Environmental regulators around the world are seeking out new ways to regulate polluting industries that can deliver higher levels of environmental protection without increasing overall cost. Integrated regulation has been shown to offer many advantages over traditional single-media approaches and this has led to its widespread uptake across the European Union (EU). The United Kingdom (UK) is s...

With the increasing of labor salaries, the RMB exchange rate, resource product prices and requirements of environmental protection, inexpensive labor and land are no longer the decisive factor of regional competitiveness. From this perspective, China needs to shift from the extensive development mode to the sustainable development mode. Science and technology resources rational allocation is on...

This paper represents an ex post rethinking of the contribution of artificial intelligence techniques to safety management, based on a long work experience in applying artificial intelligence to several engineering fields, from dam safety to environmental protection, from seismic monitoring to the protection of cultural heritage. The main issue is that developing models for assessing safety is ...

Sustainable development is widely accepted in the world. How to reflect the sustainable development capacity of a region is an important issue for enacting policies and plans. An index system for capacity assessment is established by employing the Entropy Weight Coefficient method. The results indicate that the sustainable development capacity of Shandong Province is improving in terms of its e...

In order to determine the willingness of the population of São Carlos (a city in the state of São Paulo, Brazil) to pay for the environmental protection (WTP) of the Feijão River's watershed, the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), as well as the bidding-games technique, were used. In October 2010, 280 questionnaires were applied to a probabilistic sample of the population. A multivariate logist...

The development of the ground source heat pump (GSHP) has been limited by its relatively weak capacity of heat transfer, so the GSHP system normally requires large-scale heat exchangers and higher initial capital investment. Nevertheless, its potential for application of earth energy and friendly environmental protection has drawn a great attention from the international societies and a lot of ...

In their recent article [1], Chari et al. call attention to the important subject of setting National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to provide requisite protection for public health, including the health of sensitive groups, as specified under the Clean Air Act (73 FR 66965) [2]. The authors focus on consideration of susceptibility to inform policy choices, using lead (Pb)-related neuro...

Although this document was produced with partial funding by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under Assistance Award CR–83234701 to the Health Effects Institute, it has not been subjected to the Agency’s peer and administrative review and therefore may not necessarily reflect the views of the Agency, and no official endorsement by it should be inferred. The contents of this docu...

The prevailing systems for decision-making in many countries tend to separate environmental factors at the policy, planning and management levels, a practice that has important implications for sustainable development. Among many methods, at different decision-making levels, environmental planning and environmental assessment are currently the most widely used in China. This article briefly int...

This article--an account of an interview with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official--addresses the role of citizen activism in combating environmental decisions that may cause harm, including the sludge policy of the EPA.