A Paradigm of International Environmental Law: The Case for Controlling the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes

The production of large quantities of wastes globally has created a commercial activity involving the transfrontier shipments of hazardous wastes, intended to be managed at economically attractive waste-handling facilities located elsewhere. In fact, huge quantities of hazardous wastes apparently travel the world in search of “acceptable” waste management facilities. For instance, within the industrialized countries alone, millions of tonnes of potentially hazardous waste cross national frontiers each year on their way for recycling or to treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) because there is no local disposal capacity for these wastes, or because legal disposal or reuse in a foreign country may be more environmentally sound, or managing the wastes in the foreign country may be less expensive than at home. The cross-boundary traffic in hazardous wastes has lately been under close public scrutiny, however, resulting in the accession of several international agreements and laws to regulate such activities. This paper discusses and analyzes the most significant control measures and major agreements in this new commercial activity involving hazardous wastes. In particular, the discussion recognizes the difficulties with trying to implement the relevant international agreements among countries of vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds. Nonetheless, it is also noted that global environmental agreements will generally be a necessary component of ensuring adequate environmental protection for the world community—and thus a need for the careful implementation of such agreements and regulations.     

Impacts of interannual climate variability on past and future forest composition

Numerous analyses of the possible impacts of future climatic changes on tree species composition have been published for both lowland and high-elevation forests. Most of these studies were based on the application of forest "gap" models, and the vast majority of them considered only changes in the average of climatic parameters over time. In this study, we use a unique data set on reconstructed past climatic variations to analyse forest dynamics simulated by the forest gap model ForClim. This analysis forms the basis for a systematic exploration of the ecological effects of changing means vs. changing variability of climate on central European forests. A reconstruction of historical climate covering the last 470 years in the Swiss lowlands (ClimIndex) is extrapolated to a transect across the alpine (cold) treeline and used to simulate the influence of climate variations on the time scale of decades on forest biomass and tree species composition at both sites. While the simulation at the low-elevation site shows little sensitivity to climate variations, the results from upper subalpine forests suggest that two major dieback events would have occurred at elevations above the current but below the climatic tree line, induced by clusters of exceptionally cold summers. The results are in agreement with available dendrochronological data and with documentary evidence on massive negative impacts on flora and fauna at high elevations during these periods. We conclude that ForClim is capable of capturing the effects on tree population dynamics of climate variability at these sites as reconstructed from the ClimIndex record. A factorial design is used to address the sensitivity of ForClim to changes of the long-term averages vs. changes of the variability of monthly temperature and precipitation data. To this end, the simulated tree species composition of near-natural forests is examined along a climate gradient in Europe. The results indicate that there are three types of forest response: (1) little sensitivity to both kinds of change, (2) strong sensitivity to changes in the means, but little sensitivity to changing variability, and (3) strong sensitivity to changing variability at least in parts of the examined climate space. Half of the cases investigated fall under the third category, suggesting that emphasis should be placed on also assessing the sensitivity of ecosystems to future changes in climate variability rather than on changes of average values alone. Electronic Publication     

The epistemic authority of solution-oriented global environmental assessments

The effectiveness and influence of solutions oriented global environmental assessments (SOAs) rests on their legitimacy. Based on the GEA literature this piece reviews the legitimacy of GEAs and discusses its implications, and challenges and for the legitimacy of SOAs. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented GEAs.     

Solution-oriented global environmental assessments: Opportunities and challenges

This article provides an introduction to the Special Issue dedicated to “Solution-oriented Global Environmental Assessments: Opportunities and Challenges”. In the follow-up to the Paris climate agreement and the adoption and early implementation of the global Sustainable Development Goals involving many synergies and trade-offs, the need to shift the focus from environmental problem analysis towards the exploration of specific solution options can be observed in international environmental governance debates. To remain policy-relevant, credible and legitimate, global environmental assessments (GEAs) must carefully adapt to a rapidly evolving governance landscape. This Special Issue sheds light on the potential utility and implications of increased solution-orientation of GEAs. It builds on the research project “The Future of Global Environmental Assessment Making” that was jointly initiated in 2013 by UN Environment and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. The article collection includes research on the coevolution of GEAs and the increasingly solution-oriented governance context; conditions of success for contemporary GEAs; the treatment of divergent viewpoints, stakes and stakeholders in solution-oriented GEAs; knowledge aggregation; and the enhanced measurement of GEA effectiveness in the emerging governance landscape.     

The Effect of Local Biomass Projects on Energy Balance and GHG Emission: A Life Cycle Approach

Emerging attention has been given to the use of biomass in local areas for its contribution to reducing fossil fuel dependence and mitigating global warming. The objective of the present study is to develop a method that quantitatively assesses the effects of local biomass projects on fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. A practical method based on a life cycle approach is proposed and applied to a case of bioethanol project in Miyako Islands of Japan. The project is aiming to produce bioethanol from molasses within the islands, and to replace the entire gasoline consumed in the islands to E3 fuel (i.e., a mixture of 3% ethanol and 97% gasoline by volume). The assessment using the developed method revealed that, first, the complete shift from gasoline to E3 fuel allows for decreases in fossil fuel consumption and GHG emission. Second, the performance of the project is improved by the integration of the ethanol plant and the sugar factory. Moreover, the assessment found that, in small-scale bioethanol projects, the contribution of capital goods to life cycle fuel consumption and GHG emission is not negligible.     

Bringing the Heat Home: Television Spots about Local Impacts Reduce Global Warming Denialism

ABSTRACT

Efforts to educate the general public about global warming and the potential policy solutions that could mitigate its effects have relied on the diffusion of facts. But, cognitive scientists have documented that psychologically distant events like global warming elicit less concern and motivation to act relative to immediate, proximal and certain events. This paper documents a quasi-experiment that tested the effect on attitudes of a television campaign that emphasized the temporally, geographically and socially proximal impacts of global warming on the ecosystems and business activity of a historically conservative area of the United States. The campaign aired on one cable provider. Subscribers of that and of competing providers in the same zip-codes were polled after the campaign. Respondents exposed to the campaign were more likely to believe that global warming is happening, to accept the scientific consensus, to be more concerned about impacts and more supportive of policy solutions.     

解决全球变暖问题,发达国家与发展中国家的分歧

本文论述了全球变暖对经济发展的影响。论述了在联合国气候变化峰会上,发达国家与发展中国家发生严重分歧。说明了我国坚持共同但有区别的责任原则,实现互利共赢,促进共同发展。会议无果而终。     

Global climate change and the politics of disaster

The paper explores the potential political impact of global climate change and, more generally, of natural disaster. Because the affluent West has largely tamed the natural and the social domains, popular clamor for government to anticipate, prevent, and redress disaster increases. I delineate several consequences of the new politics of disaster.     

Carbon Pool Dynamics in the Lower Fraser Basin from 1827 to 1990

/ To understand the total impact of humans on the carbon cycle, themodeling and quantifying of the transfer of carbon from terrestrial pools tothe atmosphere is becoming more critical. Using previously published data,this research sought to assess the change in carbon pools caused by humans inthe Lower Fraser Basin (LFB) in British Columbia, Canada, since 1827 anddefine the long-term, regional contribution of carbon to the atmosphere. Theresults indicate that there has been a transfer of 270 Mt of carbon frombiomass pools in the LFB to other pools, primarily the atmosphere. The majorlosses of biomass carbon have been from logged forests (42%), wetlands(14%), and soils (43%). Approximately 48% of the forestbiomass, almost 20% of the carbon of the LFB, lies within old-growthforest, which covers only 19% of the study area. Landfills are nowbecoming a major sink of carbon, containing 5% of the biomass carbonin the LFB, while biomass carbon in buildings, urban vegetation, mammals, andagriculture is negligible. Approximately 26% of logged forest biomasswould still be in a terrestrial biomass pool, leaving 238 Mt of carbon thathas been released to the atmosphere. On an area basis, this is 29 times theaverage global emissions of carbon, providing an indication of the pastcontributions of developed countries such as Canada to global warming andpossible contributions from further clearing of rainforest in both tropicaland temperate regions.KEY WORDS: Carbon pools; Global warming; Carbon release to atmosphere;Greenhouse effect     

A robust approach for iterative contaminant source location and release history recovery

Contamination source identification is a crucial step in environmental remediation. The exact contaminant source locations and release histories are often unknown due to lack of records and therefore must be identified through inversion. Coupled source location and release history identification is a complex nonlinear optimization problem. Existing strategies for contaminant source identification have important practical limitations. In many studies, analytical solutions for point sources are used; the problem is often formulated and solved via nonlinear optimization; and model uncertainty is seldom considered. In practice, model uncertainty can be significant because of the uncertainty in model structure and parameters, and the error in numerical solutions. An inaccurate model can lead to erroneous inversion of contaminant sources. In this work, a constrained robust least squares (CRLS) estimator is combined with a branch-and-bound global optimization solver for iteratively identifying source release histories and source locations. CRLS is used for source release history recovery and the global optimization solver is used for location search. CRLS is a robust estimator that was developed to incorporate directly a modeler's prior knowledge of model uncertainty and measurement error. The robustness of CRLS is essential for systems that are ill-conditioned. Because of this decoupling, the total solution time can be reduced significantly. Our numerical experiments show that the combination of CRLS with the global optimization solver achieved better performance than the combination of a non-robust estimator, i.e., the nonnegative least squares (NNLS) method, with the same solver.