Participation and empowerment-based development of socio-cultural indicators supporting regional decision-making for eco-efficiency

Abstract

This article describes a process of developing socio-cultural indicators to support local and regional decision-making for eco-efficiency. Although eco-efficiency is calculated using environmental and economic variables, decisions on local and regional levels cannot ignore the socio-cultural impacts. The indicators were developed by a participatory process that was based on involvement and empowerment of local actors. The process ensured policy relevance and meaningful indicators and advanced their future use in the decision-making.     

Aggregate eco-efficiency indices for New Zealand--a principal components analysis

Eco-efficiency has emerged as a management response to waste issues associated with current production processes. Despite the popularity of the term in both business and government circles, limited attention has been paid to measuring and reporting eco-efficiency to government policy makers. Aggregate measures of eco-efficiency are needed, to complement existing measures and to help highlight important patterns in eco-efficiency data.This paper aims to develop aggregate measures of eco-efficiency for use by policy makers. Specifically, this paper provides a unique analysis by applying principal components analysis (PCA) to eco-efficiency indicators in New Zealand.The study reveals that New Zealand's overall eco-efficiency improved for two out of the five aggregate measures over the period 1994/1995–1997/1998. The worsening of the other aggregate measures reflects, among other things, the relatively poor performance of the primary production and related processing sectors. These results show PCA is an effective approach for aggregating eco-efficiency indicators and assisting decision makers by reducing redundancy in an eco-efficiency indicators matrix.     

Regional Variations in the Implementation of the Local Air Quality Management Process within Great Britain

The UK National Air Quality Strategy has required local authorities to review and assess air quality in their area of jurisdiction and determine locations in their areas where concentrations of specific air quality pollutants are predicted to exceed national air quality objectives in the future. Statutory air quality management areas (AQMAs) are designated where air quality is predicted to be above specified objective concentrations by specific target dates, and statutory air quality action plans will be necessary to improve the local air quality within these areas. Over 124 local authorities in England (including London), Wales and Scotland anticipate declaring AQMAs following the conclusion of the statutory air quality review and assessment process. However, other influences are being exerted on the local air quality management process and AQMA decision-making processes. Such influences include regional and sub- regional collaborative working between local authorities and government agencies and wider political decision-making processes. Some regions of Great Britain (encompassing England (including London), Scotland and Wales) anticipate many AQMA designations, whilst other regions are not anticipating any such designations despite apparently similar air quality circumstances. Evidence for regional or sub-regional variations in the locations of anticipated AQMAs are examined through an evaluation of the outcomes of the scientific review and assessment process undertaken by local authorities declaring AQMAs, and through a local authority survey to identify influences on decision-making processes at a level above that of the local authority. Regional variation is reported in the type of pollutant causing AQMAs to be declared, in the numbers of AQMAs in regions and in the spatial distribution of AQMAs across Great Britain.     

Eco-efficiency in extended supply chains: a case study of furniture production

This paper presents a methodology about how eco-efficiency in extended supply chains (ESCs) can be understood and measured. The extended supply chain includes all processes in the life cycle of a product and the eco-efficiency is measured as the relative environmental and value performance in one ESC compared to other ESCs. The paper is based on a case study of furniture production in Norway. Nine different environmental performance indicators are identified. These are based on suggestions from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and additional indicators that are shown to have significant impacts in the life cycle of the products. Value performance is measured as inverse life cycle costs. The eco-efficiency for six different chair models is calculated and the relative values are shown graphically in XY-diagrams. This provides information about the relative performance of the products, which is valuable in green procurement processes. The same method is also used for analysing changes in eco-efficiency when possible alterations in the ESC are introduced. Here, it is shown that a small and realistic change of end-of-life treatment significantly changes the eco-efficiency of a product.     

Eco-efficiency in contaminated land management in Finland – Barriers and development needs

In Finland the number of potentially contaminated sites totals ca. 20?000. The annual costs of remediation are 60–70 million euros. Excavation combined with disposal or off-site treatment is the most common soil remediation method. To define which factors make contaminated land management (CLM) eco-efficient and to study whether eco-efficiency has been considered in CLM decisions we carried out a literature survey, two stakeholder seminars, thematic interviews and a questionnaire study on economic instruments. Generally speaking, eco-efficiency means gaining environmental benefits with fewer resources. To assess its realization in CLM, it is necessary to have a more specific definition. In our study, we arrived at a list of several qualifications for eco-efficiency. It was also shown that eco-efficiency has hardly been a real issue in the selection of remediation techniques or generally, in the decision-making concerning contaminated sites. The existing policy instruments seem to be insufficient to promote eco-efficiency in CLM. Several concrete barriers to eco-efficiency also came up, urgency and lack of money being the most important. The scarcity of the use of in situ remediation methods and the difficulties involved in recycling slightly contaminated or treated soil were considered to be major problems. Insufficient site studies, inadequate or unsuitable methods for risk assessment and cost evaluation, and deficient and mistimed risk communication can also hinder the realization of eco-efficiency. Hence, there is a need to promote the use of more eco-efficient remediation techniques and to develop CLM policy instruments, guidelines, and participatory processes and methods to assess the eco-efficiency of CLM options.     

Eco-health evaluation for the Shanghai metropolitan area during the recent industrial transformation (1990-2003)

Shanghai is a cosmopolitan city and one of the most important economic centers in China, but is saddled with serious environmental problems resulting from a recent industrial transformation. This paper examines the interactive relationships between economic growth, eco-efficiency of urban metabolism, and environmental performance of the Shanghai metropolitan area since the 1990s using 15 indicators. This study has revealed an enhanced eco-efficiency of water and energy use as well as an improved overall environmental quality in the central urban districts of Shanghai. Both TGDP (total GDP) and GDP per capita increased rapidly at the annual rate of 16.28% and 15.91%, respectively. In contrast, energy consumed per 10000RMB YUAN GDP (ECG), water consumed per 10000RMB YUAN GDP (WCG), wastewater discharged per 10000RMB YUAN GDP (WWDG), and waste gases emitted per 10000RMB YUAN GDP (WGEG) decreased at the annual rate of 9.34%, 10.69%, 14.57%, and 8.52%, respectively. The rapid decline in ECG, WCG, WWDG, and WGEG indicates an enhanced eco-efficiency of urban metabolism. However, uncontrolled emission of wastes from domestic instead of industrial sources adversely affected the overall environmental quality. In addition, suburban areas have undergone rapid economic growth at the cost of human health deterioration, as measured by mortalities and relative mortality ratios of three major diseases (tumor, respiratory disease, and trauma/toxicosis). With Shanghai serving as the "locomotive" driving the economy of the Yangtze River Basin, effective pollution control policies and a network of regional coordination are urgently needed in the globalization and ecological security of the entire area.     

Bottom up and top down: analysis of participatory processes for sustainability indicator identification as a pathway to community empowerment and sustainable environmental management

The modern environmental management literature stresses the need for community involvement to identify indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development and environmental management goals. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of participatory processes on sustainability indicator identification and environmental management in three disparate case studies. The first is a process of developing partnerships between First Nations communities, environmental groups, and forestry companies to resolve conflicts over forest management in Western Canada. The second describes a situation in Botswana where local pastoral communities worked with development researchers to reduce desertification. The third case study details an on-going government led process of developing sustainability indicators in Guernsey, UK, that was designed to monitor the environmental, social, and economic impacts of changes in the economy. The comparative assessment between case studies allows us to draw three primary conclusions. (1) The identification and collection of sustainability indicators not only provide valuable databases for making management decisions, but the process of engaging people to select indicators also provides an opportunity for community empowerment that conventional development approaches have failed to provide. (2) Multi-stakeholder processes must formally feed into decision-making forums or they risk being viewed as irrelevant by policy-makers and stakeholders. (3) Since ecological boundaries rarely meet up with political jurisdictions, it is necessary to be flexible when choosing the scale at which monitoring and decision-making occurs. This requires an awareness of major environmental pathways that run through landscapes to understand how seemingly remote areas may be connected in ways that are not immediately apparent.     

Changing scenario of Himalayan agroecosystems: loss of agrobiodiversity, an indicator of environmental change in Central Himalaya, India

Environmental, biological, socio-cultural and economic variations in the Himalayas have led to the evolution of diverse and unique traditional agroecosystems, crop species, and livestock, which help the traditional mountain farming societies to sustain themselves. During the recent past, as a result of rapid changes in land use caused by socio-cultural and economic changes and various environmental perturbations, the agrobiodiversity of the Central Himalayan agroecosystems has changed steadily. A recent survey conducted in 150 different villages located along an elevated transect of the Alaknanda catchment of the Central Himalaya revealed that over a period of two decades (1970–74 and 1990–94) the cultivated area under many traditional crops had declined significantly. A micro-level study carried out in 30 villages revealed that a series of changes had occurred in land use practices over a period of 25–30 years.The loss of agrobiodiversity and the changing socio-cultural and economic dimensions and their impacts on the sustainability of Himalayan agroecosystems are emerging as major causes of concern at local/regional/national scale, and appropriate options to meet these challenges are discussed in this paper.     

Guiding Climate Change Adaptation Within Vulnerable Natural Resource Management Systems

Climate change has the potential to compromise the sustainability of natural resources in Mediterranean climatic systems, such that short-term reactive responses will increasingly be insufficient to ensure effective management. There is a simultaneous need for both the clear articulation of the vulnerabilities of specific management systems to climate risk, and the development of appropriate short- and long-term strategic planning responses that anticipate environmental change or allow for sustainable adaptive management in response to trends in resource condition. Governments are developing climate change adaptation policy frameworks, but without the recognition of the importance of responding strategically, regional stakeholders will struggle to manage future climate risk. In a partnership between the South Australian Government, the Adelaide and Mt Lofty Ranges Natural Resource Management Board and the regional community, a range of available research approaches to support regional climate change adaptation decision-making, were applied and critically examined, including: scenario modelling; applied and participatory Geographical Information Systems modelling; environmental risk analysis; and participatory action learning. As managers apply ideas for adaptation within their own biophysical and socio-cultural contexts, there would be both successes and failures, but a learning orientation to societal change will enable improvements over time. A base-line target for regional responses to climate change is the ownership of the issue by stakeholders, which leads to an acceptance that effective actions to adapt are now both possible and vitally important. Beyond such baseline knowledge, the research suggests that there is a range of tools from the social and physical sciences available to guide adaptation decision-making.     

Judging the Risk of Exceedance: Local authority decision-making for air quality management area designation

Management of air quality by local government in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) requires a process of local decision-making, involving collaboration between local politicians, authority officers and interest-groups. Since the establishment of the first National Air Quality Strategy for the UK in 1997, local authority environmental health professionals have undertaken a scientific review and assessment process to identify locations where predicted future pollutant concentrations may exceed national air quality objectives. Air quality management areas (AQMAs) are declared where such exceedences are predicted. Over recent years, significant changes in local authority decision-making structures in England, Scotland and Wales have occurred, resulting in changes to the structure and governance in many local authorities. Results are presented from local authority surveys undertaken to examine the occurrence of any conflicts between the science involved in predicting exceedences and the local political decision-making processes in declaring AQMAs. Data are presented for a sample set of local authorities in Great Britain from which it is concluded that decision-making structures in local government are having a demonstrable impact on the designation of AQMAs.     

Judging the Risk of Exceedance: local authority decision-making for air quality management area designation

Management of air quality by local government in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) requires a process of local decision-making, involving collaboration between local politicians, authority officers and interest-groups. Since the establishment of the first National Air Quality Strategy for the UK in 1997, local authority environmental health professionals have undertaken a scientific review and assessment process to identify locations where predicted future pollutant concentrations may exceed national air quality objectives. Air quality management areas (AQMAs) are declared where such exceedences are predicted. Over recent years, significant changes in local authority decision-making structures in England, Scotland and Wales have occurred, resulting in changes to the structure and governance in many local authorities. Results are presented from local authority surveys undertaken to examine the occurrence of any conflicts between the science involved in predicting exceedences and the local political decision-making processes in declaring AQMAs. Data are presented for a sample set of local authorities in Great Britain from which it is concluded that decision-making structures in local government are having a demonstrable impact on the designation of AQMAs.     

Environmental indicators for communication of life cycle impact assessment results and their applications

Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is performed to quantitatively evaluate all environmental impacts from products, systems, processes and services. However, LCIA does not always provide valuable information for choosing among alternatives with different specifications, functionalities and lifetimes. The objectives of this study are (1) to propose environmental indicators to evaluate environmental efficiency and value qualitatively and quantitatively on the basis of analogies to financial and economic indicators, and (2) to present the application of the indicators. Incremental evaluation using a reference is employed to obtain the environmental indicators. The environmental efficiency indicators are conceptually based on the ratios of reduced environmental burdens returned to environmental burdens required: environmental return on investment, environmental payback period and environmental internal rate of return. The environmental value indicator is the sum of all reduced and required environmental burdens: i.e., environmental net present value. All the environmental indicators can be used to compare and rank the environmental efficiencies or values of alternatives. The environmental efficiency indicators can be applied to a new environmental labeling. The concept of eco-efficiency labeling is developed by combining the environmental efficiency indicators with financial indicators. A case study is performed to illustrate the necessity and importance of the environmental indicators. These environmental indicators can help easily communicate LCIA results in the field of environmental management.     

Indicators for managing biosolids in Ireland

Sustainable development indicators (SDIs) have emerged as a tool to measure progress towards sustainable development for a number of fields. However, no indicator initiative to date has been aimed at biosolids management at local authority, regional or national levels. This paper presents a study where stakeholders involved in the management of biosolids in Ireland participated in the development of SDIs for managing biosolids at the local/regional level. A significant 81% of participating stakeholders find SDIs either 'useful' or 'very useful' as a tool for managing biosolids. A suite of 22 indicators has been developed and arranged according to the driving force-pressure-state-impact-response (DPSIR) indicator framework. The indicators address all the domains of biosolids management namely, production, quality, cost, legislation/regulation, training/research and recycling/disposal. The stakeholder approach is recognition that no effective indicator set can be developed without the input of stakeholders.     

The Arctic Water Resource Vulnerability Index: An Integrated Assessment Tool for Community Resilience and Vulnerability with Respect to Freshwater

People in the Arctic face uncertainty in their daily lives as they contend with environmental changes at a range of scales from local to global. Freshwater is a critical resource to people, and although water resource indicators have been developed that operate from regional to global scales and for midlatitude to equatorial environments, no appropriate index exists for assessing the vulnerability of Arctic communities to changing water resources at the local scale. The Arctic Water Resource Vulnerability Index (AWRVI) is proposed as a tool that Arctic communities can use to assess their relative vulnerability-resilience to changes in their water resources from a variety of biophysical and socioeconomic processes. The AWRVI is based on a social-ecological systems perspective that includes physical and social indicators of change and is demonstrated in three case study communities/watersheds in Alaska. These results highlight the value of communities engaging in the process of using the AWRVI and the diagnostic capability of examining the suite of constituent physical and social scores rather than the total AWRVI score alone.     

Opportunity cost based analysis of corporate eco-efficiency: A methodology and its application to the CO2-efficiency of German companies

In this paper, we propose the return-to-cost-ratio (RCR) as an alternative approach to the analysis of operational eco-efficiency of companies based on the notion of opportunity costs. RCR helps to overcome two fundamental deficits of existing approaches to eco-efficiency. (1) It translates eco-efficiency into managerial terms by applying the well-established notion of opportunity costs to eco-efficiency analysis. (2) RCR allows to identify and quantify the drivers behind changes in corporate eco-efficiency. RCR is applied to the analysis of the CO₂-efficiency of German companies in order to illustrate its usefulness for a detailed analysis of changes in corporate eco-efficiency as well as for the development of effective environmental strategies.     

Local and Regional Partnerships in Natural Resource Management: The Challenge of Bridging Institutional Levels

Although collaboration and multi-stakeholder partnerships have become a common feature in natural resource management throughout the world, various problems are associated with attempts to up-scale community-based natural resource management from the local to the regional level. To analyze the reasons behind these problems, this article reports on two examples of collaboratives in Australia: local Landcare groups, and regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies. Recent government-induced changes have shifted the focus from local Landcare group action to strategic planning and implementation by regional NRM bodies. Two typologies of collaboratives are applied to analyze the characteristics of both these groups. The study uses data from 52 qualitative interviews with key informants at the local and regional level in Victoria and Tasmania, participant observation, as well as literature and document analysis. The article illustrates how the groups’ distinct characteristics can cause conflicts when the different types of collaboratives operate in parallel. In addition, the article reports how stakeholders perceive the level of community participation in decision-making processes. The key message is that the benefits of community participation and collaboration that arise at the local level can be lost when these approaches are up-scaled to the regional level unless there is an intermediary or ‘mediating structure’ to facilitate communication and create the link between different types of collaboratives.     

黄河三角洲高效生态经济发展存在的问题与对策研究

国家将黄河三角洲的发展定位为"高效生态",并上升为国家战略,这给黄河三角洲高效生态经济发展提供了重要机遇。从分析高效生态经济内涵出发,着重分析了区域经济结构不合理、对外开放水平不高、体制机制严重不足、生态与环境保护薄弱等问题,并提出了优化产业结构、坚持全方位开放、建立科学制度和坚持生态优先等相应对策,以期对黄河三角洲高效生态经济发展提供借鉴。     

A conceptual model of the role of complex science in local authority consultations about air quality management

There exists a clear imperative across the EU and within the UK towards the enhanced integration of community knowledge in environmental and health decision-making processes. The underlying social force that underpins this dynamic is the drive for a more accountable, transparent and publicly acceptable decision-making arena. However, relatively little research has been undertaken on the evaluation of local air quality management consultation in particular. In this context, the paper presents an evaluation of evidence resulting from questionnaire survey and case study research undertaken in the first round of the statutory process of local air quality management (LAQM), in which local authorities are required to consult on their air quality findings and intentions. We suggest that local authority perceptions of the relative abilities of differing stakeholders' grasp of air quality science, the process that translates that science into policy, and the institutional and organizational status of stakeholders (i.e. whether they are statutory or non-statutory stakeholders) may tend to transitively determine the choice of consultation methods used, the communication strategies chosen and the relative integration of stakeholder feedback into the LAQM decision-making process. In order to interrogate this potentially problematic chain of risk communication events, a preliminary conceptual model has been developed to enable the interrogation of the pathways through, and the obstacles to, the translation of air quality knowledge. The task is to unveil the sequential chains of association that comprise the LAQM risk communication process.     

国内外旅游生态效率研究进展与启示:一个文献综述

通过对国内外旅游生态效率相关文献的梳理,从内涵维度、测度方法、时空格局演化、影响因素、提升策略等方面归纳了旅游生态效率研究的主要议题。综合来看,旅游生态效率研究呈现出以下特点:研究对象逐步延伸,研究的本土化特征明显,研究内容转向多元主题,研究方法实证取向鲜明。结合旅游生态效率研究的趋势和热点,提出未来研究应重点关注多要素集成的投入—产出指标体系构建、地理时空大数据的挖掘与应用、驱动机制的系统阐释等研究主题。