Hasil untuk "Environmental protection"

Noah J. Goldstein, R. Cialdini, Vladas Griskevicius

M. Rehman, Lijun Liu, Qin Wang et al.

Rasel Das, C. Vecitis, Agnes Schulze et al.

L. Kimball, P. Haas, R. Keohane et al.

Stanić Miloš, Galić Borislav

Society is undergoing rapid transformation, posing significant challenges to legal systems worldwide. A central aspect of this transformation is the development of artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, the right to a healthy environment, guaranteed by the constitution worldwide, is a fundamental human right and concerns all citizens, because everyone affects the state of the environment. The authors in this paper, after introducing the concept of artificial intelligence itself, first deal with the current normative state of the art in this area, both at the level of international public law and at the level of domestic legal orders. After that, the importance of environmental protection, the legal framework for its protection, and the norms regarding the use of artificial intelligence in environmental protection are presented, with an appropriate conclusion.

Meng Teng, Gong Zhi, Amr Tolba et al.

Abstract The growing urgency to transition toward clean energy systems has heightened interest in marine renewable energy (MRE) as a sustainable solution for coastal regions facing environmental degradation from fossil fuel use. This study applies the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method to evaluate and rank MRE options, offshore wind, tidal, and wave energy, based on four key criteria: Efficiency, Cost, Emissions, and Resource Availability. Expert judgment was used to derive weighted preferences, and a structured decision matrix facilitated performance scoring and ranking. The analysis identified Efficiency as the most influential factor, with offshore wind energy emerging as the top alternative due to its strong performance and scalability. The results offer a practical, adaptable framework for supporting energy planning in coastal zones, enabling decision-makers to balance environmental protection and operational feasibility.

L. Goulder, Ian W. H. Parry, Roberton C. Williams et al.

This paper uses analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to study the costs of achieving pollution reductions under a range of environmental policy instruments in a second-best setting with pre-existing factor taxes. We compare the costs and efficiency impacts of emissions taxes, emissions quotas, fuels taxes, performance standards, and mandated technologies, and explore how costs change with the magnitude of pre-existing taxes and the extent of pollution abatement. We find that the presence of distortionary taxes raises the costs of pollution abatement under each instrument relative to its costs in a first-best world. This extra cost is an increasing function of the magnitude of pre-existing tax rates. For plausible values of pre-existing tax rates and other parameters, the cost increase for all policies is substantial (35 % or more). The impact of pre-existing taxes is large for non-auctioned emissions quotas, the cost increase can be several hundred percent. Earlier work on instrument choice emphasized the potential reduction in compliance cost from converting fixed emissions quotas into tradeable emissions permits. Our results show the regulator's decision to auction or grandfather emissions rights can have important cost impacts. Similarly, the choice of how to recycle revenues from environmentally motivated taxes can be as important to cost as whether the tax takes the form of an emissions tax or fuel tax, particularly when modest emissions reductions are involved. In both first- and second-best settings, the cost differences across instruments depend on the extent of pollution abatement under consideration. Total abatement costs differ markedly at low levels of abatement. Strikingly, for all instruments except the fuel tax these costs converge to the same value as abatement levels approach 100 percent.

Nesrine Benchoubane, Olfa Ben Yahia, William Ferguson et al.

In the face of adverse environmental conditions and cyber threats, robust communication systems for critical applications such as wildfire management and detection demand secure and resilient architectures. This paper presents a novel framework that considers both adversarial factors, building resilience into a heterogeneous network (HetNet) integrating Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation with High-Altitude Platform Ground Stations (HAPGS) and Low-Altitude Platforms (LAPS), tailored to support wildfire management operations. Building upon our previous work on secure-by-component approach for link segment security, we extend protection to the communication layer by securing both Radio Frequency (RF)/Free Space Optics (FSO) management and different links. Through a case study, we quantify how environmental stressors impact secrecy capacity and expose the system to passive adversaries. Key findings demonstrate that atmospheric attenuation and beam misalignment can notably degrade secrecy capacity across both short- and long-range communication links, while high-altitude eavesdroppers face less signal degradation, increasing their interception capability. Moreover, increasing transmit power to counter environmental losses can inadvertently improve eavesdropper reception, thereby reducing overall link confidentiality. Our work not only highlights the importance of protecting networks from these dual threats but also aligns with the IEEE P3536 Standard for Space System Cybersecurity Design, ensuring resilience and the prevention of mission failures.

Aloni Cohen

Are there any conditions under which a generative model's outputs are guaranteed not to infringe the copyrights of its training data? This is the question of "provable copyright protection" first posed by Vyas, Kakade, and Barak (ICML 2023). They define near access-freeness (NAF) and propose it as sufficient for protection. This paper revisits the question and establishes new foundations for provable copyright protection -- foundations that are firmer both technically and legally. First, we show that NAF alone does not prevent infringement. In fact, NAF models can enable verbatim copying, a blatant failure of copyright protection that we dub being tainted. Then, we introduce our blameless copyright protection framework for defining meaningful guarantees, and instantiate it with clean-room copyright protection. Clean-room copyright protection allows a user to control their risk of copying by behaving in a way that is unlikely to copy in a counterfactual "clean-room setting." Finally, we formalize a common intuition about differential privacy and copyright by proving that DP implies clean-room copyright protection when the dataset is golden, a copyright deduplication requirement.

Zelin Li, Ruohan Zong, Yifan Liu et al.

With the advancement of personalized image generation technologies, concerns about forgery attacks that infringe on portrait rights and privacy are growing. To address these concerns, protection perturbation algorithms have been developed to disrupt forgery generation. However, the protection algorithms would become ineffective when forgery attackers apply purification techniques to bypass the protection. To address this issue, we present a novel approach, Anti-Tamper Perturbation (ATP). ATP introduces a tamper-proof mechanism within the perturbation. It consists of protection and authorization perturbations, where the protection perturbation defends against forgery attacks, while the authorization perturbation detects purification-based tampering. Both protection and authorization perturbations are applied in the frequency domain under the guidance of a mask, ensuring that the protection perturbation does not disrupt the authorization perturbation. This design also enables the authorization perturbation to be distributed across all image pixels, preserving its sensitivity to purification-based tampering. ATP demonstrates its effectiveness in defending forgery attacks across various attack settings through extensive experiments, providing a robust solution for protecting individuals' portrait rights and privacy. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Seeyn/Anti-Tamper-Perturbation .

Wenna Fan, Feng Wang, Siyu Liu et al.

To investigate the direct influence and mechanism of China's financial and manufacturing co-agglomeration on environmental pollution, we constructed a panel data regression model incorporating mediating and threshold effects with the panel data of 285 prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2019. The results showed a higher co-agglomeration level significantly increased environmental pollution. The transmission and upgrading from secondary to tertiary industries exhibited a remarkable intermediary role, yet the credit scale formed a nonlinear threshold effect. Both industrial structure optimization and credit scale expansion contributed to environmental protection. Nevertheless, the path of "industrial co-agglomeration → technological progress → environmental protection" was not obvious, and the positive externalities of technology need to be strengthened. These findings provide viable insights for the implementation of financial and manufacturing integration and green development.

Patrick Chwalek, Sailin Zhong, Nathan Perry et al.

This study presents a comprehensive dataset capturing indoor environmental parameters, physiological responses, and subjective perceptions across three global cities. Utilizing wearable sensors, including smart eyeglasses, and a modified Cozie app, environmental and physiological data were collected, along with pre-screening, onboarding, and recurring surveys. Peripheral cues facilitated participant engagement with micro-EMA surveys, minimizing disruption over a 5-day collection period. The dataset offers insights into urban comfort dynamics, highlighting the interplay between environmental conditions, physiological responses, and subjective perceptions. Researchers can utilize this dataset to deepen their understanding of indoor environmental quality and inform the design of healthier built environments. Access to this dataset can advance indoor environmental research and contribute to the creation of more comfortable and sustainable indoor spaces.

Mike Nkongolo, Jahrad Sewnath

The research aims to explore how individuals perceive and interact with data protection practices in an era of increasing reliance on technology and the widespread availability of personal data. The study employs a game theoretical approach to investigate the psychological factors that influence individuals' awareness and comprehension of data protection measures. This involves using strategies, moves, rewards, and observations within the game to gain comprehensive insights into these psychological factors. Through the analysis of player strategies and moves within the game, the research identifies several psychological factors that impact awareness of data protection. These factors include levels of knowledge, attitudes, perceived risks, and individual differences among participants. The findings highlight the intricate nature of human cognition and behavior concerning data protection, offering insights crucial for developing effective awareness games and educational initiatives in this domain.

Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Tianyu Du et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. However, their increasing popularity has raised significant copyright concerns, as these models can be misused to reproduce copyrighted content without authorization. In response, recent studies have proposed various copyright protection methods, including adversarial perturbation, concept erasure, and watermarking techniques. However, their effectiveness and robustness against advanced attacks remain largely unexplored. Moreover, the lack of unified evaluation frameworks has hindered systematic comparison and fair assessment of different approaches. To bridge this gap, we systematize existing copyright protection methods and attacks, providing a unified taxonomy of their design spaces. We then develop CopyrightMeter, a unified evaluation framework that incorporates 17 state-of-the-art protections and 16 representative attacks. Leveraging CopyrightMeter, we comprehensively evaluate protection methods across multiple dimensions, thereby uncovering how different design choices impact fidelity, efficacy, and resilience under attacks. Our analysis reveals several key findings: (i) most protections (16/17) are not resilient against attacks; (ii) the "best" protection varies depending on the target priority; (iii) more advanced attacks significantly promote the upgrading of protections. These insights provide concrete guidance for developing more robust protection methods, while its unified evaluation protocol establishes a standard benchmark for future copyright protection research in text-to-image generation.

Hugo Sant'Anna

This paper examines the labor market impacts of the 2015 Mariana Dam disaster in Brazil. It contrasts two theoretical models: an urban spatial equilibrium model and a factor of production model, with diverging perspectives on environmental influences on labor outcomes. Utilizing rich national administrative and spatial data, the study reveals that the unusual environmental alteration, with minimal human capital loss, primarily affected outcomes via the factor of production channel. Nevertheless, spatial equilibrium dynamics are discernible within certain market segments. This research contributes to the growing literature on environmental changes and its economic consequences.

Fang Wang, Xingzhong Yuan, Yingjun Sun et al.

Mainstreaming biodiversity into protection planning and management is of great significance for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Species potential distribution modeling is an effective way for species diversity evaluation and biodiversity hotspots identification, which are crucial for biodiversity conservation. Taking the Central Urban Area of Chongqing Municipality as the study area, the main objectives of this study were to identify the potentially suitable habitats, species richness and biodiversity of key protected species in current and future, determine the relative contribution of environmental factors and assess the conservation effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) based on MaxEnt model and gap analysis. The results showed that the current potentially suitable habitats of total key protected species were mainly located in “two rivers and four mountains”, with a total area of 1610.55 km2, of which forestland accounted for 59.78 %. Species suitable habitats demonstrated clear topographic heterogeneity, and the distribution index decreased at first and then increased with increasing terrain niche index (TNI). Meanwhile, it was observed that key protected plants and birds shared similar suitable habitats in mountainous areas, with an overlapping area of 753.53 km2, and the high species richness covered 182.83 km2. In 2050, the future biodiversity hotspots would remain stable and increase steadily. In terms of the direction of centroid shift, the biodiversity hotspots would migrate to low latitude, low altitude and southeast by 8.34 km. The jackknife tests indicated that the potential distribution of key protected species was mainly determined by land use, mean diurnal range and TNI. Additionally, the problems of high protection gaps and low protection effectiveness coexisted in the existing PAs, with the overlapping area of the comprehensive biodiversity hotspots and the existing PAs was only 446.96 km2. Finally, suggestions for natural PAs system optimization and ecological protection were proposed. This study provides scientific supports for biodiversity conservation and efficient management.

Pham Quy Giang, Rajendra Khanal

Vietnam is a coastal country with a coastline stretching more than 3,260 km. Marine resources are important for the development of Vietnam. In Vietnamese seas, there are about 20 typical ecosystems spreading over 1 million square kilometers in the East Sea consisting of mangrove forests, coral reefs, lagoons, seagrasses in intertidal areas and estuaries, and living species in 155,000 hectares, 1,300 square kilometers, 500 square kilometers, 16,000 hectares, and 11,000 living species, respectively. At present, the impact of climate change, socio-economic development, and environmental pollution are considered as the main causes of degradation of Vietnam’s marine ecosystems. This paper presents and discusses the pressure of socio-economic activities including industry, tourism, marine transportation and services, aquaculture and fishery on marine ecosystems. In Vietnam, compared to the early 2000s a total of 12% of coral reefs, and 48% of other coral reefs are vulnerable to degradation. So far, about 100 species of marine life in Vietnam are at risk of being threatened due to over-exploitation and fishing. The seagrass-bed ecosystem is currently being degraded with only over 5,580 ha remaining. In some areas, such as Cat Ba, Ha Long, and Quang Nam, seagrass beds have almost no chance to recover naturally due to serious impacts from tourism and aquaculture activities. From the findings, orientations that aim at effective management and protection of marine ecosystems to cope with adverse impacts of anthropogenic activities, climate change, and the pressure of socioeconomic development were proposed.

Liudmyla Datsenko, Svitlana Titova, Marharyta Dubnytska

Aim of the study: The purpose of the study is to substantiate the conceptual approaches of the complex and to consider its main components regarding the restoration of territories affected by the war in Ukraine, with an emphasis on the incompleteness of current legal acts. It is therefore essential to develop new legal mechanisms that will ensure the procedure for removing contaminated lands into state ownership for their long-term restoration, with appropriate compensation to landowners for the period of time that the contaminated land remains in state ownership. Material and methods: The theoretical basis consists of academic research by domestic and international scientists in the field of land management and environmental protection, legislative and regulatory acts, methodological and instructional materials, statistical and analytical data of ministries and departments of Ukraine, as well as public organizations regarding the use of land resources and socio-economic development of the regions of Ukraine. Methods used include: monographic analysis; synthesis method; structural and logical method; systemic approach; dialectical principle of connection /interaction. Results and conclusions: The land relations during the reconstruction of Ukraine should be based on the following principles and approaches: openness of the public cadastral map of Ukraine; simplification of permit procedures; assessment of land and soil quality, inventory; continuation of the trend of decreasing arable land; conservation of lands, the use of which could harm human life and health as well as the state of the environment; expropriation of land from tenants who are connected to Russia or Belarus; soil conservation in the context of war; introduction of the state system for the control of land resources and the responsibility of land users.

H. Patrick Roberts, Lori Erb, Lisabeth Willey et al.

Turtle populations are declining globally, yet limited attention has been directed toward understanding the conservation status of species perceived to be widespread and common. The goal of this study was to contribute to the understanding of the conservation status of the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina), a wide-ranging terrestrial generalist, in the northeastern United States (Maine to Virginia) by (1) characterizing relationships between occurrence and anthropogenic land use and (2) estimating the extent of land-use driven habitat impairment for the region. We used a regional dataset of occurrence records combined with pseudo-absences to develop species distribution models to first estimate the potential distribution in the northeastern United States and then predict habitat suitability within that distribution. We observed a strong positive relationship between probability of occurrence and canopy cover (within 180 m) and a strong negative relationship with hay/pasture fields (360 m), cultivated crops (180 m), impervious surface (360 m), and forest loss (since 2000; 1440 m). We estimate that approximately 51% of eastern box turtle habitat in the northeastern United States may be impaired by land use, with the majority of impairment predicted from Pennsylvania and Delaware south to Virginia. This study, in combination with previous long-term studies documenting population declines, suggests that greater attention to the conservation status of the eastern box turtle is warranted.

S. Wei, R. Richard, D. Hogue et al.

People spend most of their time indoors and are exposed to numerous contaminants in the built environment. Water management plans implemented in buildings are designed to manage the risks of preventable diseases caused by drinking water contaminants such as opportunistic pathogens (e.g., Legionella spp.), metals, and disinfection by-products (DBPs). However, specialized training required to implement water management plans and heterogeneity in building characteristics limit their widespread adoption. Implementation of machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) models in building water settings presents an opportunity for faster, more widespread use of data-driven water quality management approaches. We demonstrate the utility of Random Forest and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) ML models for predicting a key public health parameter, free chlorine residual, as a function of data collected from building water quality sensors (ORP, pH, conductivity, and temperature) as well as WiFi signals as a proxy for building occupancy and water usage in a “green” Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) commercial and institutional building. The models successfully predicted free chlorine residual declines below 0.2 ppm, a common minimum reference level for public health protection in drinking water distribution systems. The predictions were valid up to 5 min in advance, and in some cases reasonably accurate up to 24 h in advance, presenting opportunities for proactive water quality management as part of a sense-analyze-decide framework. An online data dashboard for visualizing water quality in the building is presented, with the potential to link these approaches for real-time water quality management.