Regional Environmental Problems Research Articles

Environment and security: core ideas and US government initiatives.

This article provides an overview of the links between environment and national security in the US. The links vary with geography and institutional affiliation. Developed countries tend to associate global environmental changes with the potential to create instability and conflict and tend to focus on the human security implications of local and regional environmental problems. Understanding of these issues is obscured by vagueness of terminology and postures. Current research and statistics have increased the prominence of environmental issues on national and international agendas and led to creating thinking among a diverse population of experts. An environmental and security framework has implications for the aesthetics of nature, human responsibility for global stewardship, and humanitarian concerns. Policymakers should frame international environmental priorities in terms of broad interests; to refrain from limiting interests to security concerns; and to examine environmental problems in ways other than as crises or threats. Long-term strategies are needed to address underlying problems, as well as pragmatic, multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving, conceptual clarity, and improved willingness and ability to explain complexity of environmental change to the public. US Secretary of State Warren Christopher put environmental issues near the top of the foreign policy agenda in April 1996. This article provides an overview of the major scholarly arguments and US government actions on environmental and security issues, new and traditional definitions of security, and how security issues affect the environment.

Market instruments and the control of acid rain damage: Effects of a sulphur tax on the Spanish electricity generating industry

Acid deposition is widely recognized as a regional environmental problem, the chief causes of which are oxides of sulphur and nitrogen emitted during combustion of fossil fuels. In this paper we consider the economic significance of acid rain phenomena and the relative usefulness of the different instruments available to reduce their effects. As an illustration, we examine the likely effects of the application of a hypothetical Spanish sulphur tax on the electricity producers. Since it is possible to recognize the amount of sulphur dioxides which will be emitted in the combustion of different types of fossil fuels, a product tax accompanied by fiscal rebates for desulphurizing processes is used as a proxy of the genuine emissions tax. The introduction of such a tax is likely to have important effects on the Spanish economy, at least in the short term. Given the current reliance of the electricity sector on coal fired stations for its production, the tax will involve significant increases in the price of electricity. The sulphur tax revenues are likely to be considerable, although the induced environmental benefits will probably be less relevant: most Spanish soils are resistant to acid depositions, and the influence of Spanish induced depositions abroad are small. In any case, the long-term effects will probably be fairly neutral in price and tax revenue modifications. In fact, the SO 2 tax is likely to encourage a faster and cheaper move towards the restructuring of the Spanish electricity sector to less dirty coal fired stations, a total closure of the fuel oil fired plants, and new cleaner production capabilities with extensive introduction of the natural gas.

Global Society and Information Technology

Information technology will greatly influence the quality of life in the 21st century. The challenge is to use the technology to help overcome numerous global, regional, and local problems that threaten the quality of life. These problems include global overpopulation, intense and potentially socioeconomically destructive global economic competition, continued pressures on the global environment, increasing levels of regionalized armed conflicts, regional water shortages and other regional environmental problems, and local transportation congestion, poverty, crime, and drug abuse. Social scientists mustbecome aggressively involved and accept leadership roles in the conceptualization, development, and implementation of computer-based systems that have broad social impact.

SOIL SCIENCE IN TRANSITION: SOIL AWARENESS AND SOIL CARE RESEARCH STRATEGIES

The perceived decline of soil science in the industrialized countries needs to be remedied by greater attention (i) to fundamental aspects of soil processes and soil development in the context of global climate change and (ii) to local and regional environmental problems. Soil care is proposed as a unifying concept and challenge for geoecological sustainability. It is defined as the activity of selecting and implementing, locally and regionally, a system of soil and land use management suitable for maintaining and improving soil usefulness and quality for any selected purpose. In developing countries where, in addition, improvement of soil productivity will remain the major goal, more locally trained soil scientists will be needed to increase their relative proportion among the current number of some 50,000 soil scientists worldwide and to narrow the gap in research efforts.

Growth, Energy and the Environment: new challenges for the Asian‐Pacific economy

This paper examines the impact of East Asia's future world energy demand on the environment, and explores the options for APEC in the management of regional environmental problems. This requires revisiting standard energy consumption forecasts and incorporating a more detailed examination of the environmental impact. China will be a major interest throughout, since a large part of the increment in industrial production and energy use over the next couple of decades is likely to be heavily concentrated in China.

EcoDesign: design and the response to the greening of the international market

As global and regional environmental problems pose ever greater challenges to past notions of development, the role of design in the resolution of such problems will grow in importance. This paper considers the changing relationships between economics, environment and development and considers the implications of such change for the future role of design and for industry policy. Through an examination of the greening of the international market for goods and services, arising out of regulations and from a significant ‘green’ shift in consumer behaviour, the paper concludes that a critical measure of quality (and therefore, competitiveness), for all areas of production, is now environmental impact. The response of industries to this new green market is reviewed and an analysis of approaches to improving the environmental performance of manufactured goods leads to the identification of four design directions. The paper examines the impact of the changed market and the new directions for design as these relate to education and training, government industry policy and future research.

Population and the energy problem

When energy is scarce or expensive, people can suffer material deprivation and economic hardship. When it is obtained in ways that fail to minimize environmental and political costs, these too can threaten human wellbeing in fundamental and pervasive ways. The energy problem today combines these syndromes: much of the world's population has too little energy to meet basic human needs; the monetary costs of energy are rising nearly everywhere; the environmental impacts of energy supply are growing and already dominant contributors to local, regional, and global environmental problems (including air pollution, water pollution, ocean pollution, and climate change); and the sociopolitical risks of energy supply (above all the danger of conflict over oil and the links between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons) are growing too. This predicament has many causes, but predominant among them are the nearly 20-fold increase in world energy use since 1850 and the cumulative depletion of the most convenient oil and gas deposits that this growth has entailed, resulting in increasing resort to costlier and/or environmentally more disruptive energy sources. The growth of world population in this period was responsible for 52% of the energy growth, while growth in per capita energy use was responsible for 48% (excluding causal connections between population and energy use per capita). In the United States in the same period, population growth accounted for 66% of the 36-fold increase in energy use. In the late 1980s, population growth was still accounting for a third of energy growth both in the United States and worldwide. Coping with global energy problems will require greatly increased investment in improving the efficiency of energy enduse and in reducing the environmental impacts of contemporary energy technologies, and it will require financing a transition over the next several decades to a set of more sustainable (but probably also more expensive) energy sources. The difficulty of implementing these measures will be greatest by far in the developing countries, not least because of their high rates of population growth and the attendant extra pressures on economic and managerial resources. If efficiency improvements permit delivering the high standard of living to which the world aspires based on a per capita rate of energy use as low as 3 kilowatts—about a quarter of the current U.S. figure—then a world population stabilized at 10 billion people would be using energy at a rate of 30 terawatts, and a population of 14 billion would imply 42 terawatts (compare 13.2 terawatts in 1990). Delivering even the lower figure at tolerable monetary and environmental costs will be difficult; each additional billion people added to the world population will compound these difficulties and increase energy's costs, making everyone poorer.

REGIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS OF THE USSR: A SYNOPSIS OF VIEWS FROM THE SOVIET PARLIAMENT

A geographer member of the USSR Congress of People's Deputies and member of a USSR Supreme Soviet Commission for Nationalities Policy and Interethnic Relations discusses key regional and environmental issues debated by those legislative bodies in 1989 and 1990: disparities in development levels and regional economic structure; effects of distorted prices on regional khozraschet; inadequate social infrastructure and imbalanced development in resource frontier regions; regional environmental problems exacerbated by decisions concerning location of new productive capacity; nuclear power generation and testing; administrative measures promoting environmental protection efforts; and discrepancies between the administrative-territorial and economic division of the country (translated by Jay K. Mitchell; PlanEcon, Inc.; Washington, DC 20005).

Enhanced bioaccumulation of mercury, cadmium and lead in low-alkalinity waters: An emerging regional environmental problem

Enhanced bioaccumulation of mercury, cadmium and lead in low-alkalinity waters: An emerging regional environmental problem

Energy price shocks and productivity slowdown

The paper summarizes information on the extent of productivity slowdown since 1973 and its coincidence with the energy price shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. Results from various studies on the ‘capital utilization’ hypothesis concerning the energy price - productivity connection are examined and it is concluded that whilst there may be some validity to the hypothesis it does not explain all of the productivity slowdown. The importance of further research into the energy price - productivity connection may lie in its relation to many proposals for addressing local, regional and global environmental problems.

Public participation in environmental monitoring: A means of attaining network capability

In the Puget Sound region of the United States a task force of community volunteers using bees monitored environmental pollution. This paper discusses advantages and limitations of public involvement in the assessment of regional environmental problems, particularly with respect to biological monitoring. This approach not only yielded extensive information about pollution levels but also was very cost effective.

Integrated monitoring ? Principles and practice

The concept of integrated monitoring is examined and defined. The different types and applications of monitoring in the United Kingdom are considered against the information they can provide. Two examples of integrated monitoring of health hazards in the UK are described. The relevance of the principles and the practice to the assessment of regional and global environmental problems is discussed and suggestions made for their review.

Experiments in Regional Environmental Planning

The deterioration of the physical environment in many metropolitan areas is a fact of modern life. In the United States the traditional alignment of power and institutions have proved to be ineffective in coping with environmental problems. Obvious as is this disparity between the nature of regional environmental management problems and the administrative machinery established to remedy it, too little serious effort has been made so far to do better.The six experiments described here represent an effort to expand the environmental data-base, to improve the capacity of elected officials and their civil servants to anticipate better the consequences of a variety of environmental decisions, and to provide the broadest possible range of contributing citizens—so that environmental decision-making can become truly participatory. All of the regions involved have so far enjoyed more success technically than in the matters of transfer of information and improving citizen participation.

The Un Regional Economic Commissions and Environmental Problems

A cursory glance at a map, a university curriculum, or a government organization chart will confirm that man has a remarkable capacity for establishing arbitrary boundaries. Moreover, he has usually claimed a degree of sovereignty within those boundaries which he would energetically defend and, if possible, extend. We would continue to believe that we could reasonably afford our independent behavior except for the recent “discovery” that the human environment is not only a complex but also a finite system. Environmental problems, or, more particularly, the harmful effects of man's activities on his environment, challenge our exclusiveness and affect our existing territorial, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries simply because they transcend them. Of the many factors to be taken into account in dealing with environmental problems two have particular importance: the identification of the geographical level at which action can effectively be taken and the choice of the appropriate legal and institutional instruments to be employed.