Toxic metals in sewage sludge-amended soils: has promotion of beneficial use discounted the risks?

Land application of contaminated waste products has been defended as beneficial use by some scientists and regulators, based on the premise that the behavior of any toxins accumulated in soils from this practice is reasonably well understood and will not have detrimental agronomic or environmental impacts into the foreseeable future. In this review, I use the case of toxic metals in sewage sludges applied to agricultural land to illustrate that metal behavior in soils and plant uptake is difficult to generalize because it is strongly dependent on the nature of the metal, sludge, soil properties and crop. Nevertheless, permitted agricultural loadings of toxic metals from sewage sludges are typically regulated using the sole criterion of total metal loading or concentrations in soils. Several critical generalizing assumptions about the behavior of sludge-borne metals in soil-crop systems, built into the US EPA risk assessment for metals, have tended to underestimate risks and are shown not to be well justified by published research. It is argued that, in the absence of a basic understanding of metal behavior in each specific situation, a more precautionary approach to toxic metal additions to soils is warranted.     

我国固体废物的管理体制问题分析

随着经济的发展和城市化水平的提高,固体废物的产生量迅速膨胀,其已成为制约社会和经济持续健康发展的瓶颈.以政策过程为主线,主要在责任界定、政策制定、政策执行和效果监督等环节上对城市生活垃圾、工业固体废物、危险废物和进口固体废物这4种重要的固体废物管理中存在的问题进行分析.结果表明,城市生活垃圾和工业固体废物管理中最亟待解决的问题均在于管理责任机制不明确;危险废物管理中最显著的困难在于国内相关法律法规还不健全、存在监管漏洞;进口固体废物管理中关注的重点是电子垃圾非法贸易问题.针对以上问题,给出了相应的政策建议,以促进固体废物管理体制基础的完善.     

Fisheries management: integrating societal preference, decision analysis, and ecological risk assessment

Fisheries management is the practice of analyzing and selecting options to maintain or alter the structure, dynamics, and interaction of habitat, aquatic biota, and man to achieve human goals and objectives. The theory of fisheries management is: managers or decision makers attempt to maximize renewable `output' from an aquatic resource by choosing from among a set of decision options and applying a set of actions that generate an array of outputs. Outputs may be defined as a tangible catch, a fishing experience, an existence value, or anything else produced or supported by renewable aquatic resources. Overall output is always a mix of tangible and intangible elements. However defined, management goals and objectives are essential components of fisheries management or any other field of renewable natural resource management. Reaching consensus on management goals and objectives has never been a simple task. Beyond the broad and often conflicting goals of an agency, managers must decide who should set specific management objectives — agency personnel, the public, or a combination of the two. Historically, rhetoric aside, fisheries managers in North America nearly always have consulted with professionals in governmental roles to set management objectives. In a strongly pluralistic society, this often resulted in protracted political and legal conflict. Increasingly, there are calls for use of risk assessment to help solve such ecological policy and management problems commonly encountered in fisheries management. The basic concepts of ecological risk assessment may be simple, but the jargon and details are not. Risk assessment (and similar analytical tools) is a concept that has evoked strong reactions whenever it has been used. In spite of the difficulties of defining problems and setting management objectives for complex ecological policy questions, use of risk assessment to help solve ecological problems is widely supported. Ecological risk assessment will be most useful (and objective) in political deliberations when the policy debate revolves around largely technical concerns. To the extent that risk assessment forces policy debate and disagreement toward fundamental differences rather than superficial ones, it will be useful in decision making.     

转基因生物风险评价的实践与发展

随着生物技术的迅猛发展和转基因生物的应用 ,转基因生物对生态环境、人和动物的健康以及非目标生物的影响成为世界关注的焦点。对转基因生物进行风险评估 ,是防止基因转化的随意性 ,对有害基因产品实施有效监控的重要环节。本文介绍了国内外转基因生物风险评价开展的情况以及相关的概念、内容、范围和方法 ,提出了在我国开展转基因生物风险评价的建议。     

森林火险的序贯分析初探

本文利用森林着火危险度指标属于正态分布的特点,根据正态型序贯分析的原理,提出了确定林火危险性的序贯分析方法;建立了长白山林区5个站点森林火险的“安全域”与“危险域”的模型;并以东岗(长白山西坡)为例,作了正态型序贯分析全过程的应用示例。结果证明,利用正态型序贯分析来确定林火的等级是可行的、可靠的,具有实用价值。     

用伴随方法对毒气泄漏事件进行危害评估

由于自然、人为等因素造成的有毒气体泄漏事件随时威胁着人们的生命安全。对于这类突发事故进行危害评估 ,在应急救援中 ,可以给决策者提供参考 ,使之采取有效措施 ,最大限度地降低事故危害程度 ,减少事故恶果及引起的恐慌。由于毒气泄漏位置事先无法确定 ,如果用常规方法进行逐点评估 ,将面临着巨大的计算量而难以进行。笔者发展了一种伴随方法 ,对风险函数的表达式进行等价变形 ,通过求解伴随方程 ,可以一次求得任意位置的毒气泄漏的风险值 ,大大降低计算量和工作量。此法在化学工厂和仓库设置 ,煤气网铺设和监测点选取 ,城市应急中心设置等多种安全规划中均有重要价值 ,为快速危害评估 ,降低化学事故危害提供了有力的研究工具和实用方法。     

基于主逻辑图的安全风险建模研究

概率风险评估已成为研究复杂系统安全风险较为成熟的方法 ,其风险模型的建立是基于故障树/事件树的 ,风险分析具有众多的静态特性。然而 ,大的复杂系统往往存在诸多动态因素 ,在风险研究需要考虑这些动态因素的情况下 ,基于传统故障树 /事件树的模型则难以提供支持。笔者对此进行了分析 ,提出了基于主逻辑图的安全风险建模 ;主要介绍了主逻辑图的概念及其建模方法 ,并对模型进行了分析 ;在此基础上 ,基于主逻辑图分析事故场景 ,对场景风险的量化评估进行了简要介绍 ,并结合某核反应堆例子进行了分析。     

People's Perception About Participatory Developmental Programs: Lessons from the Mountain Risk Engineering Program in the Indian Central Himalaya

The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) is suffering from environmental degradation due to population pressure and infra-structural needs. This is coupled with a natural setting, which creates problems of accelerated soil erosion and mass wasting. In view of these environmental difficulties and the growing concern for effective restoration, there has become an urgent need for multi-disciplinary coordinated improvement schemes. The mitigation of risk arising from hazardous mass wasting processes, through a careful and systematic approach, has helped in the development of the concept of Mountain Risk Engineering (MRE). The MRE practices involve an integrated approach to solving the infra-structural engineering problems of hilly and mountainous areas through environmentally conscious cost-effective and site-specific designs. However, the role of people's participation is extremely crucial for the success of such programs. This paper analyzes the perception of the local people about the approaches adopted in MRE participatory developmental programs and throws light on the intricacies of peoples' participation.     

ENVIRONMENTAL AUDITING: An Approach for Characterizing Tropospheric Ozone Risk to Forests

/ The risk tropospheric ozone poses to forests in the United States is dependent on the variation in ozone exposure across the distribution of the forests in question and the various environmental and climate factors predominant in the region. All these factors have a spatial nature, and consequently an approach to characterization of ozone risk is presented that places ozone exposure-response functions for species as seedlings and model-simulated tree and stand responses in a spatial context using a geographical information systems (GIS). The GIS is used to aggregate factors considered important in a risk characterization, including: (1) estimated ozone exposures over forested regions, (2) measures of ozone effects on species' and stand growth, and (3) spatially distributed environmental, genetic, and exposure influences on species' response to ozone. The GIS-based risk characterization provides an estimation of the extent and magnitude of the potential ozone impact on forests. A preliminary risk characterization demonstrating this approach considered only the eastern United States and only the limited empirical data quantifying the effect of ozone exposures on forest tree species as seedlings. The area-weighted response of the annual seedling biomass loss formed the basis for a sensitivity ranking: sensitive-aspen and black cherry (14%-33% biomass loss over 50% of their distribution); moderately sensitive-tulip popular, loblolly pine, eastern white pine, and sugar maple (5%-13% biomass loss); insensitive-Virginia pine and red maple (0%-1% loss). In the future, the GIS-based risk characterization will include process-based model simulations of the three- to 5-year growth response of individual species as large trees with relevant environmental interactions and model simulated response of mixed stands. The interactive nature of GIS provides a tool to explore consequences of the range of climate conditions across a species' distribution, forest management practices, changing ozone precursors, regulatory control strategies, and other factors influencing the spatial distribution of ozone over time as more information becomes available.KEY WORDS: Ecological risk assessment; GIS; Ozone; Risk characterization; Forests; Trees     

矿井重大灾害危险性评价的改进灰色统计法

用灰色统计理论［１］研究了矿井四大灾害即冒顶、水灾、火灾和瓦斯爆炸的危险性预评价问题，提出了一种新的评价方法──灰色统计综合法。同时，从应用的角度出发对灰色统计的算法作了改进，改进后的算法便于记忆和应用。