Mitigation and screening for environmental assessment

This article considers how, as a matter of law and policy, mitigation measures should be taken into account in determining whether a project will have significant environmental effects and therefore be subject to assessment under the EU Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive. This is not straightforward: it is problematic to distinguish clearly between an activity and the measures proposed to minimise or mitigate for the adverse consequences of the activity. The issue is a salient one in impact assessment law, but under-explored in the literature and handled with some difficulty by the courts. I argue that there is an unnecessarily and undesirably narrow approach currently taken under the EIA Directive, which could be improved upon by taking a more adaptive approach; alternatively a heightened standard of review of ‘significance’, and within this of the scope for mitigation measures to bring projects beneath the significance threshold, may also be desirable

Critical Behaviour of the 3d Gross-Neveu and Higgs-Yukawa Models

We measure the critical exponents of the three dimensional Gross-Neveu model with two four-component fermions. The exponents are inferred from the scaling behaviour of observables on different lattice sizes. We also calculate the exponents, through a second order epsilon-expansion around 4d, for the three dimensional Higgs-Yukawa model, which is expected to be in the same universality class and we find that the exponents agree. We conclude that the equivalence of the two models remains valid in 3d at fixed small N_f values.Comment: 14 Latex pages 8 PSfigures included at the end,BI-TP-93/31,AZPH-TH/93-19,SPhT 93/0

Bright solitary waves in a Bose-Einstein condensate and their interactions

We examine the dynamics of two bright solitary waves with a negative nonlinear term. The observed repulsion between two solitary waves -- when these are in an antisymmetric combination -- is attributed to conservation laws. Slight breaking of parity, in combination with weak relaxation of energy, leads the two solitary waves to merge. The effective repulsion between solitary waves requires certain nearly ideal conditions and is thus fragile.Comment: 6 pages, 14 figure

Marine Ecosystem Management & (and) a Post-Sovereign Transboundary Governance

This paper argues that for purposes of managing transboundary environment problems in general, and marine ecosystems in particular, the role of international law as traditionally understood is somewhat overrated. Binding international legal obligations owed by states to other states often turn out to be a good deal less important in environmental problem solving than is commonly supposed by many international lawyers, legal scholars, and environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Specifically, this paper argues that emphasis on binding multilateral environmental agreements among sovereign states is often misplaced and possibly even counterproductive, insofar as it threatens to divert attention from more promising strategies for managing important categories of transboundary environmental problems. These strategies typically involve novel multi-party regional collaborative governance arrangements that include sub-national and non-state actors as well as sovereign states. Such strategies seek integrated and adaptive management at ecosystem scales. This open-ended, experimentalist problem-solving approach calls into question the primacy of fixed rules of obligation owed by states to other states