Environmental concern in tourism from a cross-national perspective

This paper analyzes how tourist from European countries consider environmental issues when making decisions about their their holiday plans. Modelling these decisions is a challenge because environmental concerns depends on both individiual characteristics and contextul factors related to the country or residence, such as cultural, social and economic condictions. For that reason, environmental support by households exhibit a particular type of grouped structure, where individual, firs level, are nested into countries, second level. This hierarchical structure of date are dealed with a multilevel aproach. The estimates from a Two-Level Random Intercept Logistic Model and the post-estimation analysis demonstrate that the effects of country vary randomly, and that there is significant variance in the level of tourists´ environmental support within and between countries.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Demographic Transition Environmental Concern and the Kuznets Curve

In an endogenous growth model with pollution and abatement we characterize the socially optimal solution. We find that the rate of growth depends negatively on the weight of environmental care in utility and positively on the population growth rate. We also find a trade-off between growth and environmental quality beyond which an environmental Kuznets curve is derived in the long term. This one emerges from the implications of the demographic transition for the rate of population growth, and the accompanying variation in the willingness to pay for environmental quality as the economy develops.Optimal Growth; Environment; Population Growth; Preferences

Place effects on environmental views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied social bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people\u27s environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Environmental policy negotiations, transboundary pollution and lobby groups in small open economies

This paper analyzes the consequences of lobby group activity for policy outcomes in economies with transboundary pollution and international environmental policies. In our framework, international environmental policies are characterized as pollution taxes determined in a negotiation between two countries. We find, among other things, that the presence of local lobbying tends to reduce the level of pollution taxes. We also find that an increase in the environmental concern (i.e. stronger preferences for a clean environment) may reduce the pollution tax in both countries. It is also possible that increased environmental concern in one country reduces the pollution tax in the other country.transboundary pollution; lobbying; taxes; pollution; Nash bargain; negotiations; environmental policy

Trade union structure with environmental concern and firms' technological choice

I investigate the influence of the union structure on firms' environmental technological choice when the unions care for the environmental protection. Specifically, I compare the decentralised with the centralised structure under a Cournot duopoly. I show that the decentralised structure could always provide higher incentives to the firms for the adoption of a better (less polluting) technology. In addition, the firms prefer the decentralised unionisation than the centralised although the unions prefer the centralised structure. Furthermore, there is an inverse U-shape relation between the firm's emissions and the size of the market. Finally, the emissions could be less under the centralised case compared to the decentralised for relatively low market's size.trade unions; environmental concern; emissions; technological choice

Environmental concern areas

Veel woningen in stedelijke gebieden in Nederland ondervinden milieuproblemen. Met name de grote steden hebben last van geluidsoverlast en vervuilde lucht. Dit blijkt uit een inventarisatie van het RIVM. Dit rapport biedt een globaal overzicht van de milieuproblemen in stedelijk gebied. In opdracht van het ministerie van VROM inventariseerde het RIVM de milieubelasting in stedelijke gebieden. Hierbij werd gekeken naar luchtkwaliteit, geluid, bodem en externe veiligheid. Bij de inventarisatie is naar stedelijke postcodegebieden gekeken waarin zich woningen met een kritieke milieubelasting bevinden. Uit de inventarisatie blijkt dat veel woningen in stedelijke gebieden een overschrijding van kritische grenswaarden voor milieubelasting ondervinden. De overschrijding wordt vaak veroorzaakt door luchtvervuiling, in de vorm van hoge concentraties fijn stof en stikstofdioxide, en lawaai van weg- en railverkeer. Vooral in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht en Noord-Brabant spelen deze problemen. Deelkaarten in dit rapport geven per postcodegebied aan welke milieuproblemen zich ter plaatse voordoen en hoe ernstig deze zijn. De kaarten bieden beleidsmakers en planologen een overzicht van de gebieden die in milieutechnisch opzicht aandacht vragen.Many urban residential areas in the Netherlands experience environmental problems. Particularly within the major cities, extensive environmental damage is caused by noise and air pollution from roadway traffic. This was concluded from an inventory carried out by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). This report presents an overview of urban problem areas. By order of the Ministry of Housing and Spatiol Planning, the RIVM made an inventory of environmental problems in urban regions in the Netherlands due to air pollution, noise, potential soil pollution and external safety risks. Environmental problems (exposure or exposure risks) were related to the presence of dwellings in each postal area where critical limit values are exceeded. From the inventory, it appears that the critical exposure values are exceeded at many dwellings. Exceedences are often caused by air pollution (particulate matter and nitrogen oxide) and noise from road- and railway traffic. Many of these dwellings can be found in major cities with ringways (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht ) and also in the Province of Noord-Brabant. Inventories are presented in a set of color coded maps, showing the type of environmental damage occurring and indicating the number of dwellings critically exposed in each postal area. The maps give policy makers and urban planners an overall picture of the residential areas demanding attention from an environmental point of view.VROM-DGM-LM

Rural environmental concern: Effects of position, partisanship and place

The social bases of environmental concern in rural America resemble those for the nation as a whole, but also reflect the influence of place. Some general place characteristics, such as rates of population growth or resource-industry employment, predict responses across a number of environmental issues. Other unique or distinctive aspects of local society and environment matter as well. We extend earlier work on both kinds of place effects, first by analyzing survey data from northeast Oregon. Results emphasize that “environmental concern” has several dimensions. Second, we contextualize the Oregon results using surveys from other regions. Analysis of an integrated dataset (up to 12,000 interviews in 38 U.S. counties) shows effects from respondent characteristics and political views, and from county rates of population growth and resource-based employment. There also are significant place-to-place variations that are not explained by variables in the models. To understand some of these we return to the local scale. In northeast Oregon, residents describe how perceptions of fire danger from unmanaged forest lands shape their response to the word conservation. Their local interpretation contrasts with more general and urban connotations of this term, underlining the importance of place for understanding rural environmental concern

Environmental Concern and Rational Production, Consumption and Rehabilitation

Utility from consumption might be spoiled by the degradation of the environment. The incorporation of a direct dependency of utility on the state of the environment through environmental concern and the incorporation of the effects of production pollution and rehabilitative investment on the environment into a lifetime utility maximization model imply that a minimal degree of impatience is necessary for an interior steady state to exist. This steady state is unique, approachable along a path with damped oscillations of consumption and rehabilitative investment, and characterized by a larger production than in the steady state without environmental concern.Consumption, environmental investment, golden rule

Environmental impacts of organic farming in Europe

Organic farming has become an important element of European agri-environmental policy due to increasing concern about the impact of agriculture on the environment. This book describes in detail the environmental and resource use impacts of organic farming relative to conventional farming systems, based on a set of environmental indicators for the agricultural sector on a European level. The policy relevance of the results is also discussed in detail