Construction and operation of buildings is internationally a major cause of resource depletion and environmental pollution. Computational performance evaluation tools could support the decision making process in the area of environmentally responsive building design and play an important role in environmental impact assessment, especially when a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach is used. LCA...

Recent interest in use of satellite remote sensing for environmental compliance and remediation assessment has been heightened by growing policy requirements and the need to provide more rapid and efficient monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. However, remote sensing solutions are attractive only to the extent that they can deliver environmentally relevant information in a meaningful and time...

introduction gotvand-olia as one of the largest constructional projects in iran has been constructed on the karoun river, between masjed soleiman and gotvand regulatory dam in khuzestan province. it is situated in 382.8 km away from the river estuary at a distance of 25 km north of shoushtar city. this study was conducted to identify and assess the risk of gotvand-olia dam on the environment at...

there is a strong mutuality between tourism and environment via the creation of feedback mechanisms, since tourism often places adverse effects upon the quality and quantity of natural and cultural resources of the destination, leading to its qualitative and quantitative degradation. within theenvironmental impacts assessment (eia) studies, various methods have been proposed to assess and analy...

This paper reports the environmental results, integrated with those arising from mass and energy balances, of a research project on the comparative analysis of strategies for material and energy recovery from waste, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. The project, involving the cooperation of five University research groups, was devoted to the optimisation of m...

Baseline data represent one of the important stages of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure that describes the existing environment of the study area and surrounding areas in enough detail to allow the environmental impacts of the proposed area to be accurately and adequately assessed, and future changes and effects can be measured. Baseline data may be inaccurate, difficult to obtai...

This paper provides an overview of current thinking about the use of scientific findings in policy making about environmental issues. As Funtowicz and Ravetz [14] have pointed out, issues of global environmental change differ from “traditional scientific problems”, because they are global in scale and have long-term impacts, data are generally inadequate and the phenomena are complex and not we...

An initial step in hazard and risk assessment for an environmental contaminant is to identify the adverse effects resulting from exposure to a contaminant. What constitutes an adverse effect is not defined in environmental health legislation but is broadly defined in Federal risk assessment guidelines. For example, the EPA Integrated Risk Information System defines an adverse effect as “a bioch...

Coastal areas are characterised by the choice of performance measures and/or reference points which may be critical in the environmental management process, determining the success of an Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) plan. The tools for the strategic control of ICZM plans are particularly important, although they are still not widely used at the local level. The following paper prop...