Public access to environmental information - challenges and research directions: a review of current issues with environmental information provision

September 2-

State and Local Environmental Information Centers, Facilities, and Services

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has already kindly provided the first edition of a catalog of state and local environmental libraries. 1 However, I wish to provide more than such a catalog. As you may have read in Schneiderman's paper, there are both active and passive library roles to be played. I will concentrate on discussing the possible active roles of an environmental library after I dismiss a few of the passive items. Browsing through the EPA listing will give you an idea of the range of libraries dealing both generally and specifically with environmentally related materials. Naturally, each state library will collect some environmental journals, books, and conference proceedings. Some state governments which have established either a natural resources department or an environmental research agency have started environmental collections (e.g., Arkansas, Delaware, Michigan, and Illinois). Small, local public libraries try to collect mostly nontechnical, lay reading material on the environmental crisis. In addition to these types of libraries, we must remember to take advantage of all those special collections which may be considered national or regional, but which are also frequently local. For example, unless one lives in Santa Barbara, California, the Oil Spill Information Center there may be unknown. Another narrow subject area is dealt with by the eutrophication program at the University of Wisconsin's Water Resources Center. (A future edition of EPA's directory might contain a subject listing of special collections.) Without assuming to speak for all special libraries, one may say that most of them are happy to serve by phone or mail. Professional associations and foundations ranging from the Conservation Foundation in Washington, D.C., to the American Foundrymen's Society in Des Plaines, Illinois usually have libraries or information centers with very specific environmental information available.published or submitted for publicatio

Public access to environmental information: Past, present and future

Since the late 1960s and the "environmental revolution", information and information systems have been an integral part of the environmental debate. In the decade that has passed since the Rio conference and the establishment of the "sustainable development" principle, there have been legislative and practical moves to open access to environmental information for all stakeholders that are involved in environmental decision making processes. In this paper, the origins of environmental information and public environmental information systems are explored and scrutinised. The paper questions the current state of the art in environmental information provision, and offers some directions for possible improvements. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd

Criticality of environmental information obtainable by dynamically controlled quantum probes

A universal approach to decoherence control combined with quantum estimation theory reveals a critical behavior, akin to a phase transition, of the information obtainable by a qubit probe concerning the memory time of environmental fluctuations. This criticality emerges only when the probe is subject to dynamical control. It gives rise to a sharp transition between two dynamical phases characterized by either a short or long memory time compared to the probing time. This phase-transition of the environmental information is a fundamental feature that facilitates the attainment of the highest estimation precision of the environment memory-time and the characterization of probe dynamics.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

APPROACHES OF ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION AUDIT IN ANNUAL REPORTS

Accountants and auditors have traditionally not been associated with theconservation or environmental movement. However, as providers of information,reports, and assurance on which business and government decision are frequentlybased, they have increasingly been drawn into the environmental arena. The influenceof accountants and auditors comes from their access to financial and performanceinformation. They analyze report and communicate information on which decisionsare based and performance is evaluated. They can encourage greater transparencyand informed decision about the application of resources and the impact of activitieson environmental outcomes without distorting existing accounting standard. Thus, inorder to ensure the provision of accurate information by annual reports, it isnecessary to involve the environmental audit. In this article, we approached thecarrying out of environmental audit, mainly underlining its necessity and importance.environmental auditing, annual report, environmental information, environmentalaccounting