A global environmental right

The development of an international substantive environmental right on a global level has long been a contested issue. To a limited extent environmental rights have developed in a fragmented way through different legal regimes. This book examines the potential for the development of a global environmental right that would create legal duties for all types of decision-makers and provide the bedrock for a new system of international environmental governance. Taking a problem solving approach, the book seeks to demonstrate how straightforward and logical changes to the existing global legal architecture would address some of the fundamental root causes of environmental degradation. It puts forward a draft global environmental right that would integrate duties for both state and non-state actors within reformed systems of environmental governance and a rational framework for business and industry to adhere to in order that those systems could be made operational. It also examines the failures of the existing international climate change regime and explains how the draft global environmental right could remedy existing deficits. This innovative and interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to policy-makers, students and researchers in international environmental law, climate change, environmental politics and global environmental governance as well as those studying the WTO, international trade law, human rights law, constitutional law and corporate law

A rights-based approach to climate change governance

This paper will consider the potential for the introduction of a rights-based approach to global environmental governance and its specific application to the future development of the climate change regime. It is based on over 10 years of research in the field of environmental rights and its relationship with global environmental governance. In particular it is based on the analysis and conclusions of the recently published book, Stephen J. Turner, ‘A Global Environmental Right’ (Routledge, 2014). The paper will discuss the potential benefits of applying a rights-based approach to decision-making, founded on the premise that all actors, whether state or non-state, should ultimately bear a human rights based duty to protect the environment. By summarizing the research that has been carried out, it will explain how such a duty could apply directly to key global actors such as corporations, the WTO, banking institutions and of course states themselves. The paper focuses on the practical application of such an approach by providing an analysis of the type of legal architecture that would be required to achieve such a system. It explains the legal requirements businesses would need to adhere to along with the international institutions that would be necessary to ensure that fairness could be achieved both for states and the commercial world. The paper inevitably highlights the weaknesses of the traditional ‘Westphalian’ approach to the resolution of international environmental challenges but seeks to have a ‘problem-solving’ approach by putting forward a practical alternative

A reformed global legal architecture for corporate responsibility

This paper considers key features within the legal architecture of all jurisdictions that utilise the ‘corporation’ as a primary medium for business enterprise. Therefore it highlights the legal frameworks under which ‘corporations’ operate and the pressure that this places upon corporate directors to achieve specific financial outcomes. It then illustrates how this legal architecture can have certain negative effects for other stakeholders such as the environment and communities. The paper considers the reasons why the law was originally designed in this manner and seeks to demonstrate that this design represents one of the ‘drivers’ of environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn affects peoples’ human rights. It takes into account the initiatives that have developed in recent years, which include the work of the UN’s Special Representative of the Secretary General - Professor John Ruggie, the work of the Global Reporting Initiative and the development of the concept of ‘corporate social responsibility’. It assesses the effectiveness of these initiatives and questions whether they address the ‘root causes’ of the problem that they look to resolve. Finally, consideration is given to recent research which has proposed a new type of legal architecture, that would provide a framework of legal responsibilities for corporations to adhere to within an international system of administrative oversight. This redesigned legal and administrative framework would necessitate that all business activity would be predisposed to outcomes of environmental sustainability

A discrete least squares collocation method for two-dimensional nonlinear time-dependent partial differential equations

In this paper, we develop regularized discrete least squares collocation and finite volume methods for solving two-dimensional nonlinear time-dependent partial differential equations on irregular domains. The solution is approximated using tensor product cubic spline basis functions defined on a background rectangular (interpolation) mesh, which leads to high spatial accuracy and straightforward implementation, and establishes a solid base for extending the computational framework to three-dimensional problems. A semi-implicit time-stepping method is employed to transform the nonlinear partial differential equation into a linear boundary value problem. A key finding of our study is that the newly proposed mesh-free finite volume method based on circular control volumes reduces to the collocation method as the radius limits to zero. Both methods produce a large constrained least-squares problem that must be solved at each time step in the advancement of the solution. We have found that regularization yields a relatively well-conditioned system that can be solved accurately using QR factorization. An extensive numerical investigation is performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the present methods, including the application of the new method to a coupled system of time-fractional partial differential equations having different fractional indices in different (irregularly shaped) regions of the solution domain

The Four-Jet Rate in e+e- Annihilation

We present an analytic expression for the four-jet rate in e+e- annihilation, calculated using the coherent branching formalism in the Durham scheme. Our result resums all the leading and next-to-leading kinematic logarithms to all orders in the QCD strong coupling constant.Comment: 7 pages; Final result for R4 and D7 corrected and a couple of typos fixe

Trueswell's Weeding Technique: The Facts

published or submitted for publicatio

Autocatalytic plume pinch-off

A localized source of buoyancy flux in a non-reactive fluid medium creates a plume. The flux can be provided by either heat, a compositional difference between the fluid comprising the plume and its surroundings, or a combination of both. For autocatalytic plumes produced by the iodate-arsenous acid reaction, however, buoyancy is produced along the entire reacting interface between the plume and its surroundings. Buoyancy production at the moving interface drives fluid motion, which in turn generates flow that advects the reaction front. As a consequence of this interplay between fluid flow and chemical reaction, autocatalytic plumes exhibit a rich dynamics during their ascent through the reactant medium. One of the more interesting dynamical features is the production of an accelerating vortical plume head that in certain cases pinches-off and detaches from the upwelling conduit. After pinch-off, a new plume head forms in the conduit below, and this can lead to multiple generations of plume heads for a single plume initiation. We investigated the pinch-off process using both experimentation and simulation. Experiments were performed using various concentrations of glycerol, in which it was found that repeated pinch-off occurs exclusively in a specific concentration range. Autocatalytic plume simulations revealed that pinch-off is triggered by the appearance of accelerating flow in the plume conduit.Comment: 10 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys Rev E. See also http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/nonlinear/papers_chemwave.htm