Water pollution control has been a top environmental policy priority of the world's most developed countries for decades, and the focus of significant regulation and public and private spending. Yet, significant water quality problems remain, and trends for some pollutants are in the wrong direction. This book addresses the economics of water pollution control and water pollution control policy in agriculture, with an aim towards providing students, environmental policy analysts, and other environmental professionals with economic concepts and tools essential to understanding the problem and crafting solutions that can be effective and efficient. The book will also examine existing policies and proposed reforms in the developed world. Although this book addresses and has a general applicability to major water pollutants from agriculture (e.g., pesticides, pharmaceuticals, sediments, nutrients), it will focus on the sediment and nutrient pollution problem. The economic and scientific foundations for pollution management are best developed for these pollutants, and they are currently the top priorities of policy makers. Accordingly, the authors provide both highly salient and informative cases for developing concepts and methods of general applicability, with high profile examples such as the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone in the US; the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe; and Lake Taupo in New Zealand.

This book presents select proceedings of the National Conference on Renewable Energy and Sustainable Environment (NCRESE 2020) and examines a range of reliable energy-efficient harvesting technologies, their applications and utilization of available alternate energy resources. The topics covered include alternate energy technologies, smart grid topologies and their relevant issues, solar thermal and bio-energy systems, electric vehicles and energy storage systems and its control issues. The book also discusses various properties and performance attributes of advance renewable energy techniques and impact on environmental sustainability. The book will be useful for researchers and professionals working in the areas of energy and sustainable environment and the allied fields.

This book demonstrates the flow of the international trade of secondhand goods and examines the socio-economic background and mechanisms of the trade. It highlights the actors involved in the trade of secondhand goods and how traditionally secondhand good have largely been traded through social or ethnic networks in order to effectively transfer quality and market information. The development of information technology and emergence of new information platforms have changed these business models. The policies and regulations relating to the trade of secondhand goods are explored, alongside the negative impact of these trades, and the growing awareness of the circular economy. This book illustrates how importing countries as well as international institutions have developed regulations in order to balance these two issues. It will relevant to students and economists interested in development economics and economics geography.

The interface between land use management and transportation planning represents probably the most important spatial impact in sustainable land use, mobility and transportation development. Prior to this book, only limited attempts have been made to integrate these topics as to enhance smart growth and sustainable development principles within spatial systems.The approach followed differs internationally and specifically between different planning and transportation authorities. The spatial impacts of land use and transportation serve as the main catalyst in urban form, development and its associated problems. These impacts represent severe consequences from a built and environmental development perspective. All of these are covered in the book and its supporting chapters.The focus of the book is the application of best practice principles in managing the interface between land use management and transportation planning. Internationally the practice is the promotion of more sustainable urban and rural forms supported by improved levels of accessibility through the application of smart growth and sustainability principles.The focus however remains to successfully optimise land use and transportation integration. The structuring used within each of the chapters provide the reader with the basic and applicable theory and practical knowledge to attain system wide integration and sustainability within the dynamics of spatial and transportation systems. The inclusion of specific theme related case studies endorses the relevancy of this book's topic.

This book explores three particular strategies in the extractives sector for creating shared wealth, increased labour opportunities and positive social, environmental and economic outcomes from corporate projects, namely: state wealth funds (SWF), local content policies (LCP) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Collectively, the chapters explore the associated experiences and challenges in different parts of the world with the view to inform equitable and sustainable development for the communities living adjacent to extractives sites and the wider society and environment. Examples of LCPs, SWFs and CSR practices from 12 jurisdictions with diverse experiences offer usefull insights. The book illuminates challenges and opportunities for sustainable development outcomes of the extractives sector. It reflects the need to take on board the lessons of these global experiences in order to improve outcomes for poverty reduction, inequality reduction and sustainable development.

The quality of ecosystems is affected by the actions of different stakeholders who use them in a variety of ways. In order to understand this complex relationship between humans and nature, it is vital to understand the complexity of the interacting agents. The authors in this book attempt to do this by applying multi-agent systems to the problems of ecosystem management. The multi-agent approach to ecosystem management is a relatively new and rapidly developing field which takes a formal computational approach towards the interaction of humans with their environment. The authors highlight some of the promising new methodologies which are emerging in the field from disciplines such as computer science and computational social science. They move on to address a number of important topics including diffusion processes, common-pool resources, land use change and the participatory use of models, in an attempt to solve contemporary management issues. They clearly demonstrate the potential utility of multi-agent systems in the context of theoretical problems and practical case studies. This book provides a state-of-the-art review of the theory and application of multi-agent systems for ecosystem management. It will prove indispensable for ecological economists, natural resource and social scientists, and policymakers. It will also appeal to students and scholars who are interested in modelling the human dimensions of global environmental change.

Contested Waters provides an in-depth analysis of trans-boundary water conflict involving the Indus Basin in Pakistan. The book focuses on both national scale and local scale case studies to illustrate how these water conflicts are both discursively and materially driven by human institutions and politics. Through case studies of controversy over large dams, local flooding and irrigation methods, Daanish Mustafa highlights the various deeply political and institutional factors driving water conflict - specifically the disparity between national scale strategies of water politics and local scale water politics - and calls for engagement with water conflict in political terms.

This book provides up-to-date information on the state of the art in applications of biotechnological and microbiological tools for protecting the environment. Written by leading international experts, it discusses potential applications of biotechnological and microbiological techniques in solid waste management, wastewater treatment, agriculture, energy and environmental health. This second volume of book "Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology," covers two main topics: bioenergy and environmental health, exploring the latest developments from around the globe regarding applications of biotechnology and microbiology for converting wastes into valuable products and at the same time reducing the environmental pollution resulting from disposal. Wherever possible it also includes real-world examples. Further, it offers advice on which procedures should be followed to achieve satisfactory results, and provides insights that will promote the transition to the sustainable utilization of various waste products.

This book reviews the latest information on the assessment of surface and groundwater resources in Algeria. The authors cover a large diversity of topics, including the status and assessment of water resources, impacts of pesticides, soil droughts, analysis of flood characteristics, hydrogeological investigations and modeling applications, and evapotranspiration. Special attention is given to the impacts of climate changes on water resources. The assessment methods present in this book can be used or adapted to study other regions of North Africa, Middle East and/or in the Mediterranean with similar climate conditions as Algeria. This book and the companion volume Water Resources in Algeria - Part II: Water Quality, Treatment, Protection and Development will appeal to engineers, researchers, graduate students and policymakers interested in the field of groundwater and surface water assessment.

This book addresses the improvement and dissemination of knowledge on methods, policies and technologies for increasing the sustainability of development by de-coupling growth from natural resources and replacing them with knowledge-based economy, taking into account its economic, environmental and social pillars, as well as methods for assessing and measuring sustainability of development, regarding water and environment. This book gathers scholar and experts in related fields. All attendees from a vast range of companies, universities and government institutions acquire advanced technical knowledge and are introduced to new fields through discussions that focus on their own specialties as well as a variety of interdisciplinary areas. The authors hope most of scholars can find what they really need in this book.

This book presents a concept for fostering resource efficient manufacturing. The protection of our environment demands a more responsible use of natural resources, and a higher degree of transparency along manufacturing value chains will be required in order to make significant advances in this context. Industrial decision makers must be provided with adequate methods and tools to simultaneously and systematically pursue technical, economic and environmental targets. Building on established and complementary methods, such as material and energy flow analysis (MEFA), value stream mapping (VSM), life cycle costing (LCC) and environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), this book introduces a concept that allows a holistic modeling and multi-dimensional performance assessment of manufacturing systems on different levels - from processes up to entire value chains and product life cycles. It also demonstrates the application of the concept using two case studies from the metal mechanic industry.

This book investigates water resources management and policy in China over the last two decades with a core focus on the role of water for socioeconomic development and sustainability. Recent policies, such as the Three Red Lines and the Water Ten Plan are evaluated for sustainable water supply, use and quality control. The book appraises solutions through demand management, water rights and pollution trading, virtual water and water footprint. Supply management is discussed taking examples from the Three Gorges Dam and the South North Water Transfer Project. The water market is investigated uncovering the active engagement of the private sector and includes discussions on how transboundary rivers demonstrate China's engagement with its riparian countries for benefit sharing. This book will be an invaluable reference for researchers in the field as well as practitioners and students who have an interest in water and development in China.

This book features oyster beds as a political and environmental battleground. In ""The Oyster Question"", Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland's iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin. But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay's resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than federal level. ""The Oyster Question"" concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

This book aims to structure, in a complete and sequential way, the mainstream technical knowledge which is related to eutrophication control. The book considers the development of innovative technologies for phosphate removal, while supporting the restoration of currently degraded lakes and reservoir systems. In addition, this book contains key-aspects of future benchmark interests being specially framed under the ongoing development of a circular economy. In particular, the book will contribute to a better understanding of the problem of internal P-loads and P-sources disposition towards a more effective control of nutrients' enrichment in lakes. The chemical routes and environmental fate of such lake nutrients will be viewed in the light of innovative technologies (engineering dimensions) and circular economy perspectives (economics dimensions). The main theme extends to an economic appreciation of environmental polluted aquifers. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience, covering a wide spectrum of scientific fields, such as environment, physical chemistry, surface chemistry, interfacial phenomena, coastal engineering, bio-engineering, environmental policy makers, and economists.

This book focuses on the status quo and the latest information on the water-soil-agriculture nexus in the MENA countries. It presents several case studies and applications from e.g. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, while also sharing and discussing the latest findings. The content includes a range of agriculture-related topics that focus on: water resources management, impacts of climate change, and wastewater treatment for reuse in agriculture sectors; in addition, sustainable approaches to agricultural-based industry, organic crop production, crop water requirements, and soil environment are discussed in an updated and comprehensive review. In turn, the book discusses the applications of GIS and remote sensing as a new technology for better agriculture management, as well as its use in Egypt as a representative country. In closing, it considers the implementation of an environmental information system in data-scarce MENA countries from the standpoint of the water-food nexus, and addresses the question of climate justice in the MENA region. Exploring various dimensions of MENA country-based case studies on achieving sustainable agriculture, the book offers an invaluable source of topical information for agricultural sustainability-related stakeholders in the region, researchers and graduate students alike.

This book provides an overview of crimes involving water, including pollution, illegal dumping, and supply chain disruption from a criminological perspective. It examines a multifaceted issue from a comparative policy perspective supplemented with individual case studies to provide insights on the magnitude of the problem as well as possible solutions and policy recommendations. As growing populations and economic sectors continue to put unprecedented pressures on water supplies, the book aims to contribute to a better understanding of the problem in order to ensure the sustainability, long-term viability, and equitable use of this essential resource. The first part of the volume examines criminological and policy perspectives, including an overview of regulatory approaches, privatization of water resources, and the scope of the criminal problem in this area. The second part presents informative case studies from a variety of different regional and social contexts. Finally, the editors present an outlook in policy and enforcement improvements. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology, criminal justice, public policy, and comparative law, as well as those studying environmental regulations and sustainability. Water, Governance and Crime Issues is a much needed addition to the growing original contributions of green criminology. This volume captures the complex landscape of water crimes, including the numerous disparities and inequalities of there being too much water in some places and too little in others amongst the many complexities. The edited collection also covers conceptual issues (i.e. water as a human right) as well as practical hurdles (i.e. the challenges in keeping statistics on offences) and real world examples. Many of the chapters are likely to introduce readers to new issues and the interplay with a myriad of traditional problems - corruption, organised crime, privatisation, and terrorism. I agree with the editors and authors that water crime issues deserve further scientific study and this provides a solid starting point. -Dr. Tanya Wyatt, University of Northumbria Population growth and urbanization, more frequent droughts due to climate change, the privatization of and unequal access to water resources and increasing water pollution are just some of the contemporary and future challenges relating to water crimes. Water, Governance and Crime Issues speaks to the scientific relevance of water for (green) criminology as well as the policy implications of water crimes. Several of the cases in this edited book refer to countries and regions we do not usually hear about and yet are perfect illustrations of the challenges faced in governing and studying water crimes. -Dr. Lieselot Bisschop, Erasmus School of Law

Regulating Shale Gas discusses the regulatory context of shale gas in the European Union and draws conclusions on the EU's broader approach towards the regulation of new technologies. Providing the first dedicated examination of the overall regulatory context of shale gas in the EU, Leonie Reins reveals how the EU's new constitutional setup after the Lisbon Treaty has complicated rather than facilitated the EU's quest for a common energy policy. Shale gas has already transformed the energy outlook in the United States, but despite high expectations, exploration has failed to take off fully in the EU. This book investigates the reasons for this failure, as well as other related developments impacting both energy and environmental law, by highlighting the essential elements of coherent regulation of technologies. It further analyses other cross-cutting issues relating to the environmental and energy supply security challenges and offers insights into the regulation of the different sectors and the most topical developments. The regulation of shale gas is set to become an increasingly important issue, receiving attention of energy and environmental legal scholars, politicians and industry worldwide. This book will also appeal to legal practitioners seeking expertise in the law and policy of shale gas extraction in the EU.

The agricultural and food sectors have developed into a prominent industry, impacting economic markets on an international scale. In certain regions, there is a significant potential for creating increased competitive advantage in these business areas. Exploring the Global Competitiveness of Agri-Food Sectors and Serbia's Dominant Presence: Emerging Research and Opportunities includes academic coverage and perspectives on enhancing the competitiveness of the Serbian food industry in the global marketplace. Highlighting pertinent topics such as exports, international trade, and manufacturing considerations, this book is an ideal resource for academics, researchers, graduate students, and professionals actively involved in the agri-food industry.

Conventional economic analysis of property rights in natural resources is too narrow and restrictive to allow for effective comparisons between alternative institutional structures. In this book, a conceptual framework is developed for the analysis of these structures with illustrative application to the allocation of water resources. Ray Challen introduces and develops a model for the analysis of the problems involved in institutional choice that takes into account constraints in institutional change imposed by history and the value of maintaining options in an uncertain future. The emphasis of institutional analysis shifts from assessing the benefits of particular property rights regimes in isolation to considering the distribution of property rights between levels of governments, communities and individuals in an institutional hierarchy. Conceptual developments in institutional theory are illustrated by using a case study of institutional change in the regulation of water use in irrigated agriculture.

This book comprehensively examines the performance of Bangladeshi agriculture in light of the most recent thinking on economic development and the environment. It both analyses the experience during the last five decades and discusses the major issues and challenges with special emphasis on the prospects for sustainable agricultural development in the future. The authors emphasise the importance of distributional aspects of environmental change and development in relation to employment and poverty and also focus on gender issues - often ignored in traditional theory. Many of the issues that arise in Bangladesh in connection with the agricultural-development nexus are not unique to the country. Parallels exist elsewhere in the developing world and as such Bangladesh is useful as an example from which to draw conclusions about much of the developing world. Environment and Agriculture in a Developing Economy will therefore be of particular interest to developmental and environmental economists as well as international organisations and NGOs committed to environment and development issues.

This book focuses on the Earth's carrying capacity to service the needs of its human populations as well as preserve the ecosystems that provide natural resources that sustain life and support human activities in 2020 and later in the century (2050 and beyond). It addresses the two principal factors that challenge the limits of the carrying capacity: growing populations/demographic moves and global warming/climate change. It also covers the effects that these factors have on water availability, food security, sanitation and natural resources. The status of these basic needs that sustain life and societal activities with respect to population increases and global warming driven climate changes are discussed on two time frames. One with respect to the 2020 and the other with measured and computer guided projected future impacts later as the century progresses to 2050 and later, Attention is given to Africa, Asia, and somewhat for South America because of their projected increases in population. The purpose of the book is to provide those in decision-making roles and those that advise them with a sound set of facts and figures to think about to support their decisions/actions. A secondary purpose is to present data that stresses the need to act now, firmly and with investment to plan to adapt to changing conditions rather than wait until forced to do so. The book also discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the world's societies and how they have reacted. The book will be of use to students in first/second year of college/university programs in Environmental Sciences/Studies, demographics, and ancillary fields such as agriculture science, urban/land use planners, political science, public health, and consultants at academic and professional levels.