The Importance of Information and Participation Principles in Environmental Law in Brazil

This article explores the two different kinds of uncertainty, ‘hard’ uncertainty (unknown unknowns) and ‘soft’ uncertainty (known unknowns), in the context of environmental law decision making. First, the authors argue that these different categories should not be treated the same when facing decisions under uncertainty. To deal with these different uncertainties, a tiered risk analysis process is called for, using participatory techniques to turn hard uncertainty into (more manageable) soft uncertainty as well as to increase the legitimacy of environmental decision making, even in cases of hard uncertainty. This methodology can and should apply to all instances of domestic, transnational and international environmental law making. This article applies this conceptual platform to analyze how participatory techniques can be factored in to manage uncertainty by reference to two domestic systems – American and Brazilian environmental law – as well as to international (environmental) law. The authors conclude that managing uncertainty in the environmental decision-making process is a procedural justice tool to promote more balanced and equitable outcomes

Water Law in the United States and Brazil--Climate Change & Two Approaches to Emerging Water Poverty

This article examines two of the major water legal regimes in the Americas-that of Brazil and the United States. Both countries have extensive wet and dry regions and both hydro-regimes face a significant threat from global warming. Brazil, for instance, is home to between eight and fifteen percent of the world\u27s fresh water, and its fast-growing economy and population present major challenges in management and allocation. The U.S. also faces major water allocation problems resulting from past settlement policies; unsustainable reclamation projects; and also fast-growing domestic, industrial and agricultural demand. In the United States, water has traditionally been perceived as a renewable and limitless resource, a cultural legacy that has exerted a powerful influence on the nation\u27s common law. Similarly, in Brazil, the notion of water as infinitely abundant drove water policies until the enactment of the Constitution in 1988. In both countries, however, hydrological realities have become impossible to ignore. Their respective laws and jurisprudence have begun shifting toward management and allocation systems that acknowledge the limited nature of the resource. This article surveys the two countries\u27 water regimes, offering a brief history of their evolution and then focusing on the challenges of the present. It examines how the notion of a strong private property right in water is slowly (in the North-American case) and more abruptly (in the Brazilian case) evolving in the face of increased governmental intervention. The article then turns to the challenges of climate change. In Brazil, policies that fail to take desertification into account may threaten the country\u27s energy supply as well as the availability of potable water. In the United States, ignoring climate change in water management and allocation policies could significantly increase the existing water scarcity in the West and exacerbate the growing and already serious water shortage in the traditionally humid East

The Tourism Industry and Plastic Waste Policies - Comparative Perspectives from the Portuguese Experience

This paper investigates the correlations between the tourism industry and plastic waste. It starts by evidencing that increase in tourism is likely to enhance the volume and improper destination of waste, including plastic, which has become a major environmental concern in touristic cities. The paper suggests that, on the other hand, negative environmental impact caused by plastic may disincentivize tourism, due to pollution in beaches and seas. As tourism grew in Portugal, the country experienced an increase in plastic waste and has taken measures to deal with the problem. Portugal passed federal legislation to ban single-use plastic tableware as of 2020. Companies, NGOs, and the government are also joining forces to reduce plastic waste and increase recycling initiatives. These are examples to follow as the European Union and internationally-recognized NGOs, such as WWF, put fighting plastic waste as one of the main goals to cities’ environmental sustainability in the forthcoming decades

Charge and mass effects on the evaporation of higher-dimensional rotating black holes

To study the dynamics of discharge of a brane black hole in TeV gravity scenarios, we obtain the approximate electromagnetic field due to the charged black hole, by solving Maxwell's equations perturbatively on the brane. In addition, arguments are given for brane metric corrections due to backreaction. We couple brane scalar and brane fermion fields with non-zero mass and charge to the background, and study the Hawking radiation process using well known low energy approximations as well as a WKB approximation in the high energy limit. We argue that contrary to common claims, the initial evaporation is not dominated by fast Schwinger discharge.Comment: Published version. Minor typos corrected. 29 pages, 5 figure

Regularization Independent Analysis of the Origin of Two Loop Contributions to N=1 Super Yang-Mills Beta Function

We present a both ultraviolet and infrared regularization independent analysis in a symmetry preserving framework for the N=1 Super Yang-Mills beta function to two loop order. We show explicitly that off-shell infrared divergences as well as the overall two loop ultraviolet divergence cancel out whilst the beta function receives contributions of infrared modes.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, typos correcte

On the equivalence between Implicit Regularization and Constrained Differential Renormalization

Constrained Differential Renormalization (CDR) and the constrained version of Implicit Regularization (IR) are two regularization independent techniques that do not rely on dimensional continuation of the space-time. These two methods which have rather distinct basis have been successfully applied to several calculations which show that they can be trusted as practical, symmetry invariant frameworks (gauge and supersymmetry included) in perturbative computations even beyond one-loop order. In this paper, we show the equivalence between these two methods at one-loop order. We show that the configuration space rules of CDR can be mapped into the momentum space procedures of Implicit Regularization, the major principle behind this equivalence being the extension of the properties of regular distributions to the regularized ones.Comment: 16 page