INTRODUCTION Tobacco control prevention efforts are important to protect people from exposure to dangerous tobacco smoke, support cessation, and reduce tobacco-use initiation. While smoke-free laws have been a widespread tobacco control strategy, little work has been done to examine the impact of smoke-free school policies. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of provincial smo...

The economic policy needs to pay increasingly more attention to the environmental issues, which requires the development of methodologies able to incorporate environmental, as well as macroeconomic, goals in the design of public policies. Starting from this observation, this article proposes a methodology based upon a Simonian satisficing logic made operational with the help of goal programming...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure inside selected public places to provide basic data for the development and promotion of smoke-free policies. METHODS Between March and May 2009, an SHS exposure survey was conducted. PM2.5 levels and air nicotine concentrations were measured in hospitals (n=5), government buildings (4), restaurants (10) and e...

BACKGROUND Monitoring disparities in secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure is important for tailoring smoke-free policies to the needs of different groups. We examined disparity and trends in SHS exposure among both nonsmokers and smokers at Japanese workplaces between 2002 and 2012. METHODS A total of 32,940 employees in nationally representative, population-based, repeated cross-sectional surveys...

Arctic indigenous peoples face significant challenges resulting from the contamination of Arctic air, water, and soil by persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, and radionuclides. International cooperative efforts among governments and research institutions are under way to collect the information needed by environmental health scientists and public health officials to address environmenta...

Centralized collection and disposal is an integral component of waste management strategies for many solid and liquid wastes, and carbon capture and storage is currently being considered for gaseous waste. In this paper we show how collective waste disposal systems introduce essential changes in the design of optimal environmental policy. Absent collective disposal, an optimal environmental pol...

A noteworthy feature of international environmental discourse since the late-1980s has been the shift toward anticipatory policies. Precaution is the leading policy approach that has emerged to guide environmental decision-makers confronted with inadequate information. The "precautionary principle" has found expression in Australia in the 1992 Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment, var...

Adaptive governance is a concept of growing interest in the environmental policy and management literature (e.g., see Brunner and Steelman et al. 2005; Olsson et al. 2006; Scholz and Stiftel 2005). In general, adaptive governance refers to institutional change processes that are responsive to emerging problems or knowledge surrounding complex ecological systems. While some studies have provided...

A new trend in environmental policy has emerged in the 1990’s. This trend is the voluntary participation of business in environmental protection and problem-solving. So-called environmental management system principles and standards are being developed and certified in many countries. A reasonable number of corporations have already introduced this system. Voluntary agreements between industry ...

In observational research, evidence is usually derived from multiple studies, and any single result is rarely considered sufficient for public health decision making. Despite more than five decades of research and thousands of studies published, the ability to draw robust conclusions regarding the presence or absence of causal links between specific environmental exposures and human health rema...