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An integrated approach for choosing among energy supply- and demand-side measures shows that, compared to business-as-usual demand patterns, global greenhouse-gas emissions can be reduced well below current levels with net economic benefits to society. Given these findings, a 'wait-and-see' stance towards new initiatives in energy and environmental policy is not economically justifiable. Achieving significant emissions reductions, however, will require commitments to policies aimed at enabling energy markets to function more efficiently and supporting legislation where market forces do not suffice.
The review provides an overview of the features of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea in their European geographical and socio-political context. To reach sustainability in the wider sense the common society has to meet the 7 tenets - that management actions have to be environmentally sustainable, economically viable, technologically feasible, socially desirable (or at least tolerable), legally permissible, administratively achievable and politically expedient. Each of these are explained and discussed using examples from the two seas including pollution control, physical resource exploitation (such as aggregates, habitat loss, renewable energy and oil and gas), and biological resources exploitation (fisheries and...
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Conclusions: Caribou subpopulation persistence and landscape occupancy depends highly on the degree of forest cover, cover type, and distance from human presence. Thresholds/Learnings: Synopsis: This study evaluates factors influencing the persistence and landscape occupancy of caribou subpopulations in southern British Columbia. Data from 235 radio-collared caribou across 13 subpopulations were used to derive a landscape occupancy index. The index was analyzed against 33 landscape variables including, land cover, terrain, climate, and human influence. At the metapopulation level, the persistence of subpopulations correlated with the extent of wet climate conditions and the distribution of old forests and alpine...
The main concept currently in use in wind energy involves horizontal-axis wind turbines with blades of fiber composite materials. This turbine concept is expected to remain as the major provider of wind power in the foreseeable future. However, turbine sizes are increasing, and installation offshore means that wind turbines will be exposed to more demanding environmental conditions. Many challenges are posed by the use of fiber composites in increasingly large blades and increasingly hostile environments. Among these are achieving adequate stiffness to prevent excessive blade deflection, preventing buckling failure, ensuring adequate fatigue life under variable wind loading combined with gravitational loading, and...
In this paper we review threshold behaviour in environmental systems, which are often associated with the onset of floods, contamination and erosion events, and other degenerative processes. Key objectives of this review are to a) suggest indicators for detecting threshold behavior, b) discuss their implications for predictability, c) distinguish different forms of threshold behavior and their underlying controls, and d) hypothesise on possible reasons for why threshold behaviour might occur. Threshold behaviour involves a fast qualitative change of either a single process or the response of a system. For elementary phenomena this switch occurs when boundary conditions (e.g., energy inputs) or system states as expressed...
This paper makes a brief review on 30 years of history of the wind power short-term prediction, since the first ideas and sketches on the theme to the actual state of the art on models and tools, giving emphasis to the most significant proposals and developments. The two principal lines of thought on short-term prediction (mathematical and physical) are indistinctly treated here and comparisons between models and tools are avoided, mainly because, on the one hand, a standard for a measure of performance is still not adopted and, on the other hand, it is very important that the data are exactly the same in order to compare two models (this fact makes it almost impossible to carry out a quantitative comparison between...
I studied desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis, nelsoni) behavior and habitat use in response to boating activities during 1985. The percent of total observed time in attention behavior before the boating season, during the boating season, and while riverboats were < 0.8 km from bighorn sheep groups was 1, 1.4, and 12.2, respectively. Estimated energy expenditure did not significantly differ for high riverboat pressures (p > 0.2) or seasonal comparisons (p > 0.1). Habitat use significantly differed for proximity to the river, which was probably related to the summer use of the river for drinking. Moderate, minor, and no responses to passing riverboats were observed 3, 39, s and 58%, respectively. Responses to riverboats...
Humans have a variety of direct and indirect impacts on wildlife and a number of methods have been proposed to identify and quantify anthropogenic stressors that negatively impact wildlife. The ideal method would ultimately help predict the presence, absence, or population viability of animals living with a particular stressor. We critically review seven methods that have been used, or are potentially useful, to identify anthropogenic stressors on animals. We rank them from fitness indicators to disturbance indicators: breeding success, mate choice, fluctuating asymmetry, flight initiation distance, immunocompetence, glucocorticoids, and cardiac response. We describe each method's ease of use, precision in quantifying...
The aim of this study is to develop a method that allows selecting appropriate measures for reductions in negative environmental impacts on a regional energy system. In this paper a sophisticated screening method based on theoretical and practical basics of decision-making is proposed. The proposed method is applied and tested on the energy system of a typical rural middle-sized region in Latvia. The starting point for energy system analysis was evaluation of DSM (demand side management) options but later authors chose to include also primary energy to evaluate the whole regional energy system. The proposed method foresees different aspects: not only technical and economical possibilities, but also political and...
This article explores the institutional architecture in place to govern energy in the US and its underlying principles. More specifically, it identifies the key institutions involved with energy decision-making, with an emphasis on the national level and key legislative acts of the past four decades. The second section explores six historic guiding principles connected with national energy production and use, and the third section identifies how each of these conditions is eroding. The fourth section highlights the general implications of this shift for energy governance, namely that energy decision-making is now complex, inconsistent, vertically and horizontally fragmented and politicized.
The history of hydrocarbon generation, expulsion and migration from the Upper Devonian Bakken and Mississippian Lodgepole source rocks in the Williston Basin has been successfully replicated by a 330-km long TEMISPACK model, running from the centre of Williston Basin to the Wapella oilfield in Saskatchewan. The model shows that oil generation is the cause of overpressures in the Bakken Fm., where shale vertical permeabilities must be as low as 10-2-10 -3 nD when overpressures are around 15 MPa. Hydraulic fracturing threshold was not commonly reached. Yet, our model suggests that expulsion efficiencies are as high as 0.85. Observed very low Bakken shale porosities (0.03) are entirely consistent with this result....
In this article, the Lovins'[2] explain what is meant by Natural Capitalism, four principles that enable business to behave responsibly towards both nature and people while increasing profits, inspiring their workforce and gaining competitive advantage. It combines radically increased resource productivity; closed-loop, zero-waste, nontoxic production; a business model that rewards both; and reinvestment in natural capital. The article describes how, even today, when nature and people are typically valued at zero, protecting and restoring nature, culture and community can be far more profitable than liquidating them.
A regularly raised concern for wind farms is the number of species and rate of bird and bat collisions with turbines. Australian regulators require, at some operating wind farms, the monitoring of bird and bat collisions. Although monitoring is becoming more commonplace, the area recommended for searching beneath turbines is inconsistent, with many guidelines both in Australia and overseas being based on conjecture rather than empirical evidence. This has the potential to bias survey results, reduce confidence in the data collected, and preclude meaningful comparisons between sites. By having a measure of the range of the fall zone of a bird or bat, a survey can be designed that ensures that an adequate area is...
Abstrac As a pilot study potential biophysical and human land use drivers in Costa Rica were evaluated using multi-variate statistical methods in a nested scale analysis. The reconstructed land use drivers and their quantified effects on land use were applied within a dynamic framework CLUE (Conversion of Land Use and its Effects) to model land use dynamics in Costa Rica from 1973 to 1984. Our pilot study demonstrates that a land use/cover system can be described as a scale-dependent hierarchical system and that its dynamics can be satisfactorily modelled as functions of biophysical and human drivers.
Methane and nitrous oxide are potent greenhouse gases whose atmospheric abundances have increased significantly in the past 200 years, together accounting for approximately half of the radiative forcing associated with increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide. In order to understand the factors causing increase of these gases globally, we need to determine their emission rates at regional to continental scales. We directly link atmospheric observations with surface emissions using a Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Model, and then determine emission rates by optimizing prior emissions estimates. We use measurements from NOAA's tall tower and aircraft program in 2004, The Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: benzene, evaluation, exposure, human, potential
The aim of this study is to develop a method that allows selecting appropriate measures for reductions in negative environmental impacts on a regional energy system. In this paper a sophisticated screening method based on theoretical and practical basics of decision-making is proposed. The proposed method is applied and tested on the energy system of a typical rural middle-sized region in Latvia. The starting point for energy system analysis was evaluation of DSM (demand side management) options but later authors chose to include also primary energy to evaluate the whole regional energy system. The proposed method foresees different aspects: not only technical and economical possibilities, but also political and...
In this paper we review threshold behaviour in environmental systems, which are often associated with the onset of floods, contamination and erosion events, and other degenerative processes. Key objectives of this review are to a) suggest indicators for detecting threshold behavior, b) discuss their implications for predictability, c) distinguish different forms of threshold behavior and their underlying controls, and d) hypothesise on possible reasons for why threshold behaviour might occur. Threshold behaviour involves a fast qualitative change of either a single process or the response of a system. For elementary phenomena this switch occurs when boundary conditions (e.g., energy inputs) or system states as expressed...
Fire severity, frequency, and extent are expected to change dramatically in coming decades in response to changing climatic conditions, superimposed on the adverse cumulative effects of various human-related disturbances on ecosystems during the past 100 years or more. To better gauge these expected changes, knowledge of climatic and human influences on past fire regimes is essential. We characterized the temporal and spatial properties of fire regimes in ponderosa pine forests of the southern San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado by collecting 175 fire-scarred tree samples from nine sites across a wide range of topographic settings. All tree rings and fire scars were dated using standard dendrochronological...
Plastics have transformed everyday life; usage is increasing and annual production is likely to exceed 300 million tonnes by 2010. In this concluding paper to the Theme Issue on Plastics, the Environment and Human Health, we synthesize current understanding of the benefits and concerns surrounding the use of plastics and look to future priorities, challenges and opportunities. It is evident that plastics bring many societal benefits and offer future technological and medical advances. However, concerns about usage and disposal are diverse and include accumulation of waste in landfills and in natural habitats, physical problems for wildlife resulting from ingestion or entanglement in plastic, the leaching of chemicals...
map background search result map search result map Factors influencing the dispersion and fragmentation of endangered mountain caribou populations Factors influencing the dispersion and fragmentation of endangered mountain caribou populations