Hasil untuk "Environmental law"

Chenfeng Xiong, Joyce Nakatumba Nabende, Michelle Skelton et al.

The integration of data science and artificial intelligence approaches, through multidisciplinary collaboration, is set to advance health research in Africa. Here, we describe the Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa-funded effort for enhancing healthcare delivery, disease surveillance, predictive modelling, capacity building and research innovation across Africa and globally.

Nahid Sultana, M M Rizvi, Indu Wadhawan

The management of irrigation water systems has become increasingly complex due to competing demands for agricultural production, groundwater sustainability, and environmental flow requirements, particularly under hydrologic variability and climate uncertainty. Addressing these challenges requires optimization frameworks that can jointly determine optimal crop allocation, groundwater pumping, and environmental flow releases while maintaining economic and hydrological feasibility. However, existing hydro-economic models, including the widely used Lewis and Randall formulation, may overestimate net benefits by allowing infeasible negative pumping and surface water allocations. We extend the Lewis and Randall framework by reformulating groundwater pumping and surface water use as non-negative, demand-driven decision variables and by explicitly incorporating environmental flow and canal capacity constraints. Three models are developed to maximize economic benefit, minimize environmental deficits, and a multiobjective model that evaluates the trade-offs between these two objectives. An illustrative test case examining optimal crop area allocation and environmental flow management across dry, average, and wet years, using data from the Rajshahi Barind Tract in northwestern Bangladesh, is presented. The results show that the proposed formulation produces economically and hydrologically consistent solutions, identifying optimal strategies when either net benefits or environmental protection is prioritized, as well as Pareto-optimal trade-offs when both objectives are considered together. These findings provide practical insights for balancing farm income, groundwater sustainability, and ecological protection, offering a robust decision-support tool for irrigation management in water-limited river basins.

Aayushi Dangol, Robert Wolfe, Nisha Devasia et al.

Two of the most socially consequential issues facing today's children are the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rapid changes to the earth's climate. Both issues are complex and contested, and they are linked through the notable environmental costs of AI use. Using a systems thinking framework, we developed an interactive system called Ecoprompt to help children reason about the environmental impact of AI. EcoPrompt combines a prompt-level environmental footprint calculator with a simulation game that challenges players to reason about the impact of AI use on natural resources that the player manages. We evaluated the system through two participatory design sessions with 16 children ages 6-12. Our findings surfaced children's perspectives on societal and environmental tradeoffs of AI use, as well as their sense of agency and responsibility. Taken together, these findings suggest opportunities for broadening AI literacy to include systems-level reasoning about AI's environmental impact.

Susann Wolf, Mimmi Leite, Abdulqadir Mohamad Suleiman et al.

Abstract Background Substances of very high concern (SVHCs), causing serious and often irreversible effects on human health and the environment, are included in the candidate list under the European REACH regulation, awaiting further regulatory processing. There is a need for prioritisation efforts to evaluate hazardous chemicals rapidly and efficiently. Lacking workplace exposure measurements, this paper aimed to evaluate whether it is feasible to make an exposure-based prioritisation of occupationally relevant SVHCs. Exposure surrogates, such as data on product use, production volume and processes, were used to establish exposure profiles among professional workers in the Nordic countries. Results It was challenging to create an exposure-based prioritisation list of SVHCs solely by using publicly available information, mainly due to limited data accessibility in product registers, ECHA Chem and REACH workplace exposure scenarios. Conclusions Limited data accessibility hampers an effective and transparent chemical risk assessment and exposure-based prioritisation of substances that is applicable and useful for regulatory authorities and other stakeholders. To enable a more effective chemical risk assessment and exposure-based prioritisation of substances, exposure data needs to be accessible.

Martono Anggusti, Fitri Yanni Dewi Siregar, Ruetaitip Chansrakaeo

Introduction: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved over time, reflecting changes in corporate thinking and practices regarding their relationships with society and the environment. Purposes of the Research: This research aims to analyze the regulation and implementation of CSR in Indonesia to compare it with CSR regulations in other Southeast Asian countries, namely Malaysia and Thailand. Methods of the Research: This research is a normative legal study that emphasizes a conceptual and legislative approach. Results of the Research: The development of the concept of CSR began in the 18th century by Robert Owen, who provided facilities for employees. CSR rapidly evolved in the 20th century, with large companies in the US establishing social departments. Milton Friedman's thinking about profit as the primary goal of business and John Elkington's concept of the "triple bottom line" also influenced the development of CSR. CSR functions as the moral responsibility of companies towards society and the environment, implemented through transparency, ethics, and responsible business decisions. In Indonesia, CSR has been regulated by law since 2007, with the aim of improving the quality of life and supporting sustainable development. A comparison of CSR regulations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand shows that although their goals are similar, namely to encourage corporate contributions to social and environmental development, their approaches differ. Indonesia implements strict legal obligations, Malaysia combines voluntary elements with supportive regulations, while Thailand prioritizes a cultural and voluntary approach with government recognition. Thailand is recognized as the best example in the implementation of CSR in ASEAN, with a higher quality of implementation compared to other countries.

Ruben Budău, Claudia Simona Cleopatra Timofte, Ligia Valentina Mirisan et al.

Monumental trees, defined by their exceptional size, form, and age, are critical components of both cultural heritage and ecological systems. However, their conservation faces increasing threats from habitat fragmentation, climate change, and inadequate public policies. This review synthesized global research on monumental trees by analyzing 204 peer-reviewed articles published between 1989 and 2024 that were sourced from Web of Science and Scopus. Our bibliometric analysis highlighted <i>Olea europaea</i> and <i>Castanea sativa</i> as the most frequently studied species and identified a surge in publications after 2019, particularly from the USA, Italy, and Spain. Key research themes included conservation, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The methodological approaches varied globally, encompassing ranking systems; GIS mapping; remote sensing; and non-invasive diagnostic tools, such as acoustic tomography and chlorophyll fluorescence. Conservation strategies discussed included vegetative propagation, cryopreservation, and legal risk management. Despite advances in these techniques, significant gaps remain in effectively addressing environmental pressures and integrating multidisciplinary approaches. We concluded that targeted, interdisciplinary strategies are essential to safeguard monumental trees as vital ecological and cultural landmarks.

T. K. Sridharan, J. G. Mangum, B. Butler

Measurement of environmental parameters is one of the basic requirements for the proper operation of a telescope. This memo is intended to provide guidance for the measurement accuracy requirements in the context of the ngVLA. It relies on previous work for ALMA (Mangum, 2001) and EVLA (Butler \& Perley, 2008) and a review of the subject by Mangum \& Wallace (2015). The local operational environment can be broadly divided into two categories: electromagnetic and physical. Meteorological parameters (weather) primarily constitute the physical environmental component and radio frequency interference (RFI) is the essential element of the electromagnetic environment. This memo focuses on the weather component and does not address the RFI, safety and physical infrastructure components. Under weather, the relevant topics are (1) the correction to pointing arising from refraction in the atmosphere (2) the different delays in the arrival times of signals at different antennas due to propagation in the atmosphere (3) monitoring weather parameters to provide operations support, e.g. in determining prevalence of precision or normal conditions, dynamic scheduling and the choice of antennas to constitute a sub-array with a given set of characteristics, among others, and (4) archival. Here we restrict ourselves to the first two topics which impact the data obtained and its calibration.

Hannah Wakeling, Philip Burrows, Jim Clarke et al.

The proposed construction of new particle accelerator-based facilities in the coming decades -- and upgrades to existing facilities -- provides the unique opportunity to embed innovative environmental impact reduction techniques into their design. This living document provides high-level guidelines to improve environmental sustainability in the planning, construction, operational and decommissioning stages of large accelerator facilities. A collection of various resources is provided, with examples of some existing and suggested practices.

Andres Larroza, Javier Naranjo-Alcazar, Vicent Ortiz et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer energy efficient processing suitable for edge applications, but conventional sensor data must first be converted into spike trains for neuromorphic processing. Environmental sound, including urban soundscapes, poses challenges due to variable frequencies, background noise, and overlapping acoustic events, while most spike based audio encoding research has focused on speech. This paper analyzes three spike encoding methods, Threshold Adaptive Encoding (TAE), Step Forward (SF), and Moving Window (MW) across three datasets: ESC10, UrbanSound8K, and TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes. Our multiband analysis shows that TAE consistently outperforms SF and MW in reconstruction quality, both per frequency band and per class across datasets. Moreover, TAE yields the lowest spike firing rates, indicating superior energy efficiency. For downstream environmental sound classification with a standard SNN, TAE also achieves the best performance among the compared encoders. Overall, this work provides foundational insights and a comparative benchmark to guide the selection of spike encoders for neuromorphic environmental sound processing.

Boyang Li, Zhongpeng Jin, Shuai Zhao et al.

The ability to adapt to changing environments is crucial for the autonomous navigation systems of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, existing navigation systems adopt fixed execution configurations without considering environmental dynamics based on available computing resources, e.g., with a high execution frequency and task workload. This static approach causes rigid flight strategies and excessive computations, ultimately degrading flight performance or even leading to failures in UAVs. Despite the necessity for an adaptive system, dynamically adjusting workloads remains challenging, due to difficulties in quantifying environmental complexity and modeling the relationship between environment and system configuration. Aiming at adapting to dynamic environments, this paper proposes E-Navi, an environmental-adaptive navigation system for UAVs that dynamically adjusts task executions on the CPUs in response to environmental changes based on available computational resources. Specifically, the perception-planning pipeline of UAVs navigation system is redesigned through dynamic adaptation of mapping resolution and execution frequency, driven by the quantitative environmental complexity evaluations. In addition, E-Navi supports flexible deployment across hardware platforms with varying levels of computing capability. Extensive Hardware-In-the-Loop and real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed system significantly outperforms the baseline method across various hardware platforms, achieving up to 53.9% navigation task workload reduction, up to 63.8% flight time savings, and delivering more stable velocity control.

Josh Culver, Aubrey Ayres, Evan Halloran et al.

We consider a system consisting of one conservation law and one balance law with a time-dependent source term, and provide a comprehensive analysis of Riemann solutions, including the non-classical overcompressive delta shocks. The minimal yet representative structure of the system captures essential features of transport under density constraints and, despite its simplicity, serves as a versatile prototype for crowd-limited transport processes across diverse contexts, including biological aggregation, ecological dispersal, granular compaction, and traffic congestion. In addition to non-self-similar solutions mentioned above, the associated Riemann problem admits solution structures that traverse vacuum states ($ρ= 0$) and the critical density threshold ($ρ= \barρ$), where mobility vanishes and characteristic speed degenerates. Moreover, the explicit time dependence in the source term leads to the breakdown of self-similarity, resulting in distinct Riemann solutions over successive time intervals and highlighting the dynamic nature of the solution landscape. The theoretical findings are numerically confirmed using the Local Lax-Friedrichs scheme.

Krista Harrington, Alida Cantor

Dams, once considered catalysts for economic development in the Western US, are now being targeted for removal due to their adverse ecological and social outcomes. However, dam removal often remains controversial. In the Pacific Northwest, four dams on the Lower Snake River have long been criticized for their negative impacts on salmon. In 2021, the Columbia Basin Initiative was proposed, seeking to dismantle the dams in order to simultaneously improve salmon health, redesign Idaho’s energy landscape, change transportation pathways, and protect other dams. Response to the initiative has been polarized. In this paper, we build upon political ecology and ‘unlikely alliance’ scholarship by examining the reactions to and points of tension around the initiative. We specifically focus on the viewpoints of key stakeholders who have shifted from their historically rooted alliances and views. We found that being in favour of dam removal in general was not necessarily enough to cause someone to support the Columbia Basin Initiative (and vice versa). In particular, stakeholders were split on views around legal provisions in the initiative that would limit the future utility of current environmental law. We contribute to political ecology and unlikely alliance scholarship by demonstrating that dam removal is a complex issue that can bring actors together in unanticipated ways.

Jens Kahrmann, Georg Leggewie

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2024 9(1), 21-38 | European Forum Insight of 15 April 2024 | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - II. Context. - III. The draft regulation in detail. - III.1 Category 1 NGT plants. - III.2 Category 2 NGT plants. - III.3. Provisions for delegated and implementing acts as well as guidance material. - IV. Assessment of different scientific aspects in the regulation. - IV.1. Scientific reasoning of equivalence criteria as given in Annex I. - IV.2. Scientific reasoning of risk assessment criteria as given in Annex II. - V. Assessment of different legal aspects in the draft regulation. - V.1. Deliberate releases of cat 1 plants and committee procedure. - V.2 Precautionary principle. - V.3. Cartagena protocol. - v.4. Amendment of Annex I via delegated act. - VI. Ongoing discussion | (Abstract) This Insight explains in detail, yet easily understandable, the contents of the European Commission’s draft regulation on plants obtained by certain new genomic techniques and their food and feed. It critically comments on the underlying scientific considerations and discusses potential legal issues – the precautionary principle being one of them, though arguably not the most important one. Finally, the Insight summarizes the ongoing discussions and developments regarding the draft regulation. The Authors also hint at potential amendments, which might resolve some of the remaining problems.

Anél du Plessis, Oliver N. Fuo

Udo Hommen, Marie Brown, Eric Bruns et al.

Abstract Background A recently published article, by Reiber et al., on the representativity of macroinvertebrate communities in outdoor micro- or mesocosm studies, used as a higher tier tool in the environmental risk assessment of plant protection products (PPPs) in the EU, concluded that ‘micro-/mesocosm studies do not represent natural macroinvertebrate communities’. Fundamentally, the article based its conclusion on the analysis of data from 26 streams used in a monitoring project in Germany (2018–2019), in comparison to taxa found in seven lentic micro- and mesocosm studies, conducted at four test sites (2013 – 2018), and submitted to the UBA, Germany. Results There are multiple reasons why this conclusion is incorrect, e.g. the number of taxa, for which the Minimum Detectable Differences (MDDs) were low enough to allow a detection of direct effects in the seven lentic mesocosm studies, cannot be compared to the number of taxa just present in at least five of 26 streams. We have further investigated the data from five of the seven studies which were analysed in detail by Reiber et al. and determined that the MDDs of 12 to 18 invertebrate taxa per study fulfilled the current recommendation to allow a detection of medium effects (MDD up to 70%). However, which taxa can be considered potentially sensitive depends on the specific test item. While lentic test systems may not be suitable to test effects on typical stream taxa, taxa occurring in lentic systems such as ponds and ditches are not by definition less sensitive, or vulnerable, to pesticides than taxa living in streams, and their relative sensitivity can be checked in laboratory tests, or artificial streams, if needed. Conclusions In our view, well conducted micro- and mesocosm studies do provide reliable and useful data for the environmental risk assessment of plant protection products covering long-term, as well as indirect, effects under semi-natural conditions.

Niklas Becker

In this dissertation, we look at environmental effects in extreme and intermediate mass ratio inspirals into massive black holes. In these systems, stellar mass compact objects orbit massive black holes and lose orbital energy due to gravitational wave emission and other dissipative forces. We explore environmental interactions with dark matter spikes, stellar distributions, accretion disks, and combine and compare them. We discuss the existence and properties of dark matter spikes in the presence of these environmental effects. The signatures of the environmental effects, such as the phase space flow, dephasing, deshifting of the periapse, and alignment with accretion disks, are examined. These signatures are quantified in isolated spike systems, in dry, and in wet inspirals. We generally find dark matter effects to be subdominant to the other environmental effects, but their impact on the waveform is still observable and identifiable. Lastly, the rates of inspirals and the impact of spikes are estimated. All of these results are obtained with the help of a code imripy that is published alongside. If dark matter spikes exist, they should be observable with space-based gravitational wave observatories

Tobias Vente, Lukas Wegmeth, Alan Said et al.

As global warming soars, the need to assess the environmental impact of research is becoming increasingly urgent. Despite this, few recommender systems research papers address their environmental impact. In this study, we estimate the environmental impact of recommender systems research by reproducing typical experimental pipelines. Our analysis spans 79 full papers from the 2013 and 2023 ACM RecSys conferences, comparing traditional "good old-fashioned AI" algorithms with modern deep learning algorithms. We designed and reproduced representative experimental pipelines for both years, measuring energy consumption with a hardware energy meter and converting it to CO2 equivalents. Our results show that papers using deep learning algorithms emit approximately 42 times more CO2 equivalents than papers using traditional methods. On average, a single deep learning-based paper generates 3,297 kilograms of CO2 equivalents - more than the carbon emissions of one person flying from New York City to Melbourne or the amount of CO2 one tree sequesters over 300 years.

Awais Iqbal, Muhammad Maqsood Ur Rehman, Muhammad Usman et al.

Abstract Background Wet meadows, a type of wetland, are impacted by significant climate fluctuation and human activity, impacting soil microorganisms that play an essential role in ecosystem processes. Understanding the underlying ecological mechanisms and processes of wet meadows depends on the fungal communities associated with the plant roots. We used Illumina MiSeq profiling for amplicon sequencing to determine how environmental factors and elevation affect the fungal communities of the rhizosphere and rhizoplane related to three plant species, Cremanthodium ellisii, Cremanthodium lineare, and Caltha scaposa, in alpine wet meadows. Results The phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota dominated the rhizosphere (54.5% and 20.9%) and rhizoplane (51.6% and 36.4%), while the predominant fungal genera in the rhizosphere and rhizoplane were Unclassified fungi, Unclassified Ascomycota, Pseudeurotium, Tetracladium, Vishniacozyma, Rhodotorula, Cadophora, and Penicillium. Mantel test and network analysis revealed that the soil water content (SWC), soil organic carbon (SOC), and total nitrogen (TN) were the primary drivers of fungal communities. However, the influence of microbial biomass C (MBC), pH, microbial biomass N (MBN), and elevation varied. Stochastic assembly processes were dominant in both rhizosphere and rhizoplane fungal communities. FUNGuild functional prediction revealed site-specific variation in the trophic level and guild of plant-root-associated fungal communities. The rhizosphere contained 58.5% saprotrophs, 11.7% pathotrophs, and 12.6% symbiotrophs. In addition, 60.4% of the observed OTUs were arbuscular mycorrhizae, 13.2% were endophytes, 20.9% were ectomycorrhizae, and 1.09% were orchid mycorrhizae. The rhizoplane comprised 51.3% of OTUs linked with saprotrophs, 13.9% with pathotrophs, and 7.92% with symbiotrophs. Moreover, 36.1% of OTUs represented arbuscular mycorrhizae, 25.0% were endophytes, 30.6% were ectomycorrhizae, and 2.77% were ascribed to orchid mycorrhizae in the rhizoplane. The abundance of saprotrophs and pathotrophs in the rhizosphere was highest in C. ellisii at SI and SIII, while symbiotrophs were highest in C. lineare at SIII. Similar variations among the plant species and sites were observed in the fungal functional groups (guilds). Conclusions It was concluded that although root compartments significantly influenced the fungal communities in the rhizosphere and rhizoplane, environmental factors and plant types exhibited distinct effects. This study explains how physicochemical properties, plant species, and sites can alter the overall structure and functional repertoire of fungal communities in alpine wet meadows. Graphical Abstract

Donghua Zhou, Yuxiu Huang

ABSTRACTThis paper takes the public companies as a sample during 2012–2017, using DID analysis to test the relationship between 2015 new ‘Environmental Protection Law’ and zombie companies. The results show that the promulgation of the new environmental protection law has significantly negative with zombie enterprises. The strengthening of environmental regulation has accelerated of transformation and upgrading by assets restructuring and promoted technological innovation, which inhibiting the formation of zombie enterprises. Furthermore, this paper found that the negative relationship between environmental law and zombie companies mainly concentrate in non-state-owned enterprises, small-scale enterprises and enterprises with high regional environmental law enforcement intensity. Moreover, the promulgation of the new environmental law has a significant positive effect on corporate value in the medium and long term. This paper enriches the research literature in the field of zombie enterprises and economic consequences of environmental regulation.

Vlajnić Jelena

The subject of this paper is the study of a certain segment of positive environmental law in the Republic of Serbia in the context of administrative legal protection. The leading international instrument in the field of environmental protection is the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention). The Aarhus Convention rests on the so-called "pillars", the first two of which represent the availability of environmental information and public participation in decision-making. Therefore, the presentation of the administrative and legal protection of the environment in the Republic of Serbia will be presented from the aspect of these two elements, while in the final part of the paper, the application of some of the mentioned institutes will be considered using an example from practice.