Environmental Analysts Research Articles

Applying Fuzzy Logic to Assess Human Perception in Relation to Conservation Plan Efficiency Measures Within a Biosphere Reserve

The objective of this study is to present an efficiency-perception impact assessment based upon the integration of fuzzy logic (FL) of the "Productive Reconversion" conservation program (PRP) instituted by the Mexican government, in the upper Gulf of California and the Colorado Delta Biosphere Reserve. This approach enables environmental analysts to deal with the intrinsic imprecision and ambiguity associated with people's judgments and conclusions. The application of FL to the assessment of program efficiency is illustrated in this work, demonstrating how subjective perceptions can be converted into quantitative values easy to evaluate during the decision-making process.

Application of Immunological Techniques (from Vaccination to Final Measurements) in Determination of Pharmaceutical Residues in Environmental Samples

Numerous biologically active compounds are intuitively produced by humans and are present in the environment. Their fate and the occurrence of their metabolites still remain a great challenge for environmental analysts and risk assessors. There are a lot of different analytical approaches leading to the determination of residues of pharmaceuticals used both by humans and for veterinary purposes. However, the majority of known analytical approaches are based on the application of indirect methods where proper sample preparation (isolation/preconcentration of analytes prior to final determination of analytes) plays a vital role. The attention of analysts is oriented towards the direct methods when a special pretreatment of handled samples and during analysis is not needed. These procedures are fulfilling the requirement of sustainable development and can be classified as “green” analytical procedures. Immunoanalytics can be treated as a typical example of this approach. This paper presents a review of one of the most versatile and direct method of analysis, immunoassaying, focused on the application and determination of pharmaceuticals and their residues' concentration/presence in different environmental compartments.

The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy

Schnaiberg's concept of the treadmill of production is arguably the most visible and enduring theory to emerge in three decades of environmental sociology. Elaborated and tested, it has been found to be an accurate predictor of political-economic changes in the global economy. In the global South, it has figures prominently in the work of structural environmental analysts and has been used by many political-economic movements. Building new extensions and applications of the treadmill theory, this new book shows how and why northern analysts and governments have failed to protect our environment and secure our future. Using an empirically based political-economic perspective, the authors outline the causes of environmental degradation, the limits of environmental protection policies, and the failures of institutional decision-makers to protect human well-being.

Spatial indeterminacy and the construction of environmental knowledge

As concern about the sustainability of industrialised economies has increased, analysts have developed various indicator‐based methodologies to explore environmental policy implications of human consumption and production activities. Critical and social constructivist theorists have challenged the presumption of objectivity underlying such research, however, by highlighting the role that social process and tacit assumptions play in accounts of human–environment interactions. While the ‘science wars’ hostility between realists and constructivists has abated and many in both camps agree that environmental analysts should be more open and reflexive about the empirical limitations of their work and its potential to encode social, political and cultural bias, practical guidance and clear examples for doing so remain rare. This paper is situated within this gap: it is at once an attempt by an environmental analyst to show what a ‘self‐reflexive’ approach to environmental assessment might look like and a rumination on the opportunities and challenges that such an undertaking entails. At the same time, the paper makes traditional scientific claims to creating new knowledge and advancing methodological sophistication by identifying a general problem of spatial indeterminacy that limits the empirical basis of all manner of place‐based environmental assessment. The paper uses a climate change‐related case study regarding the attribution of carbon emissions from electricity use to various US states to show the strong, though generally unrecognised, representational and political implications that can be introduced through the common methodological responses to spatial indeterminacy. I argue that in such cases both positivist and constructivist approaches to understanding human–environmental relations are needed to thoughtfully navigate options for constructing indicators and analysing policy options.

A análise interdisciplinar de processos de licenciamento ambiental no estado de Minas Gerais: conflitos entre velhos e novos paradigmas

A interdisciplinaridade tem sido tema constante nas discussões sobre o conhecimento humano, sobre as suas possibilidades frente ao que Morin (2002) denomina de "desafio do século XXI", ou seja, frente à necessidade de compreensão e enfrentamento dos problemas multidimensionais atuais, tais como os derivados da interação de processos naturais, sociais, econômicos e tecnológicos. Baseado nessa perspectiva, a Secretaria de Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Sustentável do Estado de Minas Gerais, desde 2003, tem promovido o emprego do enfoque interdisciplinar na análise dos processos de licenciamento ambiental, por meio da realização de uma série de ações e procedimentos que buscam a convergência e a integração dos saberes disciplinares dos analistas ambientais. Nesse sentido esse artigo procura expor o processo de inserção da perspectiva interdisciplinar na análise dos processos de licenciamento ambiental do Estado de Minas Gerais. Dessa forma, tomando como base exemplificativa os Pareceres elaborados para Processos de Licença Prévia de empreendimentos de grande porte do setor sucroalcooleiro, julgados no Conselho de Política Ambiental do Triângulo Mineiro e Alto Paranaíba, MG, procura elucidar a contribuição do modelo interdisciplinar para a formulação de novas estratégias e racionalidades para a avaliação de impactos ambientais, bem como as dificuldades para a sua adoção.

Aviation emission inventory development and analysis

An up to date and accurate aviation emission inventory is a prerequisite for any detailed analysis of aviation emission impact on greenhouse gases and local air quality around airports. In this paper we present an aviation emission inventory using real time air traffic trajectory data. The reported inventory is in the form of a 4D database which provides resolution of 1° × 1° × 1000 ft for temporal and spatial emission analysis. The inventory is for an ongoing period of six months starting from October 2008 for Australian Airspace. In this study we show 6 months of data, with 492,936 flights (inbound, outbound and over flying). These flights used about 2515.83 kt of fuel and emitted 114.59 kt of HC, 200.95 kt of CO, 45.92 kt of NO x , 7929.89 kt of CO 2, and 2.11 kt of SO x . From the spatial analysis of emissions data, we found that the CO 2 concentration in some parts of Australia is much higher than other parts, especially in some major cities. The emission results also show that NO x emission of aviation may have a significant impact on the ozone layer in the upper troposphere, but not in the stratosphere. It is expected that with the availability of this real time aviation emission database, environmental analysts and aviation experts will have an indispensable source of information for making timely decisions regarding expansion of runways, building new airports, applying route charges based on environmentally congested airways, and restructuring air traffic flow to achieve sustainable air traffic growth.

The Ontological Problem with Sovereignty: Indigenous Nations, Territoriality, and the Making of Natural Resources in Alaska

Congressional resolution of Alaska Native land claims in the 1970s, driven by a discursive collusion of carbon crisis and neocolonial urgency to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, has created a substantively different legal and economic relationship between Alaskan indigenous nations and the state than that which exists for Lower 48 tribes. It has also resulted in increasingly intense inter-tribal and intra-organizational conflict over environmental governance, development, and energy, most recently culminating in a January 2009 heating oil crisis in rural villages throughout the state. In this paper, cultural conceptions of fossil energy held by young indigenous anti-development activists from Gwich’in and Koyukon tribal villages are contrasted with those held by energy analysts in Doyon, Ltd, interior Alaska’s largest regional Native corporation. The villages rejected the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and their citizen activists now provide counter-narratives of sovereignty and ‘natural resources’ that not only diverge from those held by Doyon members, but also illuminate indigenous diversity in conceptions of energy as category. Narratives of last winter’s rural crisis demonstrate how fossil energy is conceived of in culturally distinctive ways by Alaska Native environmental activists, policy makers, and energy analysts. Further, their evaluations of energy covary with diverse legal relationships between village governments, the corporations, and the state. By investigating fossil energy as a total social fact, critical ethnography can illuminate the multiple cultural understandings of relational sovereignty and energy that inform indigenous conflict in Alaska.

How much Oil is Really There? Making Correct Statistics Bring Reality to Global Planning

Abstract The oil and gas industry annually reports global proven reserves, which investment, energy and environmental analysts incorporate into future strategies. But a major statistical error has been made, reports Richard Pike. True “proven reserves” may be twice the commonly accepted figure. It is essential that this is addressed to avert climate catastrophe by the middle of the century and to compel us to a sustainable low carbon economy.

Interactive fuzzy optimization for an economic and environmental balance in a river system

An interactive fuzzy approach is applied to develop a water quality management plan in a river basin for solving multi-objective optimization problems involving vague and imprecise information related to data, model formulation, and the decision maker's preferences. This approach, originally proposed by Sakawa in 1983, is modified and presented as a sustainable water quality management strategy in which the decision makers and the environmental analysts put forward their views on three major economic and environmental factors: river water quality, assimilative capacity, and treatment cost of wastewater. This methodology is illustrated in a case study of multi-objective water quality management in the Tou-Chen River Basin in northern Taiwan. The incorporation of these three economic and environmental factors demonstrates the capability of the fuzzy interactive multi-objective optimization approach and also works suitably in water quality management in a river basin by the trade-off procedures.

Methodological Reflections on the Use of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science in Human Ecological Research

Environmental analysts increasingly utilize remote sensing (RS) and geographic information science (GIS) techniques to study the relationship between human societies and their biophysical environment. This paper considers the influence these techniques have had on environmental research. Using the case of the Sahel, the paper first relates contemporary applications of RS/GIS to the history of the environmental scientific practice in the region. While facilitating an expansion of spatiotemporal scales, applications of these new techniques continue the methodological failings of the past by relying on visual measures of environmental change and problematic indicators of human land-use pressures. The human ecology fields (human, cultural, and political ecologies), by emphasizing the causal connections between local management and environmental change, can address the problems inherent with the spatial analytical turn in environmental science. Using the author's experience with the use of GIS in a political ecology study of grazing management in western Niger, ways of more closely integrating RS/GIS techniques into human ecological research are discussed.

Integrating fuzzy logic, optimization, and GIS for ecological impact assessments.

Appraisal of ecological impacts has been problematic because of the behavior of ecological system and the responses of these systems to human intervention are far from fully understood. While it has been relatively easy to itemize the potential ecological impacts, it has been difficult to arrive at accurate predictions of how these impacts affect populations, communities, or ecosystems. Furthermore, the spatial heterogeneity of ecological systems has been overlooked because its examination is practically impossible through matrix techniques, the most commonly used impact assessment approach. Besides, the public has become increasingly aware of the importance of the EIA in decision-making and thus the interpretation of impact significance is complicated further by the different value judgments of stakeholders. Moreover, impact assessments are carried out with a minimum of data, high uncertainty, and poor conceptual understanding. Hence, the evaluation of ecological impacts entails the integration of subjective and often conflicting judgments from a variety of experts and stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to present an environmental impact assessment approach based on the integration fuzzy logic, geographical information systems and optimization techniques. This approach enables environmental analysts to deal with the intrinsic imprecision and ambiguity associated with the judgments of experts and stakeholders, the description of ecological systems, and the prediction of ecological impacts. The application of this approach is illustrated through an example, which shows how consensus about impact mitigation can be attained within a conflict resolution framework.

Motor-vehicle fuel economy: The forgotten hydrocarbon control strategy?

For the past twenty years, energy and environmental analysts in the U.S. have been searching for ways to improve urban air quality and make the country less vulnerable to supply and price volatility in the world oil market. To improve urban air quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a number of state air-quality agencies favor controls on emissions of non-methane hydrocarbons, which are one of the main contributors to ozone formation, and which are emitted along the entire fuel production-and-use chain, from drilling for oil through oil refining and gasoline marketing, to vehicle tailpipe emissions. To reduce oil consumption, some analysts and policy makers have suggested that the fuel economy of motor vehicles be increased substantially. These policies—to control emissions in order to improve air quality, and to increase fuel economy in order to reduce oil consumption—have always been considered separately in the U.S. In this paper we connect emission reduction policy with fuel-economy-improvement policy. We also examine a related issue: Does the side benefit of lower emissions due to improved fuel economy mean that fuel economy standards should be set even higher? Typically, when analysts estimate how high fuel economy standards should be, they compare the extra costs of efficiency-improving technology (including perhaps such things as reduced safety and performance) with the benefits of reduced fuel consumption. Such cost-benefit analyses have indicated an “optimal” level of fuel economy (where benefits balance costs) of between 30 and 40 mpg, depending on assumptions and methods. However, the analyses done to date have not counted the potential reduction in emissions as a benefit of improved fuel economy. We do so here, by assuming that the value of a ton of emissions eliminated by higher fuel economy is equal to the cost of controlling (eliminating) that ton by traditional control means. We find that adding the value of emission reductions to the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis justifies raising fuel economy standards by an additional one mile per gallon only.

Overstocking the Range: A Critical Analysis of the Environmental Science of Sahelian Pastoralism

AbstractThere has been little experimental work in West Africa that distinguishes grazing from climate effects on rangeland vegetation. In the absence of such knowledge, the recurrence of boom-bust cycles in livestock populations, along with the seemingly degraded state of semiarid range, have been used to support notions of the inevitability of overgrazing. Regional stocking rates are used as indicators of degradation potential. I argue that the persistent reliance by environmental analysts on carrying-capacity models oversimplifies range ecology and excludes social processes from causal analyses. Both regional stocking rates and the seasonality of livestock distributions should be treated as proximate factors, each affected by biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. The common assumption that the size of local livestock populations is primarily affected by bioclimatic factors results from a misunderstanding of the pastoral economy. A case study examines the underlying causes of the cattle population b...

Food and environmental analysis : Protection of Public Health: A Challenge for Food and Environmental Analysts, AOAC Europe Section 2nd International Symposium held in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 12–13 November 1991.

Food and environmental analysis : Protection of Public Health: A Challenge for Food and Environmental Analysts, AOAC Europe Section 2nd International Symposium held in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 12–13 November 1991.

Industrial & Environmental Analysts, Inc.

Industrial & Environmental Analysts, Inc.

Public reaction to the risks of energy technology

Implicit in every government decision on energy technology is a trade-off of a certain amount of risk in return for societal benefits. As a result of growing public concern over such risks, environmental analysts are increasingly being requested not only to describe potential adverse consequences but also to quantify their probability. However, this task is frustrated not only by inadequate experience with, and incomplete knowledge of, the causality of environmental impacts, but also by a disparity between individual and societal views of risk. While the societal view is based on objective risk functions andnet societal benefit, individuals tend to rely on subjective judgment, and consider the distribution as well as the amount of benefit. Thus, environmental “risk assessments,” produced by analysts on behalf of society as a whole, are likely to be quite speculative, and are unlikely to be reliable indicators of the acceptability of risk to the public.

A KEY FOR CLASSIFYING SOILS TO THE SUBGROUP LEVEL OF THE CANADIAN SYSTEM OF SOIL CLASSIFICATION

A dichotomus key is presented to identify the soils of Canada to the subgroup level of the Canadian System of Soil Classification. The key is designed to assist environmental analysts who infrequently classify soils in Canada.

Pulling the pieces together: Amalgamation in environmental impact assessment

It may seem counter intui t ive , but the more effectively envi ronmenta l impacts are specified, the more difficult the problem of choos ing a m o n g project or policy opt ions becomes. Impact specification, if done well, should cause decision makers to consider tradeoffs they had not previously considered. T h e more impacts enumerated in an environmenta l assessment, the richer the array of tradeoffs. The more obvious the tradeoffs, the more complex tile task of evaluation. T o facilitate the evaluat ion task of the decision maker, environmental analysts have exper imented with a wide variety of envi ronmental impact s tatement (EIS) presentat ion techniques. T h e tradit ional presentat ion technique O f l is t ing all potential impacts is of little use to either decision makers or publ ic interest groups. Many analysts, therefore, have a t tempted to meet the in format ion needs of the EIS reader by summar iz ing and by directly compa r ing policy or project opt ions based on the significance of the impacts. In tile absence of scientific and polit ical consensus about what constitutes a desirable envi ronment , analysts have found this task of p u l l i n g the p i ece s t o g e t h e r rather difficult. Scientifically, many qual i-

Data constraints on the environmental evaluation of new transportation energy technology

Argonne National Laboratory has been charged by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) with the execution of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 guidance for all DOE transportation technology development and commercialization activites. This work includes environmental research planning, assessment, and impact statement preparation to foster timely commercialization of environmentally acceptable technologies. In order to be effective, it is imperative to start this NEPA process with a foundation of good data. This presentation reviews the NEPA process as implemented by DOE, mentions the technologies being evaluated, and then focuses on the data problems of the environmental analysts of transportation technologies. Specific examples illustrates the scarcity of environmental information for a new technology to be used in a transportation setting and the exercises the environmental analysts must perform to draw meaningful inferences and give direction to the technologists.

Clarifying the Role of Environmental Analysts

The responsibilities of the private consulting environmental analyst are complex and may involve the public, the client, the consulting firm, regulatory agencies, and personal professional interests. These relationships may be conflicting but need not be mutually exclusive. The role of environmental analysts as part of a multidisciplinary engineering design team is critical to achieving projects that are cost-effective, environmentally sound, and implementable. Environmental analysts must work through professional societies to promote their professional status and clearly define professional and moral responsibilities.