The geopolitical economy of Thailand’s marine plasticpollution crisis

Currently approximately 9 million tons of plastic enter the world’s oceans annually. This is a majortransboundary problem on a global scale that threatens marine wildlife, coastal ecologies, human health andlivelihoods. Our concern in this paper is with the environmental governance of marine plastic pollution thatemanates from Thailand, the sixth biggest contributor globally. By zooming in on land-based polluters inThailand, we highlight both the systemic nature of the marine plastic problem and the relative impunity withwhich drivers of transboundary environmental harm function at all levels of governance. Drawing from 19 inter-views conducted with actors from the public, private and non-profit sectors, we examine three stages of theproblem: production, consumption and waste management. We found that three major barriers preventThailand’s government, private sector and citizens from engaging in the sort collective action needed to reducemarine plastic pollution. They are: (i) insufficient incentives to enact political change; (ii) scalar disconnects inwaste management; and (iii) inadequate public and private sector ownership over plastic waste reduction. Asthe state alone cannot change corporate and consumer behaviour, we argue that multi-stakeholder efforts acrossorganisational scales of governance and administrative boundaries are needed to address the barrier

Valuing Flood Risk Reductions

A choice experiment is used to estimate how Vietnamese households value a flood risk reduction. The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of households located in the Nghe An Province, one of the provinces which is the most affected by floods in Vietnam. The results reveal that there is a high level of heterogeneity in preferences across households. We compute the willingness to pay (WTP) for a flood risk reduction and we identify how it relates to different attributes of flood management policies (reduction of economic losses, reduction of human losses, political level in charge of implementing the flood management policy). In particular, the marginal WTP for reducing the flood fatality rate, which can be interpreted as the value of statistical life (VSL), varies from 2 517 million VND (approximately 120 818 USD) to 3 590 million VND (approximately 172 323 USD) depending on the model considered. The VSL represents between 77 and 111 times the annual household average income in our sample, a result in line with previous estimates in similar countries

Traits and causes of environmental loss-related chemical accidents in China based on co-word analysis

Chemical accidents are major causes of environmental losses and have been debated due to the potential threat to human beings and environment. Compared with the single statistical analysis, co-word analysis of chemical accidents illustrates significant traits at various levels and presents data into a visual network. This study utilizes a co-word analysis of the keywords extracted from the Web crawling texts of environmental loss-related chemical accidents and uses the Pearson's correlation coefficient to examine the internal attributes. To visualize the keywords of the accidents, this study carries out a multidimensional scaling analysis applying PROXSCAL and centrality identification. The research results show that an enormous environmental cost is exacted, especially given the expected environmental loss-related chemical accidents with geographical features. Meanwhile, each event often brings more than one environmental impact. Large number of chemical substances are released in the form of solid, liquid, and gas, leading to serious results. Eight clusters that represent the traits of these accidents are formed, including leakage, poisoning, explosion, pipeline crack, river pollution, dust pollution, emission, and industrial effluent. Explosion and gas possess a strong correlation with poisoning, located at the center of visualization map.</p