Hasil untuk "Environmental law"

Pedro Lopez-Merino, Valerie J. Stull, Valerie J. Stull et al.

This article introduces a flexible, multi-scale framework for assessing sustainability in agroecological food systems that explicitly incorporates indicators of biopsychosocial well-being across the levels of individuals, communities and institutions, and economics and ecologies. We seek to operationalize the interactive relationship between biopsychosocial health and sustainability, and argue that well-being constitutes a critical service that underpins the resilience and long-term viability of food systems. Our proposed framework bridges psychological, social, and ecological sciences, leveraging participatory and transdisciplinary methodologies. It integrates two complementary sets of metrics: a primary series of validated and standardized tools designed to quantify the different levels (from individual to ecological) and a second, participatory, community-defined set of indicators we term “vital signs of place”. These context-sensitive indicators, developed through collaborative and participatory processes, seek to support epistemic justice by centering diverse ways of knowing and living. To ensure the framework remains actionable and avoids becoming a black box, we emphasize parsimony and practical feasibility in the selection of indicators. A deliberately limited and well-prioritized set of metrics enables meaningful implementation, supports stakeholder engagement, and facilitates interpretation across contexts. The resulting framework balances comparability across regions with adaptability to local priorities and is applicable at multiple scales—from watersheds to regional levels. Central to our approach is the conceptualization of well-being as the dynamic expression of self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence both in individuals and communities, following C. Robert Cloninger's biopsychosocial model of personality. This view highlights well-being not merely as a state, but as a developmental process emerging from purposeful agency, social connectedness, and a sense of meaning beyond the self—across individuals, communities, and institutions. We emphasize as well the interactive role of socio-ecological organization in encouraging, or discouraging, these dimensions of well-being. The different standardized metrics and participatory indicators are looked at from this perspective. By focusing on the lived experiences and biopsychosocial health of rural communities, our approach aims to contribute to long-term sustainability efforts and addresses key challenges related to the Sustainable Developmental Goals. This framework offers tools and actionable guidance for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to center well-being in the transformation of the socio-ecological organization of food systems.

Rafael Araujo, Vitor Possebom, Gabriela Setti

We estimate the impact of environmental law enforcement on violence in the Brazilian Amazon. The introduction of the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System (DETER), which enabled the government to monitor deforestation in real time and issue fines for illegal clearing, significantly reduced homicides in the region. To identify causal effects, we exploit exogenous variation in satellite monitoring generated by cloud cover as an instrument for enforcement intensity. Our estimates imply that the expansion of state presence through DETER prevented approximately 1,477 homicides per year, a 15\% reduction in homicides. These results show that a replicable environmental enforcement policy produces social benefits.

Minwei Zhao, Sanja Scepanovic, Stephen Law et al.

Understanding how urban socio-demographic and environmental factors relate with health is essential for public health and urban planning. However, traditional statistical methods struggle with nonlinear effects, while machine learning models often fail to capture geographical (nearby areas being more similar) and topological (unequal connectivity between places) effects in an interpretable way. To address this, we propose MedGNN, a spatio-topologically explicit framework that constructs a 2-hop spatial graph, integrating positional and locational node embeddings with urban characteristics in a graph neural network. Applied to MEDSAT, a comprehensive dataset covering over 150 environmental and socio-demographic factors and six prescription outcomes (depression, anxiety, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and opioids) across 4,835 Greater London neighborhoods, MedGNN improved predictions by over 25% on average compared to baseline methods. Using depression prescriptions as a case study, we analyzed graph embeddings via geographical principal component analysis, identifying findings that: align with prior research (e.g., higher antidepressant prescriptions among older and White populations), contribute to ongoing debates (e.g., greenery linked to higher and NO2 to lower prescriptions), and warrant further study (e.g., canopy evaporation correlated with fewer prescriptions). These results demonstrate MedGNN's potential, and more broadly, of carefully applied machine learning, to advance transdisciplinary public health research.

Konstantin V. Getman, Oleg Kochukhov, Joe P. Ninan et al.

We explore the empirical power-law relationship between X-ray luminosity (Lx) and total surface magnetic flux (Phi), established across solar magnetic elements, time- and disk-averaged emission from the Sun, older active stars, and pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars. Previous models of large PMS X-ray flares, lacking direct magnetic field measurements, showed discrepancies from this baseline law, which MHD simulations attribute to unusually strong magnetic fields during flares. To test this, we used nearly simultaneous Chandra X-ray and HET-HPF near-infrared observations of four young Orion stars, measuring surface magnetic fields during or just after powerful PMS X-ray flares. We also modeled these PMS X-ray flares, incorporating their measured magnetic field strengths. Our findings reveal magnetic field strengths at the stellar surface typical of non-flaring PMS stars, ruling out the need for abnormally strong fields during flares. Both PMS and solar flares deviate from the Lx-Phi law, with PMS flares exhibiting a more pronounced deviation, primarily due to their much larger active regions on the surface and larger flaring loop volumes above the surface compared to their solar counterparts. These deviations likely stem from the fact that powerful flares are driven by magnetic reconnection, while baseline X-ray emission may involve less efficient mechanisms like Alfven wave heating. Our results also indicate a preference for dipolar magnetic loops in PMS flares, consistent with Zeeman-Doppler imaging of fully convective stars. This requirement for giant dipolar loops aligns with MHD predictions of strong dipoles supported by polar magnetic surface active regions in fast-rotating, fully convective stars.

Michail Bachras, Hans-Arno Jacobsen

The exponential growth of data is making query processing increasingly critical for modern computing infrastructure, yet the environmental impact of database operations remains poorly understood and largely overlooked. This paper presents ATLAS, a comprehensive methodology for measuring and quantifying the environmental footprint of analytical database systems, considering both operational impacts and manufacturing costs of hardware components. Through extensive empirical evaluation of four distinct database architectures (DuckDB, MonetDB, Hyper, and StarRocks), we uncover how fundamental architectural decisions affect environmental efficiency. Our findings reveal that environmental considerations in database operations are multifaceted, encompassing both immediate operational impacts and long-term sustainability implications. We demonstrate that architectural choices can significantly influence both power consumption and environmental sustainability, while deployment location emerges as a critical factor that can amplify or diminish these architectural advantages.

Bo Wu

In order to explore whether environmental liability insurance has an important impact on industrial emission reduction, this paper selects provincial (city) level panel data from 2010 to 2020 and constructs a two-way fixed effect model to analyze the impact of environmental liability insurance on carbon emissions from both direct and indirect levels. The empirical analysis results show that: at the direct level, the development of environmental liability insurance has the effect of reducing industrial carbon emissions, and its effect is heterogeneous. At the indirect level, the role of environmental liability insurance is weaker in areas with developed financial industry and underdeveloped financial industry. Further heterogeneity analysis shows that in the industrial developed areas, the effect of environmental liability insurance on carbon emissions is more obvious. Based on this, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward from the aspects of expanding the coverage of environmental liability insurance, innovating the development of environmental liability insurance and improving the level of industrialization.

Parveen Kumar, Magdalena Radulescu, Hemlata Sharma

Abstract Environmental taxes have emerged as a key policy tool in the European Union's efforts to promote economic stability and environmental sustainability. In order to assess the viability of the double dividend hypothesis, this study looks at how environmental taxes affect economic growth, unemployment, and CO2 emissions in 25 EU member states between 2000 and 2022. Significant relationships between fiscal environmental measures and macroeconomic performance are revealed by the analysis, which makes use of strong panel econometric techniques such as DOLS, PMG, AMG, System GMM, and DCCE estimators. The findings show that while transportation taxes encourage favorable economic outcomes, energy and pollution taxes have a negative impact on GDP. While energy and transportation taxes tend to raise unemployment, higher GDP is linked to lower unemployment. Furthermore, while unemployment greatly reduces CO2 emissions, energy and pollution taxes, as well as GDP growth, all contribute to rising CO2 emissions. The double dividend hypothesis is supported by these findings, which imply that funds collected from energy and pollution taxes (the second dividend) can be efficiently used to fund renewable energy, green infrastructure, and environmentally friendly transportation in order to reduce emissions (the first dividend). Overall, the study emphasizes that in order to achieve both economic and environmental benefits within the EU framework, proper revenue recycling and focused policy design are crucial.

Yuki Okamoto, Ryotaro Nagase, Minami Okamoto et al.

Some datasets with the described content and order of occurrence of sounds have been released for conversion between environmental sound and text. However, there are very few texts that include information on the impressions humans feel, such as "sharp" and "gorgeous," when they hear environmental sounds. In this study, we constructed a dataset with impression captions for environmental sounds that describe the impressions humans have when hearing these sounds. We used ChatGPT to generate impression captions and selected the most appropriate captions for sound by humans. Our dataset consists of 3,600 impression captions for environmental sounds. To evaluate the appropriateness of impression captions for environmental sounds, we conducted subjective and objective evaluations. From our evaluation results, we indicate that appropriate impression captions for environmental sounds can be generated.

S. Mukherjee, S. R. Sitaram, X. Wang et al.

Infrared spectroscopy currently requires the use of bulky, expensive, and/or fragile spectrometers. For gas sensing, environmental monitoring, or other applications in the field, an inexpensive, compact, robust on-chip spectrometer is needed. One way to achieve this goal is through gradient permittivity materials, in which the material permittivity changes as a function of position in the plane. In this paper, we demonstrate the synthesis of infrared gradient permittivity materials using shadow mask molecular beam epitaxy. The permittivity of our material changes as a function of position in the lateral direction, allowing us to confine varying wavelengths of infrared light at varying horizontal locations. We see an electric field enhancement corresponding to a wavenumber gradient of ~650 cm$^{-1}$ to 900 cm$^{-1}$ over an in-plane gradient width of ~13 $μ$ m on the flat mesa of our sample. In addition, we see a wavenumber gradient of ~900 cm$^{-1}$ to 1250 cm$^{-1}$ over an in-plane gradient width of ~13 $μ$m on the slope of our sample. These two different wavenumber gradient regions develop on two opposite sides of our material. This demonstration of a scalable method of creating an in-plane gradient permittivity material could be leveraged for the creation of a variety of miniature infrared devices, such as an ultracompact spectrometer.

Matthew A. Bershady, Kyle B. Westfall, Shravan Shetty et al.

We measure the age-velocity relationship from the lag between ionized gas and stellar tangential speeds in ~500 nearby disk galaxies from MaNGA in SDSS-IV. Selected galaxies are kinematically axisymmetric. Velocity lags are asymmetric drift, seen in the Milky Way's (MW) solar neighborhood and other Local Group galaxies; their amplitude correlates with stellar population age. The trend is qualitatively consistent in rate (d(sigma)/dt) with a simple power-law model where sigma is proportional to t^b that explains the dynamical phase-space stratification in the solar neighborhood. The model is generalized based on disk dynamical times to other radii and other galaxies. We find in-plane radial stratification parameters sigma_(0,r} (dispersion of the youngest populations) in the range of 10-40 km/s and 0.2<b_r<0.5 for MaNGA galaxies. Overall b_r increases with galaxy mass, decreases with radius for galaxies above 10.4 dex (M_solar) in stellar mass, but is ~constant with radius at lower mass. The measurement scatter indicates the stratification model is too simple to capture the complexity seen in the data, unsurprising given the many possible astrophysical processes that may lead to stellar population dynamical stratification. Nonetheless, the data show dynamical stratification is broadly present in the galaxy population, with systematic trends in mass and density. The amplitude of the asymmetric drift signal is larger for the MaNGA sample than the MW, and better represented in the mean by what is observed in the disks of M31 and M33. Either typical disks have higher surface-density or, more likely, are dynamically hotter (hence thicker) than the MW.

Sabyasachi Chattopadhyay, Matthew A. Bershady, David R. Law et al.

We have re-observed $\rm\sim$40 low-inclination, star-forming galaxies from the MaNGA survey ($\upsigma\sim65$~\kms) at $\sim$6.5 times higher spectral resolution ($\upsigma\sim10$~\kms) using the HexPak integral field unit on the WIYN 3.5m telescope. The aim of these observations is to calibrate MaNGA's instrumental resolution and to characterize turbulence in the warm interstellar medium and ionized galactic outflows. Here we report the results for the H$\rm\upalpha$ region observations as they pertain to the calibration of MaNGA's spectral resolution. Remarkably, we find that the previously-reported MaNGA line-spread-function (LSF) Gaussian width is systematically underestimated by only 1\%. The LSF increase modestly reduces the characteristic dispersion of HII regions-dominated spectra sampled at 1-2 kpc spatial scales from 23 to 20 km s$^{-1}$ in our sample, or a 25\% decrease in the random-motion kinetic energy. This commensurately lowers the dispersion zeropoint in the relation between line-width and star-formation rate surface-density in galaxies sampled on the same spatial scale. This modest zero-point shift does not appear to alter the power-law slope in the relation between line-width and star-formation rate surface-density. We also show that adopting a scheme whereby corrected line-widths are computed as the square root of the median of the difference in the squared measured line width and the squared LSF Gaussian avoids biases and allows for lower SNR data to be used reliably.

Michele Marchi

There are rules that provide shared information with the aim of guiding the behaviour of individuals or the community regarding spaces, processes and products. Therefore, the goal is to start a normalisation and standardisation procedure, which allows to solve a specific problem. With regard to the culture and practice of accessibility of spaces and environments, the reference legislation (Law 13/89, Presidential Decree 24 July 1996, n. 503, ISO 21541:2021, Ministerial Decree 236/89, UNI 17210:2021) is not only rather obsolete, but also excludes a large part of potential users. This paper aims to open a debate on the current operational tools in order to evaluate and design an inclusive context, proposing a new, more performing and universal one. The culture of accessibility is not only the scrupulous and scientific observance of the rules. It also means combining both quantitative and qualitative needs; therefore, providing environmental well-being. Thanks to the critical description of reference or experimental evaluation or design tools (HCD participatory methodologies for the definition of needs analyses, Quality Function Deployment for the tracking of technical specifications, ICF with a focus on UNI activities, laws, decrees and regulations to observe the Rule), this paper describes some projects that attempted to go beyond the rule, providing an inclusive context and space to meet people’s actual needs. Therefore, putting some operational tools into functional synergy (Rules, Inclusive Methodologies, ICF, QFD) to define a new multi-criteria tool can be an excellent starting point to develop, for each specific environmental context, a list of expectations that are important for planning and evaluation.

Editor Admin, Suhardi Mukhlis, Sutardi Sutardi et al.

This study aims to analyze the application of human resource management strategies at the Bintan Regency Environmental Office. This research is a study that uses qualitative research. The results showed that the implementation of human resource strategies at the Bintan Regency Environmental Office has been implemented but must be developed again because basically human resources have many differences for each individual. Planning at the Bintan Regency Environmental Office has been done well through planning, implementation, organizing. In terms of organizing, human resources owned by the Bintan Regency Environmental Office are still developing and training in order to implement the policies contained in the Bintan Regency regional regulations because the Bintan Regency Environmental Office is engaged in the government sector that regulates government regulations through policies that have been regulated in law. 

Junmeng Li, Laiwei Wu, Yanli Huang et al.

Abstract High-intensity coal mining has induced a series of ecological and environmental problems issues, including surface subsidence, the development of ground cracks, and the deterioration of vegetation. The disruption of water circulation systems induced by mining, such as perched groundwater, groundwater of aeration zone, and phreatic water, is the root cause of vegetation withering. The aeration zone serves as a crucial nexus in the process of water cycling and exerts a significant influence on soil fertility. To explore the characteristics of soil moisture transport in subsidence areas under the mining disturbance, on-site monitoring of the size and morphology characteristics of subsidence areas and ground cracks was conducted in typical mining areas in Inner Mongolia, China. Subsequently, a typical soil moisture transport model was constructed in subsidence areas, the soil moisture transport patterns under the influence of different types of subsidence and cracks were analyzed, and the influence law of soil damage on soil moisture transport in the aerated zone was clarified. The results indicate that (1) Based on the occurrence and distribution characteristics of subsidence cracks, the subsidence area can be divided into tension zone, compression zone, and neutral zone; the ground cracks are divided into permanent tension cracks and dynamic cracks. (2) The drought stress effect of soil in the subsidence area is significant. Under the influence of soil structure variation, the water-holding capacity of the soil in the subsidence area decreases, and the soil moisture dissipation is strong. The soil moisture transport rate in the aeration zone of the subsidence area is ranked as follows: tension zone > neutral zone > compression zone. (3) Ground cracks can exacerbate the soil moisture transport rate in the aeration zone. After 15 d of crack appearance, the soil moisture transport reaches a relatively stable state, and the soil moisture transport rate in the surface layer of the crack is the fastest, and the loss of soil moisture is the most significant. The crack effect is not significant beyond 100 cm from the crack. This study provides a theoretical and data support for soil and vegetation remediation in mining subsidence areas.

Heru Saputra Lumban Gaol, Wafia Silvi Dhesinta Rini

Based on a study in the Journal Nature, it is known that 86% of plastic waste in the ocean comes from Asian rivers. Indonesia was reported to be the second highest level country of waste production, producing more than 3 million metric tons of plastic waste every year. Generally, the waste comes from the industrial sector, especially Bottled Drinking Water (AMDK). Starting from collective concern about global environmental issues, comes behavior to encourage sustainable consumption and production. Nowadays, consumers are more inclined to choose eco-friendly products or services. Unfortunately, this consumer awareness is also accompanied by greenwashing conducted by business actors as biased information related to products. This greenwashing practice certainly contradicts consumers' basic rights as stipulated in Article 4 point 3 of the Consumer Protection Law regarding consumer right to get correct, clear, and honest information of goods and/or services. This research examined the framework for developing consumer protection laws that can protect consumers from the negative excesses of greenwashing in the AMDK industry. To analyze the problem, socio-legal research methods which use a legal and social science approach. The research results show that consumers already have environmental awareness of AMDK products and are also willing to buy ecolabel products even if the price is more expensive. To protect these interests, it is necessary to build an ecocentrism-oriented legal development framework that prioritizes the role of both parties in sustainable production and consumption behavior.

Monica R. Vidaurri, Alexander Q. Gilbert

This document is an abbreviated version of the law review, led by Alexander Q. Gilbert, entitled: "Major Federal Actions Significantly Affecting the Quality of the Space Environment: Applying NEPA to Federal and Federally Authorized Outer Space Activities." Here, we discuss the future of the space environment, and how it is increasingly becoming a human environment with regard to continued robotic and human presence in orbit, planned and proposed robotic and human presence on bodies such as the Moon and Mars, planned space mining projects, the increase use of low-Earth orbit for communications satellites, and other human uses of space. As such, we must evaluate and protect these environments just as we do on Earth. In order to prioritize mitigating threat of contamination, avoiding conflict, and promoting sustainability in space, all to ensure that actors maintain equal and safe access to space, we propose applying the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, to space missions. We put forward three examples of environmental best practices for those involved in space missions to consider: adopting precautionary and communicative structure to before, during, and after missions taking place off-world, environmental impact statements, and transparency in tools that may impact the environment (including radioisotope power sources, plans in case of vehicle loss or loss of trajectory, and others). For additional discussion related to potential space applications of NEPA, NEPA's statutory text, and NEPA's relation to space law and judicial precedent for space, we recommend reading the full law review.

Zhenyu Gao, Dimitri N. Mavris

Accurate modeling of aircraft environmental impact is pivotal to the design of operational procedures and policies to mitigate negative aviation environmental impact. Aircraft environmental impact segmentation is a process which clusters aircraft types that have similar environmental impact characteristics based on a set of aircraft features. This practice helps model a large population of aircraft types with insufficient aircraft noise and performance models and contributes to better understanding of aviation environmental impact. Through measuring the similarity between aircraft types, distance metric is the kernel of aircraft segmentation. Traditional ways of aircraft segmentation use plain distance metrics and assign equal weight to all features in an unsupervised clustering process. In this work, we utilize weakly-supervised metric learning and partial information on aircraft fuel burn, emissions, and noise to learn weighted distance metrics for aircraft environmental impact segmentation. We show in a comprehensive case study that the tailored distance metrics can indeed make aircraft segmentation better reflect the actual environmental impact of aircraft. The metric learning approach can help refine a number of similar data-driven analytical studies in aviation.

Yi-Fan Zhao, Ruoxi Zhang, Zi-Ting Sun et al.

Magnetic topological states refer to a class of exotic phases in magnetic materials with their non-trivial topological property determined by magnetic spin configurations. An example of such states is the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) state, which is a zero magnetic field manifestation of the quantum Hall effect. Current research in this direction focuses on QAH insulators with a thickness of less than 10nm. The thick QAH insulators in the three-dimensional(3D) regime are limited, largely due to inevitable bulk carriers being introduced in thick magnetic TI samples. Here, we employ molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to synthesize magnetic TI trilayers with a thickness of up to ~106 nm. We find these samples exhibit well-quantized Hall resistance and vanishing longitudinal resistance at zero magnetic field. By varying magnetic dopants, gate voltages, temperature, and external magnetic fields, we examine the properties of these thick QAH insulators and demonstrate the robustness of the 3D QAH effect. The realization of the well-quantized 3D QAH effect indicates that the nonchiral side surface states of our thick magnetic TI trilayers are gapped and thus do not affect the QAH quantization. The 3D QAH insulators of hundred-nanometer thickness provide a promising platform for the exploration of fundamental physics, including axion physics and image magnetic monopole, and the advancement of electronic and spintronic devices to circumvent Moore's law.

Yazmin Hailen Ugalde de la Cruz, Beatriz Maruri Aguilar, María Magdalena Hernández Martínez et al.

Se efectuó una revisión temática acerca del papel del fuego en las comunidades vegetales de las zonas áridas mexicanas, con énfasis en la denominada semidesierto queretano hidalguense. Esta región es hábitat de una gran riqueza biológica, apreciable en su diversidad de comunidades vegetales y endemismos, y está considerada dentro del proyecto Geoparque Mundial Unesco Triángulo Sagrado, en el centro de México. Los recursos empleados fueron bases de datos meteorológicas, cifras acerca de los incendios forestales en el país y en el estado de Querétaro, e información bibliográfica. El fuego no cumple una función necesaria o benéfica para las comunidades vegetales de biomas áridos y semiáridos, cuyo ambiente y estructura propios no facilitan su propagación. Aun así, pueden surgir incendios que dañan severamente a las plantas, a pesar de que algunas de sus adaptaciones las protegen de las temperaturas elevadas. En México, los matorrales xerófilos no forman parte de los ambientes con mayor presencia de puntos de calor, aunque sí sufren pérdidas por fuego, prácticamente cada año. Los datos de los últimos años muestran que los incendios forestales en los municipios que forman parte del semidesierto queretano hidalguense se presentan ocasionalmente y no afectan superficies grandes. El fuego se relaciona de manera natural con la sequía, pero en la región estudiada los registros meteorológicos son insuficientes para determinar que existe una reducción paulatina en el volumen de precipitación anual. Estas circunstancias requieren una estrategia de conocimiento, prevención y manejo de los efectos del fuego en el semidesierto queretano hidalguense, lo que puede traducirse en mejores herramientas y decisiones para su planeación y manejo.

Taiwei Wang, Yutao Chen

Although corporate environmental performance has received widespread attention and its economic consequences have been studied in the literature, little is known about the motivation of firms to choose different environmental strategies (corporate environmental expenditures). Constructing an indicator for the capitalization of corporate environmental expenditures, we explore corporate environmental strategies. This paper investigates the impact of environmental legislation on the capitalization of corporate environmental expenditures. By analyzing data on manual environmental expenditures of Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2020, we find that implementing the new Environmental Protection Law (EPL) can enhance the capitalization of corporate environmental expenditures of high polluting firms. The effect is stronger for firms with higher external legitimacy pressures, such as those with greater public supervision and environmental enforcement. Firms with more internal resources are more likely to experience this effect, as evidenced by lower financing constraints and less managerial myopia. Further mechanistic studies suggest that implementing new EPL raises environmental media attention and perceived environmental risk among high polluting firms. This paper contributes to the environmental accounting literature by introducing a novel measure of corporate environmental strategy-the capitalization of corporate environmental expenditures. It investigates the effect of environmental regulation on the capitalization of corporate environmental expenditures to provide a reference for polluting firms' corporate environmental strategy and the implementation of the EPL in China.