National Environmental Policy Research Articles

Environmental impact assessments not the main barrier to timely forest management in the United States

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes are commonly used by government agencies to evaluate the merits and environmental risks of natural resource management decisions. Citing EIA as red tape, decision makers from across the political spectrum are increasingly circumventing EIA to expedite implementation of necessary actions for climate resilience and clean energy. Few studies have quantified the extent that EIA is the main barrier to efficient implementation. We combine administrative data from the US Forest Service with survival analysis to show that, for most actions, the Forest Service takes as long or longer to award first contracts and roll out initial activities than to comply with the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and that NEPA compliance accounts for approximately one-fifth of planned implementation time.

Legal support for an environmentally balanced system of natural resource management in terms of European integration of Ukraine

Legal support for an environmentally balanced system of natural resource management in terms of European integration of Ukraine

Prioritizing science efforts to inform decision making on public lands

Public land management agencies in the US are committed to using science‐informed decision making, but there has been little research on the types and topics of science that managers need most to inform their decisions. We used the National Environmental Policy Act to identify four types of science information needed for making decisions relevant to public lands: (1) data on resources of concern, (2) scientific studies relevant to potential effects of proposed actions, (3) methods for quantifying potential effects of proposed actions, and (4) effective mitigation measures. We then used this framework to analyze 70 Environmental Assessments completed by the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado. Commonly proposed actions were oil and gas development, livestock grazing, land transactions, and recreation. Commonly analyzed resources included terrestrial wildlife, protected birds, vegetation, and soils. Focusing research efforts on the intersection of these resources and actions, and on developing and evaluating the effectiveness of mitigation measures to protect these resources, could strengthen the science foundation for public lands decision making.

CORPUS CHRISTI SHIP CHANNEL DEEPENING PROJECT: OVERVIEW and MODELING APPROACH TO ASSESS ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

The Corpus Christi Ship Channel in Texas connects the Port of Corpus Christi to the Gulf of Mexico. The Port is seeking to deepen the Corpus Christi Ship Channel to 22.9m (75ft) nominal depth in order to allow fully loaded very large crude carriers (VLCC’s) to access proposed terminals within the port complex. As a part of the environmental coordination requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) the Port Authority prepared a number of studies to assess the potential environmental impacts of the proposed channel deepening. These included assessing changes in hydrodynamics, salinity, storm surge, and sedimentation patterns including sediment movement generated by vessel generated currents. The channel design was also verified through vessel maneuvering studies which were conducted using modeled currents, dynamic underkeel clearance assessment, and propeller scour potential determination. The fate of proposed beneficial use of dredged materials to construct a submerged beach berm and perform beach nourishment was also assessed.

The Implementation of National Environmental Management Policy at a Rural University in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

The objective of the study was to investigate the challenges associated with carrying out the National Environmental Management Policy at a distant university in the Eastern Cape Province. The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of the university’s environmental management practices. The qualitative part of the investigation was a case study using convenience sampling. Ten managers who implement policies in their departments were chosen as participants in the case study. Phone interviews were also conducted in 2021 due to the COVID outbreak. Data analysis used content analysis. The results indicated that the university’s implementation of the national environmental management policy lacked clarity. The study suggests that the university should create and implement an environment management policy for employees to use as a reference. Furthermore, managers should focus on using effective environmental tools and effective communication strategies. The institution should provide management with tools to explain clear directives under the National Environmental Management Act of 1998. Keywords: Eastern Cape Province, National Environmental Management Policy, Environmental Education, Implementation.

Does Carbon Emissions Trading Policy Improve Inclusive Green Resilience in Cities? Evidence from China

With the impact of external globalization uncertainties and the pressure of internal national environmental policies and markets, maintaining inclusive green resilience while coordinating economic, environmental, and social systems is critical for achieving green and sustainable urban development. We define inclusive green resilience for cities in this research and build a system of inclusive green resilience indicators. The DID model and entropy approach were used to examine the impact of carbon trading policies on inclusive green resilience in 184 representative Chinese cities from 2008 to 2018, and PSM-DID was utilized for further validation. According to the findings of the study, carbon emissions pricing policies can considerably increase inclusive green resilience in cities. Mechanism verification demonstrates that carbon trading programs improve inclusive green resilience in cities through industrial restructuring, technical innovation capability, and employment benefits. According to the city heterogeneity study, the implementation of the carbon emissions trading system has a scale effect and significant urban functional differences, and its impact on inclusive green resilience of cities is greater in large and medium-sized cities and non- resource-based cities. This research offers a new way of thinking about inclusive green resilience as well as empirical data for future sustainable policy development.

Forced Migration and the Politics of Belonging: Integration Policy, National Debates and Migrant Strategies

This research note examines the politics of refugee belonging in Germany, Sweden, Austria, United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Specifically, it explores how migrant belonging is impacted by integration policies and national political debates on immigration in these countries. Prior research suggests that refugees have little knowledge of policy, but that national political or media debates strongly impact a feeling of inclusion. Our research shows that both policy and national/media debates affect belonging. Despite widely differing legal and national contexts, the countries studied largely base integration on principles of cultural assimilation that can be hostile to “outsiders” and lead to insecure and contradictory belonging. The article also examines the strategies migrants adopt to forge belonging, depending on the national context. We find that in some contexts, migrants emphasize that they take individual responsibility for integrating and in others they build belonging on cultural and religious similarities with the host community. Thus, this research shows that the national policy environment not only impacts belonging, but also shapes the strategies migrants adopt to achieve it. The research is based on a long-term study conducted as a part of an EU Horizon 2020 project, RESPOND.

Scope-shifting: Bureaucracy, Energy Justice and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Through a study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) environmental assessment (EA) of the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, this paper explores regulatory agencies’ “interpretive implementation.” We find that, in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, USACE “scope-shifted”—facultatively expanding and contracting the scopes of its spatial, scientific and cost–benefit impact analyses—to expedite industrial expansion, contravening the policies’ original intents. In doing so, USACE's EA created various energy injustices by excluding local tribes (especially the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes) and their concerns, e.g. treaty rights, local histories, climate change and especially potential oil spills with impacts on human health and subsistence resources. We analyze this scope-shifting through the lens of Karl Polayni's double movement between socioenvironmental protections and capitalist development. We elaborate this framework further via a triple-helix model that analyses ideologies, power relations and policies (here further complicated by both “law” and “interpretation” threads), as three intertwined strands that pull with or against each other, jointly progressing toward greater rights for vulnerable communities, “retrograding” toward earlier, oppressive conditions or simply stagnating. Ultimately, we argue that understanding scope-shifting and other forms of interpretive implementation as threads within the triple-helix policy strand, in dynamic tension or synchrony with other threads and strands, can help explicate agency decision-making processes. We hope that this conceptualization can elucidate the capacity of seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices for exacerbating, or potentially alleviating, energy injustice.

The Mountain Valley Provision—Impacts and Implications for the Market and the Future

The political theater that recently played out related to the US debt ceiling may have illustrated the chaos that polarization has brought to Washington, but it showed one other thing as well: even when it does not have much to do with the matter at hand—as in defaulting on the national debt—there's actually an appetite for federal permitting reform on both sides of the aisle. The Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) addressed some immediate priorities relating to infrastructure— including changes to the review process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). But then, surprising many in the natural gas industry, as well as many of the industry's critics, the FRA actually ordered the regulatory permitting of the long‐delayed, controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). For over five years, MVP has been in various stages of regulatory limbo, having received a certificate from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) years ago but continually failing to secure the other federal permits necessary for completion. That failure was generally not the result of actions of the agencies involved, but rather of successful efforts by project opponents to gain appellate court reversals of the agency actions approving the pipeline. The MVP saga has proven that even an “act of congress” does not necessarily end the drama. Well after the passage of the FRA, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which had been the dominant forum for most of the previous stoppages, issued a stay of the construction under a U.S. Forest Service permit that MVP had already received. The outcome of that action is unknown at the time of publication, but presages the ongoing legal arm‐wrestling that will likely surround the FRA provision and the project.

Beyond particulate matter: New evidence on the causal effects of air pollution on mortality

The increasing demand for electricity worldwide has caused a corresponding rise in the consumption of coal, leading to an increase in sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution levels. Despite the severity of the issue, there is a lack of conclusive evidence establishing a causal link between SO2 pollution and health, particularly in developing countries. We leverage a large national environmental regulation policy, implemented in China to reduce SO2 emissions, to estimate the impacts of SO2 pollution on mortality. We find that 1-μg/m3 reduction in SO2 concentrations leads to 18 fewer cardiovascular deaths per 100,000 people aged 60 years and above (0.9% decrease) and 2 fewer deaths per 100,000 children under the age of 5 (1.5% decrease) annually. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the total health benefits of the environmental policy outweigh its economic costs. The results are consistent across various robustness checks.

Comments: Who Holds the Rights to US Geothermal Heat Sources?

A recently enacted law in Texas, which went into effect in mid-June, declares the landowner or the owner of surface rights as the holder of subsurface geothermal energy and associated resources. If the surface and mineral rights of the land have been separated, the owner of the surface estate prevails. Senate Bill 785 amended a section of the Natural Resources Code to define heat as a byproduct of geothermal energy and associated resources, but excludes mineral, oil, gas, or any product of oil or gas. It also excludes “the ownership and use of groundwater,” including “minerals dissolved or otherwise contained in groundwater, including hot brines.” The law entitles the owner “to drill for and produce the geothermal energy and associated resources.” As with pore space rights for underground carbon storage, legislating surface and subsurface rights for geothermal energy and underground hydrogen storage is an evolving frontier. Privately held rights vs. state or federal lands contribute to the complexity of these relatively nascent efforts to advance decarbonization. Ownership of geothermal rights varies widely from state to state, often dictated by a state’s definition of what constitutes “geothermal resources.” California’s definition, for example, says “the natural heat of the earth, the energy, in whatever form, below the surface of the earth present in, resulting from, or created by, or which may be extracted from, such natural heat, and all minerals in solution or other products obtained from naturally heated fluids, brines, associated gases, and steam, in whatever form, found below the surface of the earth, but excluding oil, hydrocarbon gas, or other hydrocarbon substances.” Other states, such as Utah, define a geothermal resource by a temperature threshold (“water or steam at temperatures greater than 120°C naturally present in a geothermal system”). At that mark, a separate lease is required because the resource is no longer part of the water rights. Once geothermal resources are defined, who holds the rights may be murky. In California, Hawaii, and New Mexico, the mineral estate is the owner. Wyoming considers geothermal heat as part of the water rights—“underground water, including hot water and geothermal.” Other states consider rights as held by the surface estate unless they have been specifically transferred. Yet, many states have no clearly defined guidance about privately held ownership, and the parties involved in disputes head to the courts to hash out the ambiguity. The rules governing development of geothermal energy on federal lands are more defined. Geothermal was the first type of renewable energy that the US Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management approved for production on public lands. The first project was given the go-ahead in 1978. A federal lease allows future exploration and development. However, it does not include the right to move ahead with any ground-disturbing activities to explore for or develop the resources. Each stage of development under the lease requires separate authorizations and compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. Two examples of state-controlled lands are well-known geothermal fields in California, The Geysers and the Salton Sea projects. The state’s leases in The Geysers are on school lands. Revenue and royalties are deposited into the California State Teachers’ Retirement fund. Royalty rates range from 10 to 12.5% of the gross value of geothermal steam, calculated by multiplying the gross value of electric power with the agreed percentage of steam that began initially as 36% in 1999, increasing to a maximum of 42% of the value of electricity. While innovation steadily advances technologies to produce geothermal energy, the determination of clear law and regulations is playing catch-up ... state by state and case by case in courts. And until it does, scaling up of this promising energy source in the US is at risk of being hamstrung.

Sustainable production assessment of the 50 US states

Economic production is often accompanied by the depletion of natural resources and amplified environmental concerns. Mainstream economic models usually disregard such socio-environmental consequences of economic production. Therefore, there is more need of interdisciplinary methods to evaluate the sustainable productivity of nations. In this paper, we investigate the sustainable production growth of the 50 US states from 1997 to 2018. The US, as one of the largest economies and emitters of greenhouse gases, has a significant role to play in addressing the global environmental issues. The US has numerous national and international commitments and environmental policies in place, however the role of such policies on sustainable production has mostly been overlooked. We implement Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models based on several economic indicators and find that most states have been efficient between 1997 and 2018. We use Slack-Based Measures (SBM) to investigate individual states' capital, labor, energy, and emission performances. According to the results, capital efficiency is high while energy and emissions efficiency is low, which results in states' eco-productivity being greater than their eco-efficiency. This highlights that, while ensuring economic efficiency, many states compromise environmental focus. We further adopt Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) to evaluate the states' productivity, efficiency, and technological change over 22 years, and document significant adverse impact of the global financial crisis on economic efficiency. Next, we apply econometric models to evaluate the impact of renewable energy and energy efficiency policies on efficiency outcomes. The test results indicate that all policies positively affect the states’ average production efficiencies and KPI measures. Overall, the findings provide valuable insights into the sustainable production growth of the US states and the impact of renewable energy and energy efficiency policies on efficiency outcomes.

Energy security dilemma and energy transition policy in the context of climate change: A perspective from China

Fossil fuel-related energy crises continue to threaten energy security and create problems for the transition to low-carbon energy. This study estimates the effects of coal-to-gas policies on natural gas consumption in various regions in China using the two-way fixed-effects multi-period difference in differences method and the staggered difference in differences method. We also measure the policy implementation intensity using textual analysis methods. Using daily data on natural gas consumption, the regression discontinuity design in time method is applied to explore the causality between coal-to-gas policies and natural gas shortages. The main results are as follows: coal-to-gas policies significantly boost yearly average natural gas consumption. A heterogeneity analysis shows townships, rural, and county are the focus of policy implementation. Investments in natural gas utilities and increased gas utilization are the main channels for increasing natural gas demand. While coal-to-gas policies cause natural gas shortages during the heating season, additional pipeline networks, liquefied natural gas receiving station and gas storage depots could improve the stability of supplies and reduce the impact of peak-to-trough differences. The article demonstrates for the first time that radical energy transition policies are one of the main causes of the energy crisis, providing a crucial foundation for national energy and environmental policies, and having some implications for the global energy transition process.

Addressing structural hurdles for metadata extraction from environmental impact statements

AbstractNatural language processing techniques can be used to analyze the linguistic content of a document to extract missing pieces of metadata. However, accurate metadata extraction may not depend solely on the linguistics, but also on structural problems such as extremely large documents, unordered multi‐file documents, and inconsistency in manually labeled metadata. In this work, we start from two standard machine learning solutions to extract pieces of metadata from Environmental Impact Statements, environmental policy documents that are regularly produced under the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. We present a series of experiments where we evaluate how these standard approaches are affected by different issues derived from real‐world data. We find that metadata extraction can be strongly influenced by nonlinguistic factors such as document length and volume ordering and that the standard machine learning solutions often do not scale well to long documents. We demonstrate how such solutions can be better adapted to these scenarios, and conclude with suggestions for other NLP practitioners cataloging large document collections.

Can environmental monitoring power transition curb corporate greenwashing behavior?

To address ecological, climate and environmental issues in sustainable growth, local ecological environmental monitoring power withdrawal (EEMPW) by the Chinese State Council has been implemented since 2015. This paper aims to comprehensively investigate how the centralization of national environmental quality monitoring policy via the EEMPW affects corporate greenwashing behavior, and evaluate the reacting mechanisms. The empirical findings derived by the continuous difference-in-differences models show that the EEMPW significantly curbs firms’ hypocritical greenwashing behaviors, and by increasing financial constraint level, the greenwashing behaviors can be significantly reduced. This paper finds that firms in cleaner production industries, firms in regions with highly developed green finance, firms in highly environmentally regulated areas, and state-owned enterprises are more restrained in greenwashing. Furthermore, our mechanism analyses show that financially constrained firms reduce their likelihood of greenwashing behavior by compressing management and financial costs, and facilitating green innovation efficiency behaviors. Our findings provide suggestions for curbing greenwashing behaviors and for improving the efficiency of the government regulation of ecological, climate and environmental targets in economic growth.

Crop Production and Security in Ningjin County of the North China Plain

Stable growth in grain production is a critical challenge to ensure food security in North China Plain (NCP), an area dominated by smallholder farming. Food production and security of NCP largely depend on how smallholders farm their land. This study took Ningjin County of the NCP as an example to describe the characteristics of crop planting structure and the changes in crop production based on household surveys, statistics, various documents, and literature by descriptive statistics, calculation of crop self-sufficiency, and curve fitting, and aimed to reveal crop security and the influencing factors of crop production at the household level. The results were as follows: (1) Wheat and maize sown area accounted for 61.69% and 47.96% of the total sown area of crops during 2000–2020, increasing at a rate of 3.42% and 5.93%, respectively. Their planted areas increased from 27.52% and 15.54% in 2000 to 47.82% and 44.75% in 2020, respectively. (2) The self-sufficiency rate of maize showed a significant upward trend and reached its peak in 2019. the self-sufficiency rate of wheat also showed an increasing trend, from 192.87% to 617.37%, which indicates that wheat and maize can meet food self-sufficiency and the per capita grain yield is in a safe state. (3) The trends on wheat yield and fertilizer initially grew, then decreased, closely resembling an inverted “U”, while the maize yield showed a pattern of increasing first and then basically remaining stable, similar to an “S” shape. A turning point for fertilizer use (550 kg/ha) was identified, indicating the limits of fertilizer use to increase yield. The national agricultural production and environmental protection policies, continuous improvement of crop varieties, as well as the farmers’ traditional practices have significant impacts on crop production. This study will enhance management practices for improved yield, which can support the integrated management of agricultural production in intensive agricultural areas.

Development and environmental policies of Ethiopia: Policy review from view point of development-environment sustainability linkage

Ethiopia is rich in a wide range of agro-ecological zones in which a variety of agricultural activities and farming systems operate. These agricultural activities and farming systems affect the quality of the environment and sustainability of natural resources in different ways, which should be one of the prime concerns of national development policies. The objective of this study was to determine the extent to which Ethiopia's national development, environmental policies, and strategic plans consider the interrelationship between farming systems and environmental sustainability. The second objective was to determine the extent to which the policies and strategies integrate economic growth and environmental sustainability. Accordingly, different national development policies, strategies, and programs of Ethiopia were reviewed. The results reveal that these policies and strategies fundamentally focus on economic growth. Policymakers did not pay adequate attention to the environmental effects of farming systems in national development policies and strategic plans. Policies do not consider the integration of development and environmental sustainability. Simply put, the multidimensional links between economic growth and environmental sustainability have not been adequately articulated in development policies and programs. Therefore, both economic and environmental effects of the farming systems should be well-addressed during the preparation of development policies and strategic plans.

Bibliometric Analysis on Wildfires and Protected Areas

Wildfire are increasingly frequent events on a planet undergoing climate change. With more favourable climate conditions for their occurrence, like prolonged periods of drought, the frequency and intensity of these catastrophes continue to increase. Protected areas are important territories for conserving ecosystems and biodiversity around the world and serve as a key management tool in national environmental policies. Many studies have been developed around the world to assess the conditions, frequency, and intensity of fires, and, on the other hand, protected areas are intensively studied to understand whether conservation actions are effective in keeping the ecosystem balanced. However, there are few studies that contemplate these two themes together. Consequently, this study offers a bibliometric analysis of the wildfires and its occurrence in protected areas, aiming to understand the spatial and temporal relation between them, characteristics of the research studies, and trending issues to be worked on. We used the Bibliometrix package in R language, which provides the option of different methods for analysing bibliometric data to understand the temporal evolution of the published documents about wildfires and protected areas. In total, 1116 publications were analysed, ranging from 1970 to 2022. The findings show that the terms “fires” (185 occurrences), “fire” (117), “wildfire” (101), and “forest fire” (92) are more frequently used and associated with studies on topics including biodiversity (304), conservation (221), environmental protection (188), deforestation (148), ecosystems (138), forestry (133), and climate change (126) as well as protected areas (399). The highest growth of research has been registered since 2002. The majority of the publications were published by authors from universities in the USA (77), South Africa (72), the United Kingdom (22), and Brazil (19). The USA leads all other countries with 7 of the top 10 international collaborations, followed by Brazil, Australia, and South Africa. However, only the United Kingdom continues to maintain an increased number of external (inter-country) collaborations, whereas the other nine continue to maintain an increased number of internal (intra-country). Considering the top 10 authors in terms of production, only 1 was active from 1999 to 2019, and the other 9 only have been active since 2009. The topics that stand out were subjected to a coupling analysis, which revealed that environmental protection is a motor theme, endangered species, Australia, and savannah are niche themes, and protected area, biodiversity, and fire management are basic themes.

Status of Sacred Groves in India: A Review

Areas covering native plant and tree species protected on behalf of religious grounds are known as sacred groves. Apart from India, sacred groves occur in various countries including America, Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe. They are not merely patches of forests but are islands in desolated landscapes. Many valuable medicinal plants and wild relatives of cultivated species are residing in sacred groves which have got tremendous roles to play in species or tree improvement programmes. Ancient sacred groves should be treated as possessing “Incomparable Values” according to the National Environment Policy of India. This paper reviewed extensively, analyzed and presented the current status on these invaluable resource pockets in India.

Determinants of coal exit strategy in the banking industry

In recent years, an increasing number of major international banks have begun to announce their exit from the coal sector, in response to the trend initiated by public actors such as governments and related public sector financial institutions. This article examines the determinants of coal exit strategies of international banks. Using a sample of 111 banks from 31 countries and a PLSPM methodology, the results show that: 1) the announced strategies are particularly partial in nature and the financing allocated to coal firms is still high, 2) external variables (i.e., national and institutional contexts) significantly influence exit scores, notably coal dependence, progress in the energy transition and the environmental performance of the home countries, 3) with the exception of size, internal variables (e.g., exposure to the sector, risk and profitability) have no impact on coal exit scores. Banks therefore adopt a defensive strategy: the managerial decision echoes national energy and environmental policies, which underlines the crucial political and regulatory role of governments in influencing bank strategies.