Environmental policy

The use of sonar by military vessels during military exercises may produce acoustic pollution of the marine environment. States have an obligation under international law to reduce and control this form of pollution. Regulation of the use of sonar is rendered more complex by the specific regime applicable to warships, i.e. sovereign immunity. Immunity however does not prevent in all cases action by States other than the flag State, notwithstanding the limitations imposed by Art. 236 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. More importantly, immunity does not prevent the flag State from taking measures to reduce pollution caused by its own warships. Under some environmental treaties, flag States not only may, but have the obligation to adopt measures.

Environmental problems have become the main agenda of all countries in the world since 1970's. Various reports have been written, international meetings have been held and various contracts, agreements and action plans were accepted according to these decisions. Each of these arrangements has reflected to policies of countries. The most important issue of international meetings is that environmental values and natural resources should be used rationally and without extravagancy, should be protected and sustained considering the policy of using rights and benefits of current and future generations. In this sense, the concept of " sustainable development " which aims at enabling economic growth and is defined as an environmentalist view in included in the report called Our Common Future which is prepared by Bruntland in 1987 and presented to United Nations Commission of Environment and Development. Later on, this principle was accepted as the main principle of meeting in RIO Summit of 1992. Turkey which is one of the developing countries did not remain out of this process and determined environmental policies in accordance with decisions in global level. Turkey participated in both meetings mentioned above; carried out preparation studies according to these principles and adapted these principles to legal regulations and policies about environmental and economic development. In this study, first of all historical development of sustainable development concept in global sense will be explained and then it will be evaluated how this principle influences environmental policies in Turkey in analytical way together with examples of practice. 1 Giriş 1970'li yıllardan bu yana çevre sorunları dünyanın bütün ülkelerinin ana gündem konularından biri haline gelmeye başlamıştır. Bu konuda çok sayıda raporlar yazılmış, uluslararası toplantılar gerçekleştirilmiş, bu toplantılarda alınan kararlar doğrultusunda çeşitli sözleşmeler, anlaşmalar ve eylem planları kabul edilmiştir. Bu düzenlemelerin her biri ülkelerin uygulamış oldukları politikalara yansımıştır. Bütün bu düzenlemelerin nedeni çevre sorunlarının küresel niteliğe sahip olmalarından kaynaklanmaktadır. Doğal varlıklar üzerinde gelecek kuşakların da söz hakkı sahibi olduğu düşüncesi küresel çevre politikalarının en önemli yanlarından birisidir. Bu bağlamda ekonomik gelişmenin sağlanmasını amaçlayan ve çevreci görüş olarak tanımlanan " sürdürülebilir gelişme " 1987 yılında Bruntland tarafından hazırlanan ve Birleşmiş Milletler Çevre ve Kalkınma Komisyonuna sunulmuş olan Ortak Geleceğimiz isimli raporda yer almıştır. Daha sonra 1992 yılındaki RIO Zirvesi'nde bu ilke toplantının ana ilkesi olarak kabul edilmiştir. BM'nin bu tarihten sonraki bütün toplantılarında da bu ilke ana gündem konusu olmuştur. Gerek 2002 yılındaki Johannesburg Zirvesi gerekse 2012 yılındaki RIO+20 Zirvesi sürdürülebilir gelişmenin sağlanması konusundaki ilkelerin belirginleştiği toplantılar olmuştur. Küresel bir sorun olarak nitelendirilen çevre sorunlarına yönelik politikalar, sorunun doğasından kaynaklanan özelliklerinden dolayı küresel düzeydeki politikaların ülkelerin iç politikalarına dönüşmesini zorunlu kılmıştır. Bundan dolayı herhangi bir ülkenin çevre politikalarını incelerken küresel aktörlerin bu konudaki politika ve eylemlerini esas almak bir zorunluluktur. Sürdürülebilir gelişme kavramı da söz konusu politika ve eylemler sonucunda ortaya çıkmış olan ve yalnızca çevre politikaları alanında değil birçok alanda esas alınan bir ilke haline gelmiştir. Gelişmekte olan ülkelerden biri olan Türkiye de bu sürecin dışında kalmamış ve küresel düzeyde alınan kararlar doğrultusunda çevre politikalarını belirlemiştir. Çevre politikalarını belirleme konusunda uluslararası düzeyde alınan en önemli kararlardan biri de sürdürülebilir gelişme ilkesinin hayata geçirilmesi olmuştur. Yukarıda adı geçen her iki toplantıya da katılan Türkiye hem bu ilkelere yönelik hazırlık çalışmaları yapmış hem de çevre ve ekonomik gelişmeye ilişkin yasal düzenleme ve politikalarına bu ilkeleri uyarlamıştır. Bu çalışmada ilk olarak sürdürülebilir gelişme kavramının tarihsel gelişimi anlatılacak ardından da bu ilkenin Türkiye'deki çevre politikalarını iklim değişikliği örneğinde nasıl etkilediği analitik bir biçimde değerlendirilecektir. İklim değişikliğine ilişkin sorunlar ile sürdürülebilir gelişme ilkesinin aynı yazı kapsamında ele alınması her iki olgunun da neredeyse eş zamanlı olarak uluslar arası kamuoyunun gündemine gelmesinden dolayıdır. İklim değişikliği aynı zamanda ekonomik kalkınma ile çevre arasındaki çatışmalı sürecin bir tezahürüdür. Çalışmamızın temel varsayımı şudur: İklim değişikliği diğer adıyla küresel ısınma sorunu ancak kuşaklar arası adaleti önceleyen ve sürdürülebilir gelişme ilkesinin uygulanmasıyla mümkün olabilir. Ancak kavrama yüklenen toplumsal, ekonomik ve çevresel sürdürülebilirliğin gerçek anlamıyla tahrif edilmeksizin kullanılması koşuluyla.

We develop an endogenous growth model with capital and pollution externalities to analyse whether environmental policy should be decided upon by a parliament or an independent regulator. We find that an independent regulator gives raise to suboptimal equilibria. On the contrary, when the environmental decision is taken in parliament, it induces compromises in other policy dimensions due to coalition formation. This avoids that a single group gets majority and confiscates capital or labour income from the other groups.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a justice crisis. It also brings to light multiple ongoing, underlying social crises. The COVID-19 crisis is actively revealing crises of energy sovereignty in at least four ways. First, there are many whose access to basic health services is compromised because of the lack of energy services necessary to provide these services. Second, some people are more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of exposure to environmental pollution associated with energy production. Third, energy services are vital to human wellbeing, yet access to energy services is largely organized as a consumer good. The loss of stable income precipitated by COVID-19 may therefore mean that many lose reliable access to essential energy services. Fourth, the COVID-19 crisis has created a window of opportunity for corporate interests to engage in aggressive pursuit of energy agendas that perpetuate carbon intensive and corporate controlled energy s...

Capital needs during the next twenty years for public wastewater treatment, piping, combined sewer overflow correction, and storm-water management are estimated to be approximately $300 billion for the USA. Financing these needs is a significant challenge, as Federal funding for the Clean Water Act has been reduced by 70% during the last twenty years. There is an urgent need for new approaches to assist states and other decision makers to prioritize wastewater maintenance and improvements. We present a methodology for performing an integrated quantitative watershed-scale goals assessment for sustaining wastewater infrastructure. We applied this methodology to ten watersheds of the Hudson-Mohawk basin in New York State, USA that together are home to more than 2.7 million people, cover 3.5 million hectares, and contain more than 36,000 km of streams. We assembled data on 183 POTWs treating approximately 1.5 million m(3) of wastewater per day. For each watershed, we analyzed eight metrics: Growth Capacity, Capacity Density, Soil Suitability, Violations, Tributary Length Impacted, Tributary Capital Cost, Volume Capital Cost, and Population Capital Cost. These metrics were integrated into three goals for watershed-scale management: Tributary Protection, Urban Development, and Urban-Rural Integration. Our results demonstrate that the methodology can be implemented using widely available data, although some verification of data is required. Furthermore, we demonstrate substantial differences in character, need, and the appropriateness of different management strategies among the ten watersheds. These results suggest that it is feasible to perform watershed-scale goals assessment to augment existing approaches to wastewater infrastructure analysis and planning.

A solução dos problemas na Amazônia não são independentes, mas conectada com outras partes do País e do mundo. A redução dos desmatamentos e queimadas na Amazônia depende do desenvolvimento de atividades agrícolas adequadas nas áreas já desmatadas e que tenham mercado, em vez do uso “sustentável” da floresta e de direitos difusos. Nesse sentido, uma política agrícola teria efeitos mais positivos do que uma política ambiental, que não pode ser efetuada de maneira isolada das demais regiões do País, sob risco de transferir contingentes populacionais de outras localidades. Há necessidade de elevar a produtividade das atividades agrícolas na Amazônia, reduzirem a pressão sobre os recursos naturais com risco de esgotamento, incentivar plantios racionais de recursos extrativos potenciais, substituir as importações de produtos tropicais (seringueira, dendê, cacau, etc.), melhorarem as relações de troca dos produtos amazônicos versus produtos importados da Zona Franca de Manaus, efetuar a r...

Obesity has been characterized as a disease. Strategies to change the incidence and prevalence of this disease include a focus on changing physical and social environments, over and above individual-level strategies, using a multilevel or systems approach. We focus our attention on evidence published between 2008 and 2013 on the effectiveness of interventions in nutrition environments, i.e., environmental interventions designed to influence the intake of healthful foods and amount of energy consumed. An overarching socioecological framework that has guided much of this research was used to characterize different types of environmental strategies. Intervention examples in each area of the framework are provided with a discussion of key findings and related conceptual and methodological issues. The emphasis in this review is on adults, but clearly this literature is only one part of the picture. Much research has been focused on child-specific interventions, including environmental in...

This paper presents results of repeated economic lab experiments. They were designed to test a model of combinatorial auctions on the case of providing financial support (capital investment subsidies) to polluters. Combinatorial auctions are those auctions in which bidders can place bids on combinations of items. The advantage of combinatorial auctions is that the bidder can more fully express his preferences. This is particular important when items are complements. In the experiment presented in the paper, the polluters have two options: (i) to invest individually or (ii) create coalitions, i.e. to prepare and realize common capital investment projects. The commonmodel of combinatorial auctions is described first in the paper. The design of the laboratory experiment is presented in the next section and the results are shown in the last section.

In 2007, China overtook the US to become the largest emitter of CO2 into the Earth's atmosphere. China's vital role in global efforts to combat climate change creates a pressing challenge to explore the unique characteristics of Chinese environmental values and policy processes, and to identify the frames that are employed to understand climate change and related environmental issues domestically. This paper investigates a) how the political context, as well as differing political agendas and policy goals within which actors operate, affects and sometimes constrains the frames they generally employ; and b) the specific frames used to understand and discuss climate change by interview subjects and in written documents. It finds that different frames are employed by those supporting the current regime and its attendant official discourses on climate change and the environment (mainly government officials) and those challenging or in opposition to such dominant framings (particularly NGOs).

Efficient natural resources management, including continental water at watershed level, requires understanding the arrangement of landscape attributes in a region. The geographical analysis of landscape attributes is a useful approach to delineate relatively homogeneous watersheds or regions. This research was carried out in order to evaluate the effect of land cover through time on regionalisation modelling in the poorly-gauged Cuitzeo Lake Watershed, and to develop models to create two hydrogeographical regionalisations for the years 1975 and 2000. The inputs required by the regionalisation methodology were integrated in a GIS and validated before carrying out statistical regionalisation procedures (cluster analysis and PCA). GIS operations were done in Arc View 3.2 and statistical analyses in PC-ORD. Median Euclidean distances with mean distance linkage methods were used. A 75% of similarity was chosen as the threshold to generate regions. Importance rankings of regions were obtained using multicriteria evaluation methods. Based on the analysis, 38 of the 52 subwatersheds belonging to the Cuitzeo Lake Watershed were clustered; eight groups were defined in 1975 and nine in 2000. According to PCA, the strongest positive variables are associated to morphometric, geologic, land cover and soil attributes. Fourteen subwatersheds were never clustered. Four subwatersheds changed of cluster between 1975 and 2000. This change is explained because of rainfed agricultural parcel abandonment, and subsequent shrubland growth. This means that the hydrogeographical regionalisation is sensitive to land cover change processes. The methodological approach applied in this research is a low-cost and fast alternative for evaluating the impact of land cover and land use change on hydrogeographical regionalisation; in consequence, data and information generated during the analysis were made available to local authorities so that they can improve both water resources planning and their informational baseline for decision making and for development of environmental policies in the Cuitzeo Lake Watershed.

A dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy specialized in producing tourism services is presented. The tourism package is a bundle of attributes provided by firms, the government and the natural environment. Investment in accommodation increases the number of visitors but also congests public goods and reduces environmental quality. The model is used to determine the conditions for the existence of a long-term double dividend. These conditions depend on both the initial level of environmental quality and the responsiveness of the tourism price to marginal changes in environmental and accommodation quality and congestion of public goods.

Paper setting out questions for directors and boards to ask in relation to environmental governance, strengthening markets, monitoring developments, securing an integrated response, cooperation and collaboration, environment cities, environment management and behaviour, creative environments and innovation, and aesthetic, supportive and inclusive environments prepared for 17th World Congress on Environment Management.