The relationship of occupational injury and use of mental health care

Introduction: Symptoms of depression and anxiety are a common consequence of occupational injury regardless of its cause and type. Nevertheless, mental health care is rarely covered by workers’ compensation systems. The aim of this study was to assess the use of mental health care post-injury. Methods: We used a subsample of patient-care workers from the Boston Hospital Workers Health Study (BHWHS). We matched one injured worker with three uninjured workers during the period of 2012–2014 based on age and job title (nurse or patient-care associate) and looked at their mental health care use pre- and post-injury using medical claims data from the employer sponsored health plan. We used logistic regression analysis to assess the likelihood of mental health care use three and six months post-injury controlling for any pre-injury visits. Analyses were repeated separately by job title. Results: There were 556 injured workers between 2012 and 2014 that were matched with three uninjured workers at the time of injury (n = 1,649). Injured workers had a higher likelihood of seeking mental health care services than their uninjured counterparts during the six months after injury (OR = 1.646, 95% CI: 1.23–2.20), but not three months post-injury (OR = 0.825, 95% CI: 0.57–1.19). Patient-care associates had a higher likelihood to seek mental health care post-injury, than nurses (OR: 2.133 vs OR: 1.556) during the six months period. Conclusions: Injured workers have a higher likelihood to experience symptoms of depression and anxiety based on their use of mental health care post-injury and use is more predominant among patient-care associates; however, our sample has a small number of patient-care associates. Practical Applications: Treating depression and anxiety as part of the workers’ compensation system has the potential of preventing further physical ailment and improving the return to work process regardless of nature of injury.     

环境司法专门化下的特殊环境诉讼规则

我国的环境司法处于发展初期,有关环境纠纷的司法救济程序散落在不同的部门法中。为了维护国家环境安全和公共环境利益,构建环境司法专门化势在必行,但是在特殊的环境保护法院进行专门化的环境审判过程中,出现环境诉讼保护对象的争议性、生态环境损害责任承担的特殊性等问题亟待解决,环境民事公益诉讼和生态环境损害赔偿诉讼等特殊环境诉讼规则应运而生,虽然目前还面临着一些困境,但是整体上构建环境司法体系的进程依然在不断推进。     

Framing of Geoengineering Affects Support for Climate Change Mitigation

The growing recognition that climate change mitigation alone will be inadequate has led scientists and policymakers to discuss climate geoengineering. An experiment with a US sample found, contrary to previous research, that reading about geoengineering did not reduce conservatives’ skepticism about the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, depending on how it is framed, geoengineering can reduce support for mitigation among both conservatives and non-conservatives. When geoengineering is framed as a major solution, people worry less about climate change, leading to reduced mitigation support. When framed as disastrous, people perceived geoengineering as riskier, also leading to a decrease in mitigation support. A more moderate framing of geoengineering as a partial solution is less susceptible to moral hazard effects. Overall, results suggest that geoengineering will not lessen political polarization over anthropogenic climate change, and could undercut support for mitigation efforts. Instead, framing geoengineering as a small piece to solving a big puzzle seems to be the best strategy to weaken this potential moral hazard.     

大型水利水电工程实施占用耕地补偿制度的思考

本文在分析长江三峡工程用地特点的基础上。对大型水利水电工程实施耕地补偿制度中的问题和困难进行调查研究，认为应从新的视角来认识大型水利水电工程的耕地占补平衡问题。进而探索耕地补偿制度实施的新途径和新方式。应在耕地总量动态平衡政策适当调整的基础上．将“以地补地”和“缴费补地”的方式相结合。既通过土地整理．在提商土地质量的前提下增加耕地的有效面积：又要落实耕地开垦费．扶持库区的土地整理。从而使库区的耕地占补制度顺利实施。     

Footprints for Sustainability: The Next Steps

The concept of an ecological footprint is based on the understanding that every individual human appropriates a share of the productive and assimilative capacity of the biosphere. An ecological footprint corresponds to this exclusive biologically productive area that a defined population uses for all its resource requirements and wastes, and is expressed in terms of bioproductive space, with world-average productivity. Humanity's footprint or its aggregate ecological demand can only temporarily exceed the productive and assimilative capacity of the biosphere without liquidating and weakening the natural capital on which humanity depends fundamentally. Therefore, accounting tools for quantifying humanity's use of nature are essential for overall assessments of human impact as well as for planning specific steps towards a sustainable future.This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the ecological footprint as an ecological accounting method, points out research needs for improvement of the analysis, and suggests potential new applications. The paper identifies ten new applications of the tool to make it applicable at various geographic scales and for a number of analytical and didactic purposes. Then nine methodological improvements are suggested that could refine the currently applied method, making assessments more sensitive to a larger number of ecological impacts. It concludes that many crucial questions pertinent to building a sustainable society can be addressed by current ecological footprint research. By making the method more complete, this tool could evolve from being largely of pedagogical use to become a strategic tool for policy analysis.     

页岩气开发对生态环境影响评价模型

针对页岩气特殊的开发方式及环评难度比常规气大的特点,运用"压力-状态-响应"框架模型,建立了页岩气开发对生态环境影响的评价指标体系。引入曲线投影的方式,并将投影寻踪方法和动态聚类方法相结合,提出了曲线投影寻踪动态聚类的定量评价方法;基于样本各指标的曲线投影和动态聚类方法寻找最佳投影方向,并建立相应的生态环境影响评价优化模型。结合全局最优经验指导和信息素交流,采用改进的蚁群算法对优化模型进行求解。该算法维持蚁群的多样性,且收敛性较好,同时也避免出现局部最优。对四川省威远页岩气区块进行了实例分析,结果表明:2010年、2011年和2014年的环评属于差类(4级),2012年和2013年的环评属于中类(3级),其中植被覆盖率、空气质量优良率、地表水质达标率、废水排放量、公众对环境的满意度、二氧化硫排放量和废水排放量达标率等指标对生态环境评价的影响较大。在页岩气开发初期,由于开发技术落后,再加上环保投资不高,环保意识不强,造成生态环境问题较为严重。随着学习借鉴美国的经验,及页岩气的开发技术进一步提高,加上国家对生态环境保护的重视,威远页岩气区块生态环境恶化得到有效的遏制。但开发时间越长,开采难度越大,将会产生更多更大的生态环境问题。分析结果与威远页岩气开发区域的实际情况相符,为页岩气气田生态环境影响评价奠定了科学基础。投影寻踪动态聚类方法具有无需设定参数、操作简单、客观等优点,是页岩气开发对生态环境影响评价的一种新方法。     

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

Regime shift often results in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the provision of ecosystem services and can therefore have significant impacts on human wellbeing. Understanding regime shifts has profound implications for ecosystem recovery and management. China’s coastal ecosystems have experienced substantial deterioration within the past decades, at a scale and speed the world has never seen before. Yet, information about this coastal ecosystem change from a dynamics perspective is quite limited. In this review, I synthesize existing information on coastal ecosystem regime shifts in China and discuss their interactions and cascading effects. The accumulation of regime shifts in China’s coastal ecosystems suggests that the desired system resilience has been profoundly eroded, increasing the potential of abrupt shifts to undesirable states at a larger scale, especially given multiple escalating pressures. Policy and management strategies need to incorporate resilience approaches in order to cope with future challenges and avoid major losses in China’s coastal ecosystem services.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0692-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Reviving wood-pastures for biodiversity and people: A case study from western Estonia

Wood-pastures are associated with high cultural and biodiversity values in Europe. However, due to their relatively low productivity, large areas of wood-pastures have been lost over the last century. In some areas, incentive schemes have been developed to revive wood-pastures. We investigated the effects of one such scheme in western Estonia. We compared the structure of grazed wood-pastures (old and restored) to those of abandoned wood-pastures and ungrazed forest stands to explore the effects of management, and conducted interviews with 24 farmers to investigate their motivations to carry out the management. We found a positive influence of active management on the semi-open structure of wood-pastures. Financial support was vital for management, but personal values related to tradition also played an important role. The interviewees differed widely in their range of motivations, suggesting that other strategies in addition to financial incentives would further improve the management of wood-pastures in the region.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0719-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Ecological citizenship and democracy: Communitarian versus agonistic perspectives

Grassroots environmental movements have recently started to question the focus on sustainable consumption as a main strategy to tackle climate change. They prefer to address individuals as citizens rather than as consumers, and focus on collective rather than individual change. Two prominent movements in this regard are Transition Towns and Climate Justice Action. While both movements criticise conventional approaches, they put forward entirely different strategies for what has to happen instead. Based on extensive qualitative research, this article analyses how these movements manifest themselves in Flanders (Belgium). The focus is on their different accounts of how and why collective practices have to be built, and the place they attribute to ‘the political’ in this. The analysis reveals the existence of two different forms of ecological citizenship: one communitarian, the other agonistic.     

Connotation and principles of ecological compensation in water source reserve areas based on the theory of externality

Understanding the connotation and principles of ecological compensation in water source reserve areas is the basis and guarantee for establishing and improving the ecological compensation mechanism of water source reserve areas. First, this paper reviews the three stages of ecological compensation research progress. Based on the review, using the theory of externality, the ecological environment system of water source reserve areas is then analyzed. This paper argues that the connotation of ecological compensation in water source reserve areas is a kind of institutional arrangement, which is designed to internalize externalities. Finally, based on the understanding of the connotation of ecological compensation in water source reserve areas, five principles for establishing and improving the ecological compensation mechanism are proposed, including the principle of fairness and justice, the principle of equivalence of equality and responsibility, the principle of flexibility and effectiveness, the principle of “earmark funds, and implementation by law,” and the principle of government compensation supplemented with market compensation.