On sustainability and social welfare

This paper proposes to define sustainability in terms of leaving it possible for future generations to sustain certain defined targets. It is shown that variants of genuine savings and the ecological footprint can then serve as indicators of sustainability. The link between sustainability and intergenerational welfare is examined, and it is shown how to incorporate indicators of sustainability into a social welfare measure, including risk in the analysis.     

运用绩效管理推动地方政府抓紧抓实生态环境建设

绩效管理作为推动地方政府建设生态环境的有效手段和方式,能够把生态环境建设纳入地方政府的绩效管理,从而推动地方政府实施生态环境建设。在此过程中应侧重于如下几个问题：提高环境保护在政府绩效评价体系中的地位与比重;探索建立生态文明建设动态评价系统,对环境质量和生态发展进行区域性监控与跟踪;将国家环境功能区划纳入到地方经济社会发展规划中,成为地方政府绩效考核的基本依据和内容;坚持绩效管理理念,推进环境风险全过程管理;强化目标责任制,构建科学发展的长效机制;从以内部考核为主向内外考核兼顾转变。     

History of Bioengineering Techniques for Erosion Control in Rivers in Western Europe

Living plants have been used for a very long time throughout the world in structures against soil erosion, as traces have been found dating back to the first century BC. Widely practiced in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bioengineering was somewhat abandoned in the middle of the twentieth century, before seeing a resurgence in recent times. Based on an extensive bibliography, this article examines the different forms of bioengineering techniques used in the past to manage rivers and riverbanks, mainly in Europe. We compare techniques using living material according to their strength of protection against erosion. Many techniques are described, both singly and in combination, ranging from tree planting or sowing seeds on riverbanks to dams made of fascine or wattle fences. The recent appearance of new materials has led to the development of new techniques, associated with an evolution in the perception of riverbanks. This study was part of a research project on river bioengineering funded by the French Ministère de l’Ecologie, de l’Energie, du Développement Durable et de l’Aménagement du Territoire, Direction Générale de la Prévention des Risques.     

Improved method of ecological footprint – Funing County ecological economic system assessments

This paper improves the ecological footprint method by regulating cropland area with cropping index. The results calculated by the improved method are the area of cropland that human needed, but not of cropping. This study analyzes the ecological supply/demand of Funing County in China with improved ecological footprint method. It suggested that ecological remainder per thousand U.S. dollar GDP is regarded as the indicator of regional sustainable development ability and pointed out that the stockbreeding is the keystone factor that affects the regional ecological footprint.     

Physical limits to resource access and utilisation and their economic implications in Mediterranean economies

This paper applies Ecological Footprint accounting to Mediterranean countries to track ecological asset balances and investigate the long-term feasibility of fulfilling natural resource and service needs. Our findings are that the Mediterranean region currently uses approximately 2.5 times more natural resources and ecological services than their ecosystems can provide. We argue that when consumption exceeds local availability, countries either resort to depletion of ecological assets or turn to international trade in order to satisfy their demands. Access to outside resources is however limited by (a) the availability of resources on international markets and (b) their affordability. Countries highly dependent on natural resource imports therefore expose their economies to the macroeconomic consequences of price volatility. We find that trade-related effects of natural resource price volatility are significant for Mediterranean economies as a 10% increase in the price of natural resources corresponds with a change in the trade balance between +7% and −2.4% of the GDP. We conclude that, in a world characterised by the existence of physical limits to the availability of global ecological assets, a systemic risk may exist for Mediterranean economies due to the concurrence of (1) ecological asset scarcity, (2) increasing prices and (3) challenging financial situations.     

The impact of coastal flooding on conservation areas: A study of the Clyde Estuary, Scotland

This study examines the impact of flooding on land of high conservation value located along part of the southern shoreline of the River Clyde Estuary in western Scotland. This paper hypothesizes that, over the next 50 years, the frequency and extent of coastal flooding will increase due to the gradual effect of global warming and the consequent rise in sea-level and increase in storminess. It is argued that because of the great cost of constructing new flood defence systems it will not be possible to protect all land areas to an equal extent from flooding. A means of ranking different land use will be necessary so that society can make a rational judgement concerning which sections of coastline will be worth protecting. This study provides a methodology that combines an objective ranking of conservation areas using non-economic indicators with a GIS model of flood potential, and permits accurate forecasts of flood losses to conservation areas of different ecological value. The conservation case study used in this paper proposes the use of an ecological weighting value based on five ecological variables each of 10 categories. Tables and maps identify the sites that have been highlighted as consisting of the most ‘valuable’ conservation sites. The methodology makes extensive use of geographical information systems (GIS) to model the predicted areas of flooding and to calculate conservation weighting values of the land areas.     

The ecological footprint: an exhibit at an intergenerational trial?

This paper aims at assessing the extent to which the ecological footprint indicator (EF) can be regarded as an exhibit allowing an intergenerational trial about the use of natural resources. For that purpose, we examine various criticisms questioning the relevancy of EF measures for the study of environmental justice between generations. We explore the difficulties raised by the physical—and highly aggregated—nature of EF measures, as well as problems related to the number, the possible non-existence, and the tastes of future generations. The extent to which postulates on nature’s regeneration and technological progress affect the significance of EF studies is also discussed. It is concluded that those criticisms, by identifying various weaknesses of EF measures for the study of intergenerational justice, point to several crucial refinements of existing EF-based analyses.

Ecological half-life of Cs in mosses and lichens in the Ordu province,Turkey by Cevik and Celik

Twenty-one years after the Chernobyl accident, lichen and moss samples were collected from the Ordu province, which was already chosen for a related study some years ago. It was observed that ¹³⁷Cs activity concentration ranged from 31 to 469 Bq kg⁻¹ in the moss and from 132 to 1508 Bq kg⁻¹ in the lichen samples. The decrease of the activity concentrations in the present measurements (2007) relative to those in 1997 (over a period of 10 y) indicated ecological half-lives between 1.8 and 10.4 y for the moss and between 2.1 and 13.7 y for the lichen samples. It was observed that ¹³⁷Cs was still eminent in the area studied. Moreover, ⁴⁰K activity concentrations and K element concentrations were measured and their relationships were discussed.     

The effects of social desirability on self-reported environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour

There are several claims in the literature that social desirability concerns affect people’s response to self-reported measures of environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour. However, only a few empirical studies have indirectly evaluated the impact of social desirability on environmental issues measures, and those who did have found only a low impact. This article describes two studies that explicitly address whether socially desirable responding has direct and moderating effects on self-reported environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour. Results from correlational and moderated multiple regression analyses from both studies showed that social desirability had only a weak direct effect on environmental attitudes (but not ecological behaviour), and had no moderating effect on the environmental attitudes–ecological behaviour relationship. Implications of these findings for research on environmental issues are discussed.

An ecological perspective on theory, methods, and analysis in environmental psychology: Advances and challenges

Over the course of environmental psychology's brief history, there has been an interest in ecologically oriented approaches to theory and research. Based on this work, this paper identifies a set of six principles of ecological analysis that present theoretical, methodological, and analytic challenges to future research in environmental psychology. These challenges include the theoretical treatment of the multiple contexts within which human experience and behavior occurs, the need for sampling both persons and environments, the modeling of moderating and mediating processes, the issue of self-selection into and out of different settings, the necessity of considering temporal factors in environmental research, reliance on single methods (e.g., verbal report) in data generation, cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs, and the need for greater use of statistical techniques developed for contextual (multi-level) research. These issues are discussed and illustrated using recent developments in environmentally oriented research. The paper concludes with a set of 11 recommendations for the future.