Development of new dunes in the Dutch Delta: nature compensation and ‘building with nature’

A new dune area was constructed by beach and foreshore nourishments along the Delfland Coast in the southwestern Netherlands. The new area is intended to be a compensation for losses of existing high quality dunes in nearby areas, due to the use/construction of Maasvlakte 2, the new harbour extension of Rotterdam opening in 2013. The target habitats for compensation include dry grey dunes and moist dune valley grassland. Due to the habitat type, the nourished material had to have a special character. The nourishment was carried out according to a special design and initial development of the new area had to follow certain pathways. In order to meet the compensation requirements in time. Careful monitoring is done to assess whether development of the new habitat is taking place in the direction of the desired target habitats. This paper reports on the construction of the new area and on the first years of development and monitoring. The monitoring mainly concerns development of the abiotic landscape elements, geomorphology, groundwater and soils. The lessons learned from this area are discussed in the light of the development of other recent young nature areas in the sandy Dutch delta coast. This gives new insights for coastal management in general in the context of building with nature.     

The dynamics of industrial symbiosis: a proposal for a conceptual framework based upon a comprehensive literature review

There is increasing evidence that throughout the world, firms, governmental agencies and NGOs are seeking to stimulate industrial symbiosis. This concept and its application have also been the topic of extensive research. Up till now, this work lacks a more comprehensive theoretical framework, and this paper fills this gap. We provide a theoretical basis for understanding the dynamics through which regional industrial systems change their connectiveness in an attempt to reduce their ecological impact. We position our framework within the field of industrial symbiosis based on a comprehensive literature search in the ISI Web of Science database for publications that listed ‘industrial symbiosis’, ‘eco-industrial park’, or a combination of ‘industrial-ecology’ and ‘regional’ as a topic.The framework conceptualizes industrial symbiosis as a process at two levels: (1) the level of the regional industrial system (RIS), and (2) the societal level where the concept and routines of industrial symbiosis diffuse. We link the dynamics at these levels to changes in ecological impact and increase in institutional capacity. We conclude with a research agenda based on the variables and their basic relationships specified in our framework. The main line of research we propose is to systematically investigate how institutional capacity evolves over time in regional industrial systems and how it affects the ecological impact of such systems. We also propose to investigate how insights from existing literature about stimulating and impeding factors to industrial symbiosis can be understood in terms of mechanisms of transmission and how these mechanisms interact to create nationally distinct patterns of diffusion of industrial symbiosis.     

Water quality status of dugouts from five districts in Northern Ghana: implications for sustainable water resources management in a water stressed tropical savannah environment

This study was primarily aimed at investigating the physicochemical and microbial quality of water in 14 such dugouts from five districts in the northern region of Ghana. Results obtained suggest that except for colour, turbidity, total iron and manganese, many physicochemical parameters were either within or close to the World Health Organisation’s acceptable limits for drinking water. Generally, colour ranged from 5 to 750 Hz (mean 175 Hz), turbidity from 0.65 to 568 nephelometric turbidity units (NTU; mean 87.9 NTU), total iron from 0.07 to 7.85 mg/L (mean 1.0 mg/L) and manganese from 0.03 to 1.59 mg/L (mean 0.50 mg/L). Coliform counts in water from all the dugouts in both wet and dry seasons were, however, above the recommended limits for drinking water. Total and faecal coliforms ranged from 125 to 68,000 colony forming units (cfu)/100 mL (mean 10,623 cfu/100 mL) and <?1 to 19,000 cfu/100 mL (mean 1,310 cfu /100 mL), respectively. The poor microbial quality, as indicated by the analytically significant presence of coliform bacteria in all samples of dugout water, strongly suggests susceptibility and exposure to waterborne diseases of, and consequent health implications on, the many people who continuously patronise these vital water resources throughout the year. In particular, more proactive sustainable water management options, such as introduction to communities of simple but cost-effective purification techniques for water drawn from dugouts for drinking purposes, education and information dissemination to the water users to ensure environmentally hygienic practices around dugouts, may be needed.     

Elemental and spectroscopic characterization of fractions of an acidic extract of oil sands process water

‘Naphthenic acids’ (NAs) in petroleum produced water and oil sands process water (OSPW), have been implicated in toxicological effects. However, many are not well characterized. A method for fractionation of NAs of an OSPW was used herein and a multi-method characterization of the fractions conducted.     

Waste in the Inner City: asset or assault?

In an unequal society, undesirable wastes often end up in the poorest and least powerful communities, becoming part of the economic and environmental milieu of the inner city. Two contradictory responses to waste reflect contrasting theoretical paradigms. Some wastes can become assets in local economic development, creating incomes through scavenging, industrial jobs in recycling plants or new businesses using locally available materials. Other wastes are an assault on the community that receives them; toxic wastes, polluting facilities and industrial by-products often create local health hazards rather than development. Waste as an asset is consistent with the free market model of economics. The inner city, 'endowed' with waste materials and low-wage labour, has a comparative advantage in labour-intensive processing of materials that the rest of society has discarded. Waste as an assault on the community is consistent with a different model of environmental risk. Some by-products of industry are so hazardous that they should not be produced, or should be tightly regulated. Each model has a realm of validity; the balance between the two depends on which wastes are hazardous, and which are just ugly resources waiting to be discovered.     

Detection capacity,information gaps and the design of surveillance programs for invasive forest pests

Integrated pest risk maps and their underlying assessments provide broad guidance for establishing surveillance programs for invasive species, but they rarely account for knowledge gaps regarding the pest of interest or how these can be reduced. In this study we demonstrate how the somewhat competing notions of robustness to uncertainty and potential knowledge gains could be used in prioritizing large-scale surveillance activities. We illustrate this approach with the example of an invasive pest recently detected in North America, Sirex noctilio Fabricius. First, we formulate existing knowledge about the pest into a stochastic model and use the model to estimate the expected utility of surveillance efforts across the landscape. The expected utility accounts for the distribution, abundance and susceptibility of the host resource as well as the value of timely S. noctilio detections. Next, we make use of the info-gap decision theory framework to explore two alternative pest surveillance strategies. The first strategy aims for timely, certain detections and attempts to maximize the robustness to uncertainty about S. noctilio behavior; the second strategy aims to maximize the potential knowledge gain about the pest via unanticipated (i.e., opportune) detections. The results include a set of spatial outputs for each strategy that can be used independently to prioritize surveillance efforts. However, we demonstrate an alternative approach in which these outputs are combined via the Pareto ranking technique into a single priority map that outlines the survey regions with the best trade-offs between both surveillance strategies.     

The challenge of validating vulnerability estimates: the option of media content analysis for identifying drought-related crises

For an integrated assessment of the vulnerability of societies to drought it is necessary to set the benchmark at a level where the impacts of droughts lead to a state of affairs that departs from normal conditions, i.e. a crisis event. This article aims to improve the understanding of drought-related crisis events on the basis of a twofold media content analysis. This approach enables us to test when increased vulnerability in fact leads to a crisis situation and offers an improved understanding of the intensity and the extent of crisis events. To this end, we first outline our perspective on crisis and give an overview on existing approaches to identify crisis events. We then outline our two-step approach of media content analysis aimed at developing a crisis data set for the case study regions Andhra Pradesh (India), Southern Portugal and the Volga region (Russia). Using the Factiva news database and information by regional newspapers, a crisis data set is generated enabling us to define the occurrence and extent of drought-related crisis events in the case study regions. Moreover, based on attributes of drought impacts reported by news sources, we categorize the extensiveness of a specific drought. As a key result, our findings suggest that Southern Portugal, the case study region which is expected to be less susceptible to drought events than the other case study regions, faced the most extended crisis events.     

The Absorption of Atmospheric Sulfur Dioxide by Water Solutions

Results of a laboratory study indicate that the rate of solution of atmospheric sulfur dioxide in distilled water, over the range of atmospheric concentrations of 0.81?8.73 mg SO₂/M³, is a function of the concentration of SO2 in the atmosphere, with saturation being reached more rapidly at the higher concentrations. This would indicate that rain water, with constantly renewed surfaces, can be very effective in the removal of atmospheric SO₂. The pH of the exposed water samples reached values of 4.0 or less, comparable to values observed in fog and cloud water near large industrial areas. Overall solubility of sulfur dioxide in distilled water did not follow the law of partial pressure. At the atmospheric concentrations used it was found that over 98.5% of the sulfite in solution was in the form of the bisulfite ion with, the remainder present as unionized sulfurous acid. Computations using the concentration of unionized sulfurous acid in the solution showed that the solubility of this portion of dissolved sulfite did follow the law of partial pressure.     

Environmental Engineering Intersociety Board

In the early Fifties, sanitary engineering professional development activities were being undertaken principally by the Joint Committee for the Advancement of Sanitary Engineering. This Committee had representation from a number of organizations whose membership included sanitary engineers. Over the years, this group had been giving thought to expanding its activities to include greater recognition for the sanitary engineer. The result was the creation of the American Sanitary Engineering Intersociety Board in 1955, with the societies supporting the Joint Committee becoming the initial sponsoring organizations: American Public Health Association; American Society for Engineering Education; American Society of Civil Engineers; American Water Works Association; Water Pollution Control Federation.