bayes Rule. We find adjustment costs to climate change are 1.4% of annual land rents.     

Plant vintage, technology, and environmental regulation

We use data on productivity and pollution abatement costs at individual pulp and paper mills to test whether the impact of environmental regulation on productivity differs by plant vintage and technology. Plants with higher pollution abatement costs have significantly lower productivity levels. This relationship differs greatly based on a plant's technology, with productivity at integrated mills being greatly affected by abatement costs, while the impact at non-integrated mills is negligible. Plant vintage does not seem to matter, with older and newer plants showing similar impacts. Reported abatement costs appear to substantially understate the true costs of abatement. Accounting for the impact of technology differences makes some difference in the estimated overall impact of environmental regulation.     

Intertemporal production externalities,technical change,and public expenditure analysis

This paper discusses the implications of relative price change for public expenditure analysis involving natural environments. It develops a model which identifies those demand and supply factors which must be considered in the evaluation of the time stream of benefits associated with the amenity services provided by natural environments in their preserved status.     

Circular economy strategies for combating climate change and other environmental issues

Global industrialization and excessive dependence on nonrenewable energy sources have led to an increase in solid waste and climate change, calling for strategies to implement a circular economy in all sectors to reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Here we review circular economy strategies with focus on waste management, climate change, energy, air and water quality, land use, industry, food production, life cycle assessment, and cost-effective routes. We observed that increasing the use of bio-based materials is a challenge in terms of land use and land cover. Carbon removal technologies are actually prohibitively expensive, ranging from 100 to 1200 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide. Politically, only few companies worldwide have set climate change goals. While circular economy strategies can be implemented in various sectors such as industry, waste, energy, buildings, and transportation, life cycle assessment is required to optimize new systems. Overall, we provide a theoretical foundation for a sustainable industrial, agricultural, and commercial future by constructing cost-effective routes to a circular economy.

     

Structurally-consistent estimation of use and nonuse values for landscape-wide environmental change

We address the problem of estimating the use and nonuse value derived from a landscape-wide programme of environmental change. Working in the random utility framework, we develop a structural model that describes both demand for recreational trips to the landscape's quality-differentiated natural areas and preferences over different landscape-wide patterns of environmental quality elicited in a choice experiment. The structural coherence of the model ensures that the parameters of the preference function can be simultaneously estimated from the combination of revealed and stated preference data. We explore the properties of the model in a Monte Carlo experiment and then apply it to a study of preferences for changes in the ecological quality of rivers in northern England. This implementation reveals plausible estimates of the use and nonuse parameters of the model and provides insights into the distance decay in those two different forms of value.     

Cost-effective environmental policy: implications of induced technological change

Cost-effective environmental policy generally requires that all emission sources are faced with the same tax. In this paper I discuss how the existence of induced technological change may alter this result, if at least some of the effect is external to the firm. Focusing on Learning by doing (LBD) effects in abatement activities, it is shown that emission sources with external learning effects should be faced with a higher tax than emission sources with only autonomous technological change. By using simple numerical simulations, it is further investigated to what degree a cost-effective climate policy differs from a free quota market, under various assumptions about learning effects, diffusion of technology and environmental targets. The results indicate that optimal taxes may be significantly higher in the industrial world than in the developing world. Moreover, the industrial world's share of global abatement may be much higher in a cost-effective solution than in a free quota market. The global cost savings of a fully flexible implementation of the Kyoto Protocol are further questioned, as potential spillover effects of technological growth in the industrial world are not internalised in the market.     

Transitional politics: emerging incentive-based instruments in environmental regulation

This paper proposes a positive theory of environmental instrument choice. We study a democratic society that seeks to lower the level of pollution from industrial sources to a pre-specified target. The target can be implemented by one of three instruments: [S]: uniform emission standards; [P]: tradeable permits; and [T]: emission taxes. The conflict of interest between special-interests, representing polluters, and the electorate is resolved by an elected politician. We characterize when each of the three policy instruments is chosen in political equilibrium and show that the transition, observed in many countries, from [S] to either [P] or [T] can be understood as a natural consequence of increasingly ambitious environmental targets.     

Quantifying relationships between bird and butterfly community shifts and environmental change.

Quantifying the manner in which ecological communities respond during a time of decreasing precipitation is a first step in understanding how they will respond to longer-term climate change. Here we coupled analysis of interannual variability in remotely sensed data with analyses of bird and butterfly community changes in montane meadow communities of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Landsat satellite imagery was used to classify these meadows into six types along a hydrological gradient. The northern portion of the ecosystem, or Gallatin region, has smaller mean patch sizes separated by ridges of mountains, whereas the southern portion of the ecosystem, or Teton region, has much larger patches within the Jackson Hole valley. Both support a similar suite of butterfly and bird species. The Gallatin region showed more overall among-year variation in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) when meadow types were pooled within regions, perhaps because the patch sizes are smaller on average. Bird and butterfly communities showed significant relationships relative to meadow type and NDVI. We identified several key species that are tightly associated with specific meadow types along the hydrological gradient. Comparing taxonomic groups, fewer birds showed specific habitat affinities than butterflies, perhaps because birds are responding to differences in habitat structure among meadow types and using the landscape at a coarser scale than the butterflies. Comparing regions, the Teton region showed higher predictability of community assemblages as compared to the Gallatin region. The Gallatin region exhibited more significant temporal trends with respect to butterflies. Butterfly communities in wet meadows showed a distinctive shift along the hydrological gradient during a drought period (1997-2000). These results imply that the larger Teton meadows will show more predictable (i.e., static) species-habitat associations over the long term, but that the smaller Gallatin meadows may be an area that will exhibit the effects of global climate change faster.     

温带湖泊周边湿地原生草地与人工林土壤碳释放差异性分析

采用红外气体分析法对东平湖湿地人工杨树林和自然草地土壤碳通量进行测定,分析了6:00到18:00两种生境下群落土壤碳通量日变化规律,及其对温度、水分等环境因子的响应。结果表明:(1)两种生境群落的土壤碳通量日动态都呈单峰曲线,但人为耕作过的土壤碳通量明显高于原生草地,土壤碳通量均在6:00达到最小值,杨树林土壤碳通量的最大值出现在12:00,而草地群落土壤碳通量最大值在14:00左右;(2)人工林土壤碳通量与近地面大气温度、土壤温度的相关性均低于草地,且两种生境群落土壤呼吸与近地面大气温度的相关性(P<0.01)均好于与土壤温度的相关性(P<0.05)。土壤碳通量对近地面大气温度的敏感性Q10值大于土壤温度的敏感性,人工林土壤呼吸温度敏感性Q10值小于草地。土壤碳通量与近地面大气相对湿度之间具有显著线性方程关系(P<0.01),人工杨树林和草地的相关系数分别为:0.399、0.29。杨树林土壤碳通量与土壤体积含水量相关性差(P<0.05),湿地草地土壤CO2释放量与土壤体积含水量的相关性不显著(P>0.05),这可能由于土壤体积含水量日变化较小,而不能很好的解释日变化尺度上的土壤呼吸变化;(3)对湿地地土壤碳通量的日变化与土壤养分和盐分相关分析得出,人工林土壤中的有机质和全盐与土壤碳通量具有显著关系(P<0.05),而草地土壤碳通量与土壤养分和盐分相关性均非常差,说明人工林生境土壤有机质和全盐是影响土壤碳通量的一个重要因素,而对草地的影响较小。该结果可以为华北平原东部地区以及温带湖泊湿地的土壤碳通量研究提供参考。     

Human preferences for facial masculinity change with relationship type and environmental harshness

In humans (Homo sapiens), sexual dimorphism in face shape has been proposed to be linked to quality in both men and women. Although preferences for high-quality mates might be expected, previous work has suggested that high quality may be associated with decreased investment in partnerships. In line with a trade-off between partner quality and investment, human females have been found to prefer higher levels of masculinity when judging under conditions where the benefits of quality would be maximised and the costs of low investment would be minimised. In this study, we examined facultative preferences for masculinity/femininity under hypothetical high and low environmental harshness in terms of resource availability in which participants were asked to imagine themselves in harsh/safe environments. We demonstrate that environmental harshness influences preferences for sexual dimorphism differently according to whether the relationship is likely to be short or long term. Women prefer less-masculine male faces and men prefer less-feminine female faces for long-term than short-term relationships under conditions of environmental harshness. Such findings are consistent with the idea that high-quality partners may be low investors and suggest that under harsh ecological conditions, both men and women favour a low-quality/high-investment partner for long-term relationships. For short-term relationships, where investment is not an important variable, preferences for sexual dimorphism were similar for the low and high environmental harshness conditions. These results provide experimental evidence that human preferences may be contingent on the environment an individual finds itself inhabiting.     

Uncertainty analysis on aquatic environmental impacts of urban land use change

Uncertainties hamper the implementation of strategic environmental assessment (SEA). In order to quantitatively characterize the uncertainties of environmental impacts, this paper develops an integrated methodology through uncertainty analysis on land use change, which combines the scenario analysis approach, stochastic simulation technique, and statistics. Dalian city in China was taken as a case study in the present work. The results predict that the Fuzhou River poses the highest environmental pollution risk with a probability of 89.63% for COD in 2020. Furthermore, the Biliu River, Fuzhou River, Zhuang River, and Dasha River have 100% probabilities for NH₃-N. NH₃-N is a more critical pollutant than COD for all rivers. For COD, industry is the critical pollution source for all rivers except the Zhuang River. For NH₃-N, agriculture is the critical pollution source for the Biliu River, Yingna River, and Dasha River, sewage for the Fuzhou River and Zhuang River, and industry for the Dengsha River. This methodology can provide useful information, such as environmental risk, environmental pressure, and extremely environmental impact, especially under considerations of uncertainties. It can also help to ascertain the significance of each pollution source and its priority for control in urban planning.     

Menus of price-quantity contracts for inducing the truth in environmental regulation

Many authors have proposed mechanisms to induce regulated polluting firms to truthfully reveal their private information. This paper proposes an alternative scheme in which the regulator offers each firm a menu of linear price-quantity contracts; faced with this menu, each firm′s dominant strategy is to truthfully report its private information and self-select the contract that is ex post efficient. The proposed menu schedule that is more elastic than the firm′s residual marginal damage function engenders a positive quantity effect, thereby counterbalancing the firm′s incentive to misreport prompted by the linearity of price. Due to its built-in price quantity structure, the scheme performs as designed regardless of the elasticities of marginal damage and demand functions.     

Directing technical change from fossil-fuel to renewable energy innovation: An application using firm-level patent data

In this paper we provide an analysis of directed technical change in the sector of electricity generation. We rely on patent data in fossil-fuel (FF) and renewable energy (REN) technologies for 5471 European firms over the 1978–2006 period. The novelty of our approach is in the focus on firm׳s heterogeneity in driving technological change. We make a distinction between small specialized firms, which innovate in only one type of technology, and large mixed firms, which innovate in both technologies, to analyse how REN patents can replace FF ones at the sector level both through a shift in innovation activities within existing firms and through firms׳ entry and exit. We use zero-inflated count data estimation techniques to identify the factors that affect specialized versus mixed firms׳ patenting behaviour both at the intensive (i.e., levels of innovation) and extensive (i.e., technological entry) margins. We further investigate the implications of our firm-level estimations for reducing the gap between REN and FF innovation at the aggregate level. We establish two key findings: (1) a decrease in the FF-REN technology gap mainly comes about through technological entry of specialized REN firms following an increase in REN market size; (2) increases in FF prices, FF market size, and FF knowledge stocks all increase the technology gap by increasing mixed firms FF innovation rates. An important implication of our results is that policies aimed at increasing REN innovation should focus on helping small firms to start and sustain innovation in the long-run.     

The ecological basis for simulating phytoplankton responses to environmental change (PROTECH)

The theory and mathematical development of a model, called PROTECH, are presented. The model simulates the dynamic responses of up to eight species of phytoplankton to environmental variability in lakes and reservoirs. PROTECH models were developed originally to fulfil a commercial, decision-support role in the management of industrial water quality, where plankton growth is an issue. The progressive refinements to the model nevertheless have a robust ecological basis. This makes PROTECH a promising tool for researching plankton community ecology. The model calculates exponents describing growth and attrition, from a base of the maximum growth rates of algal species in culture. Subject to defined thresholds, growth integrates variability in the fluxes of light and nutrients. The paper develops this philosophy and its embodiment into the structure of the model. Examples of its authenticated, validated and sensitivity-tested outputs are presented.     

Tracking bioaccumulation in aquatic organisms: A dynamic model integrating life history characteristics and environmental change

We have developed a dynamic model to track the evolution of contaminant concentration in an aquatic organism as a function of season and ontogeny throughout its life cycle. We have focused our analysis on the round goby (Apollonia melanostoma), a globally distributed invasive forage fish. By integrating bioenergetics with a bioaccumulation model, we illustrate how life history characteristics interact to influence contaminant accumulation. We use uncertainty and sensitivity analyses to assess how the model output is affected by uncertainty and variability in model parameters. We then demonstrate the influence of important physiological characteristics on contaminant accumulation with two scenarios. First, we probe the influence of sexual dimorphism by comparing gender-specific accumulation of a standard polychlorinated biphenyl congener, PCB153, in male and female round gobies. We hypothesize that lipid loss in female gobies during spawning season leads to a decrease in the PCB body burden compared to male gobies. Second, we compare PCB accumulation in the round goby and in the mottled sculpin (Cottus bairdi), the native forage fish that the round goby displaced in southern Lake Michigan, to determine whether the invasive species has an intrinsically different bioaccumulation potential than the native one. Our non-intuitive findings from these simulations illustrate how the interaction of growth rate with other life history characteristics lead to unexpected bioaccumulation patterns. The model we present is a flexible tool that integrates complex and dynamic interactions among environmental parameters, thus providing a means to better assess the potential for chemical accumulation in human and wildlife populations, and aiding the development of ecological forecasts.     

苦草光合作用日变化对水体环境因子及磷质量浓度的影响

在静态实验系统中通过水下饱和脉冲荧光仪（Diving-PAM）和多参数水质监测仪（YSI）监测沉水植物苦草（Vallisneria natans）叶绿素荧光参数与水质物理指标的日变化,并同时跟踪测定水体中各形态磷的质量浓度,以研究苦草光合作用日变化对水体物理因子和磷质量浓度的影响。结果表明,苦草叶片光合作用的相对电子传递速率（rETR）,非光化学淬灭系数（qN）及快速光响应曲线的变化趋势和叶片表明的光照强度日变化同步,呈单峰曲线变化;光系统Ⅱ（PSⅡ）实际量子产量（Yield）和光化学淬灭系数（qP）与叶片表明的光照强度日变化相反,呈单槽型曲线变化。水体中溶解氧（DO）、pH和氧化还原电位（Eh）的日变化趋势和与苦草光合作用趋势一致,也呈单峰曲线,均在12：00—13：00时达到最高值。水体总磷（TP）与溶解性总磷（DTP）质量浓度在14：00达到最低值（TP 0.015 mg.L-1,DTP 0.010 mg.L-1）,在24：00达到最大值（TP 0.031 mg.L-1,DTP 0.025 mg.L-1）,溶解性活性磷（SRP）质量浓度在6：00—18：00保持在较低的水平,且无明显波动（0.38~2.46μg.L-1）,在24：00达到最大值（9.62μg.L-1）。水体各形态磷的质量浓度变化呈白天降低、夜间升高趋势,水体中各形态磷的质量浓度变化与苦草光合作用日变化趋势相反。实验结果表明,苦草光合作用引起的水体中环境因子的日变化影响了沉积物磷释放的动态平衡过程,从而引起水体磷质量浓度的日变化。