Pingbian Miao Autonomous County is one of the poorest rural areas in China. Land-use changes, mainly driven by agricultural expansion and deforestation, may significantly impact ecosystem services and functions, but such effects are difficult to quantify. In the present study, Landsat image data were combined with the published coefficients about the world and China ecosystem to quantify land-u...

The Israel network of Healthy Cities has been operating since 1990, and the first evaluation of its performance was carried out in 2004. The objectives were to evaluate the level of implementation of the 'Healthy Cities' principles and strategies in each network city and to assess the contribution of the network to its member cities. Coordinators of 18 active healthy cities participated in the ...

Ecological economics arose in the final decades of the 20th century out of concerns for environmental protection and economic sustainability. It was largely a response to a real or perceived lack of physical and biological underpinnings in neoclassical economics. It was also intended to infuse economics with a moral philosophy, in contrast with the amoral implications of neoclassical models por...

WTO standard-setting and NGO labelling are promoted as alternative approaches to international environmental protection. This has been particularly true in the context of transboundary problems such as biodiversity protection. We develop a model with realistic features and to compare the two approaches, and observe the potential inter-play between them. In a world in which the WTO is subject to...

The environment and public health goals hold a common value of healthy populations. The threat of bioterrorism requires a partnership of both, building upon the long history of the link between public health and the environment. This existing relationship is key to an effective system of biodefense for the nation, because the use of biological weapons through every environmental pathway poses a...

A last word: in the 15th of February 2008 issue of the well-known magazine “Science” you can read a short position paper on “Transforming Environmental Health Protection”, by the Director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Research and Development of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Associate Director of the U.S. ...

A highly luminescent freestanding film composed of the quantum cluster, Au(15), was prepared. We studied the utility of the material for specific metal ion detection. The sensitivity of the red emission of the cluster in the composite to Cu(2+) has been used to make a freestanding metal ion sensor, similar to pH paper. The luminescence of the film was stable when exposed to several other metal ...

concern for the environment is a constantly growing phenomenon. awareness of most peopleand governments in the world with regard to this question has risen. sometimes, this position is inverselyproportional to economic growth, leading to a situation where a more environmental stance on the part of end users has often not been supported by more restrictive environmental protection laws. this stu...

Collaboration across cultural and national boundaries has become a means to address critical global problems. This paper presents a case study examining the dynamics and processes that participants used to support transnational collaboration in the policy areas of public health and environmental protection. The case studied is AIRNow-International Shanghai, a collaborative project between the U...