Coastal sand dunes under siege : a guide to conservation for environmental managers

Coastal regions have for centuries been of benefit to humankind. Worldwide, human populations exploited the littoral and adjoining seas as a consequence to its relatively rich resource base. Particularly in an enclosed sea as the Mediterranean, demographic growth has had a marked effect on the region's resources. In recent decades, intensive shipping-related activities, industrial and infrastructural development, and other anthropogenic activities located close to the coast have led to an increased degradation of coastal ecosystems. The Maltese Islands are no exception and although numerous dune systems were obliterated during colonial times as a result of major developments along various parts of the coast, remaining sand dunes were further degraded during the decades that followed independence. This occurred, primarily, as Malta began to transform itself into a tourist destination. Since sand dunes are much dependent on a variety of factors that lie further afield from the beach zone per se, they are among the most vulnerable coastal assemblages with respect to stability. For this reason, even topographical modifications of inland landscapes may have a severe negative influence on dune dynamics, consequent to alterations or disruptions of sediment fluxes. Sadly, only a few dune assemblages remain in the Maltese Islands, with Ramla l-Ħamra being, so far, the best example, while others vary from highly impoverished to mere remnant sites. [ text extracted from Foreword section written by Professor Charles J. Farrugia, Chairman, Maltese National Commission for UNESCO ]peer-reviewe

Review of Environmental Contamination at Akwesasne and Associated Health Outcomes

The Akwesasne reservation along the St. Lawrence River has experienced significant exposure to several persistent organic pollutants due to rapid industrialization. The Aluminum Company of America, General Motors, and Reynolds Metals operated aluminum foundries that that used polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as hydraulic fluids, which leaked and were washing down the drain into the rivers or disposed of on their property. This has resulted in the community, the soil, air and water, and their food sources being contaminated with PCBs, persistent organochlorine pesticides, and heavy metals. Epidemiological studies found that exposure to these environmental toxicants are negatively associated with growth and developmental, neurobehavioral health, reproductive health, thyroid function, and increased prevalence of chronic diseases. Fish advisories limited dietary exposure to PCBs, however, some of these investigations suggest that exposure to airborne, volatile, non-persistent PCBs, may adversely affect several health outcomes, requiring further investigation

Determinants of environmental management in the red sea hotels: Personal and organizational values and contextual variables

What motivates firms to adopt environmental management practices is one of the most significant aspects in the contemporary academic debate in which the review of the existing literature yields, with an obvious contextual bias toward developed world, contested theories and inconclusive findings. Providing a unique model that brings together the individual and organizational levels of analysis on firms' adoption of environmental management practices, this study aims to provide a new insight from the context of developing world. Data from 158 Red Sea hotels reveal two identifiable dimensions of environmental management-planning and organization, and operations-that can be explained as originating from different values. Whereas organizational altruism is a powerful predictor of both dimensions, managers' personal values and organizational competitive orientation are only relevant to environmental operations. The evidence also indicates that contextual variables such as chain affiliation, hotel star rating, and size are important to explain hotels' environmental management behaviors. © 2012 ICHRIE

Greening Capitalism? A Marxist Critique of Carbon Markets

Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to dominant modes of social organization, inspiring suggestions that capitalism itself needs to be transformed if we are to ‘decarbonize’ the global economy. Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, carbon markets have emerged as the main politico-economic tools in global efforts to address climate change. Newell and Paterson (2010) have recently claimed that the embrace of carbon markets by financial and political elites constitutes a possible first step towards the transformation of current modes of capitalist organization into a new form of greener, more sustainable ‘climate capitalism.’ In this paper, we argue that the institutionalization of carbon markets does not, in fact, represent a move towards the radical transformation of capitalism, but is better understood as the most recent expression of ongoing trends of ecological commodification and expropriation, driving familiar processes of uneven and crisis-prone development. In this paper, we review four critical Marxist concepts: metabolic rift (Foster, 1999), capitalism as world ecology (Moore, 2011a), uneven development and accumulation through dispossession (Harvey, 2003, 2006), and sub-imperialism (Marini, 1972, 1977), developing a framework for a Marxist analysis of carbon markets. Our analysis shows that carbon markets form part of a longer historical development of global capitalism and its relation to nature. Carbon markets, we argue, serve as creative new modes of accumulation, but are unlikely to transform capitalist dynamics in ways that might foster a more sustainable global economy. Our analysis also elucidates, in particular, the role that carbon markets play in exacerbating uneven development within the Global South, as elites in emerging economies leverage carbon market financing to pursue new strategies of sub-imperial expansion. </jats:p

Macroalgae Decrease Growth and Alter Microbial Community Structure of the Reef-Building Coral, Porites astreoides

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Public Library of Science and can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/home.action.With the continued and unprecedented decline of coral reefs worldwide, evaluating the factors that contribute to coral demise is of critical importance. As coral cover declines, macroalgae are becoming more common on tropical reefs. Interactions between these macroalgae and corals may alter the coral microbiome, which is thought to play an important role in colony health and survival. Together, such changes in benthic macroalgae and in the coral microbiome may result in a feedback mechanism that contributes to additional coral cover loss. To determine if macroalgae alter the coral microbiome, we conducted a field-based experiment in which the coral Porites astreoides was placed in competition with five species of macroalgae. Macroalgal contact increased variance in the coral-associated microbial community, and two algal species significantly altered microbial community composition. All macroalgae caused the disappearance of a γ-proteobacterium previously hypothesized to be an important mutualist of P. astreoides. Macroalgal contact also triggered: 1) increases or 2) decreases in microbial taxa already present in corals, 3) establishment of new taxa to the coral microbiome, and 4) vectoring and growth of microbial taxa from the macroalgae to the coral. Furthermore, macroalgal competition decreased coral growth rates by an average of 36.8%. Overall, this study found that competition between corals and certain species of macroalgae leads to an altered coral microbiome, providing a potential mechanism by which macroalgae-coral interactions reduce coral health and lead to coral loss on impacted reefs

Sustainable risk management of emerging contaminants in municipal wastewaters

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2009 The Royal Society.The presence of emerging contaminants in municipal wastewaters, particularly endocrine-disrupting compounds such as oestrogenic substances, has been the focus of much public concern and scientific attention in recent years. Due to the scientific uncertainty still surrounding their effects, the Precautionary Principle could be invoked for the interim management of potential risks. Therefore, precautionary prevention risk-management measures could be employed to reduce human exposure to the compounds of concern. Steroid oestrogens are generally recognized as the most significant oestrogenically active substances in domestic sewage effluent. As a result, the UK Environment Agency has championed a ‘Demonstration Programme’ to investigate the potential for removal of steroid oestrogens and alkylphenol ethoxylates during sewage treatment. Ecological and human health risks are interdependent, and ecological injuries may result in increased human exposures to contaminants or other stressors. In this context of limiting exposure to potential contaminants, examining the relative contribution of various compounds and pathways should be taken into account when identifying effective risk-management measures. In addition, the explicit use of ecological objectives within the scope of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive poses new challenges and necessitates the development of ecosystem-based decision tools. This paper addresses some of these issues and proposes a species sensitivity distribution approach to support the decision-making process related to the need and implications of sewage treatment work upgrade as risk-management measures to the presence of oestrogenic compounds in sewage effluent

Enhancing engagement with community sector organisations working in sustainable waste management: a case study

Voluntary and community sector organisations are increasingly being viewed as key agents of change in the shifts towards the concepts of resource efficiency and circular economy, at the community level. Using a meta-analysis and questionnaire surveys across three towns in the East Midlands of England, namely Northampton, Milton Keynes and Luton, this study aimed to understand public engagement with these organisations. The findings suggest that these organisations play a significant and wide-spread role, not only with regard to sustainable environmental management, but also a social role in community development and regeneration. The surveys indicated that there were generally high levels of awareness of the organisations and strong engagement with them. Clothes were the items most donated. Key reasons for engagement included the financial value offered and the perception that it helped the environment. However, potential limitations in future public engagement were also determined and recommendations for addressing these suggested

EDS integrated approach for sustainability (EDS-IA) : campus as a living laboratory experience

Since 2016, InstitutEDSisdevelopinga new integrated approachto facilitatecollaborationsbetween different disciplines and to reinforce the developmentofpractical skills and key competencies needed tosolve concrete sustainable development problems: the EDS-IA. It aims to contribute to theacceleration ofthetransition to a closed and cyclic development system, building on the most recent knowledge mobilization frameworks in the field: the concept of Planetary Boundaries,the concept of Social Floor,the Sustainable Development Goals, Key Competencies in Sustainability and Multilevel Governance. Despite the broad consensus and the robustness of the scientific knowledge underlying all these frameworks, they are not sufficiently known beyond their own field of knowledge. In order to facilitate their diffusion and their appropriation by all the disciplines and actors concerned with the transition to sustainability, EDS-IA integrates themin a diagram as a tool that can be adapted todifferent development challenge in different contexts. During itsfirst year of implementation (2016-2017), researchers and student members of the Instituteparticipated in a series of major co-creation activitiesalong withstaff university members, governmental organizations as well as representatives of civil society. They made a diagnosisof the sustainable status of the campus and imaginedinnovating solutions for a “Campus as a living laboratory” through operations, teaching, research, and community services. In the second year (2017-2018), the transfer of the EDS-IA started through similar workshops with a university partner in Senegal(UADB). This paper presents the theoretical and methodological frameworksof the EDS-IAand the results of the first two years during which universities have been imagined as living laboratories for SDG promotion and implementation.

The effects of climatic fluctuations and extreme events on running water ecosystems

Most research on the effects of environmental change in freshwaters has focused on incremental changes in average conditions, rather than fluctuations or extreme events such as heatwaves, cold snaps, droughts, floods or wildfires, which may have even more profound consequences. Such events are commonly predicted to increase in frequency, intensity and duration with global climate change, with many systems being exposed to conditions with no recent historical precedent. We propose a mechanistic framework for predicting potential impacts of environmental fluctuations on running water ecosystems by scaling up effects of fluctuations from individuals to entire ecosystems. This framework requires integration of four key components: effects of the environment on individual metabolism, metabolic and biomechanical constraints on fluctuating species interactions, assembly dynamics of local food webs and mapping the dynamics of the meta-community onto ecosystem function. We illustrate the framework by developing a mathematical model of environmental fluctuations on dynamically assembling food webs. We highlight (currently limited) empirical evidence for emerging insights and theoretical predictions. For example, widely supported predictions about the effects of environmental fluctuations are: high vulnerability of species with high per capita metabolic demands such as large-bodied ones at the top of food webs; simplification of food web network structure and impaired energetic transfer efficiency; reduced resilience and top-down relative to bottom-up regulation of food web and ecosystem processes. We conclude by identifying key questions and challenges that need to be addressed to develop more accurate and predictive bio-assessments of the effects of fluctuations, and implications of fluctuations for management practices in an increasingly uncertain world

Empirical test of an agricultural landscape model: the importance of farmer preference for risk aversion and crop complexity

Developing models to predict the effects of social and economic change on agricultural landscapes is an important challenge. Model development often involves making decisions about which aspects of the system require detailed description and which are reasonably insensitive to the assumptions. However, important components of the system are often left out because parameter estimates are unavailable. In particular, measurements of the relative influence of different objectives, such as risk, environmental management, on farmer decision making, have proven difficult to quantify. We describe a model that can make predictions of land use on the basis of profit alone or with the inclusion of explicit additional objectives. Importantly, our model is specifically designed to use parameter estimates for additional objectives obtained via farmer interviews. By statistically comparing the outputs of this model with a large farm-level land-use data set, we show that cropping patterns in the United Kingdom contain a significant contribution from farmer’s preference for objectives other than profit. In particular, we found that risk aversion had an effect on the accuracy of model predictions, whereas preference for a particular number of crops grown was less important. While nonprofit objectives have frequently been identified as factors in farmers’ decision making, our results take this analysis further by demonstrating the relationship between these preferences and actual cropping patterns