Porto Alegre is well known for its innovative social policies but less so for the environmental policies that are this paper’s focus. The paper begins by describing the city’s participatory budgeting system and the multiple interconnections it has with a wide-ranging environmental policy. Porto Alegre has the highest standard of living and the highest life expectancy of any Brazilian metropolit...

We consider the problem of how to design resource allocation policies that both provide good performance at predicted environmental conditions and are robust against changes or misprediction of the environmental conditions. We evaluate various common threshold-based allocation policies within a simple model, where there is a clear tradeoff between the (conflicting) goals of good performance and...

Cellular automata provide the key to a dynamic modelling and simulation framework that integrates socio-economic with environmental models, and that operates at both micro and macro geographical scales. An application to the problem of forecasting the effect of climate change on a small island state suggests that such modelling techniques could help planners and policy makers design more effect...

The environmental sustainability has grasped tremendous attention of the government in recent years and different policies have been proposed and implemented to address this issue. One of the most widespread policies to foster environmental sustainability is the government’s supports for the purchases of hybrid vehicles. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides tax credits amounting to $3000 at m...

This paper examines the effectiveness of Taiwanese environmental health policies, whose aim is to improve environmental quality by reducing tire waste via the Tire Resource Recovery Program. The results confirm that implemented environmental health policies improve the overall health of the population (i.e. a decrease in death caused by bronchitis and other respiratory diseases). Current policy...

While the horror of the Nazi medical experiments has been unanimously acknowledged, debate continues over whether results of those experiments which are scientifically sound should be used and cited in publications and, by extension, over whether any ethically-suspect research should be cited or published. The author consulted persons in such diverse disciplines as medical journalism, Holocaus...

This article traces significant moments in the history of the magazine Saúde em Debate - sourcing references and information from documents, historical studies, editions of the magazine, academic work and interviews with physicians and writers who contributed to its creation. In its 39 years of existence, although there may have been variations in the magazine's editorial policy, its role as a ...

The rapid growth of rural enterprises has transformed the Chinese countryside. Although rural industrialisation has resulted in increased financial well-being, it has also contributed to decreased environmental quality. While China has strong environmental protection laws, this paper will demonstrate that they are not being effectively implemented in a rural region in Zhejiang Province. This is...

The sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems requires better coordination between policies span-ning freshwater, coastal and marine environments. Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has been promoted as a holistic and integrative approach for the safekeeping and protection of aquatic biodiversity. The paper assesses the degree to which key European environmental policies for the aquatic enviro...

Water quality is a major environmental issue. Pollution from nonpoint sources is the single largest remaining source of water quality impairments in the United States. Agriculture is a major source of several nonpoint-source pollutants, including nutrients, sediment, pesticides, and salts. Agricultural nonpoint pollution reduction policies can be designed to induce producers to change their pro...