This thorough review is based on observational satellite, airborne and in-situ data, scientific literature and technical reports, as well as the substantial experience of the authors, who hail from several Baltic Sea countries. They pay special attention to national practices, HELCOM and EMSA CleanSeaNet activities in oil pollution monitoring, and show different applications of the Seatrack Web model for oil spill drift prediction and the identification of illegal polluters, as well as for environmental risk assessment. Furthermore, some of the results on satellite monitoring of the Nord Stream gas pipeline construction in the Gulf of Finland are presented. This volume addresses the needs of specialists working in different fields of marine, environmental, and remote sensing sciences. It is a useful handbook on oil pollution for international and governmental agencies, as well as for policy makers who plan and manage oil and gas projects, the construction of ports and terminals, shipping, fishery, recreation, and tourist activities in the Baltic Sea. It also offers graduate and undergraduate students in marine and environmental sciences a valuable resource and reference work on the subject."

This book introduces a new technology for environmental protection, namely plasma cleaning. It brings together technological advances and research on plasma generators and their application in environmental science and engineering, including contaminated soil remediation, waste water degradation, metal recovery from waste solution, sterilization and polluted air remediation. It provides a balanced and comprehensive discussion of the core principles, novel plasma reactors and diagnostics, and state-of-the-art environmental applications of plasma. As such, it represents a valuable reference guide for scientists, engineers and graduate students in the fields of environmental science and plasma physics.

This study develops a new indicator for national and global sustainability. The main components of the EIIW-vita indicator are: the share of renewable energy, the genuine savings rate and the relative "green export" position of the respective countries; it is in line with OECD requirements on composite indicators. As green exports are related to technological progress and environmental-friendly products, there is also a Schumpeterian perspective of this indicator. An extended version furthermore looks at water productivity. The analysis highlights the BRIICS countries as well as the US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Japan. Moreover the special challenges and dynamics of ASEAN countries and Asia are discussed. The book derives key implications for economic and environmental policy and shows that the new global sustainability indicator is not only relevant for green progress, but also useful as a signal for international investors. The construction of the EIIW-vita global sustainability indicator is such that investors, citizens and governments can easily interpret the results. Correlation analysis of the new sustainability indicator with the human development index indicates complementarity, so that a new hybrid superindicator can be constructed. Sustainability rhetoric dominates environmental policy. This fresh assessment of key "pillars" of sustainable economic performance and growth is a valuable contribution to greening the economy, the leitmotiv of the latest Rio Earth Summit. The book places the discussion of sustainability on solid data. The rather surprising results of its new sustainability index should make policy makers rethink their environmental and economic strategies. Prof. Dr. Peter Bartelmus Columbia University, New York Many people put the economy first when sustainability concerns are raised, while environmental indicators are often developed without a sense of socio-economic performance. This important new book bridges the gap. It sheds light on crucial indicators such as renewable energies, exporting green goods and services, genuine savings, and water productivity. And it helps to observe the impressive changes at a global scale and in countries such as China. A must read for all experts interested in those issues. Prof. Dr. Raimund Bleischwitz University College London

Given our rapidly growing population, the need for judicious management of essential natural resources is becoming a major challenge for planners, managers and scientists/researchers. This book presents a multidisciplinary approach to managing water, energy and bio-resources, described in papers contributed by distinguished scientists and academics working at reputed universities and institutions around the globe. It includes 28 chapters grouped into three sections: Water Resources Management, Energy and Bio-resources Management and Climate and Natural Resources Management, examining case studies from all over the world. These contributions address current challenges, offering modern techniques for managing these resources in various geographical regions. This volume will provide a valuable asset for researchers and students, managers, environmentalists, hydrologists, water resource and energy managers, governmental and other regulatory bodies dealing with water, energy and bio-resources.

Written by internationally recognized experts in atmospheric research, this book focuses on the state of the art in topical environmental issues such as global change, forest decline, ozone depletion and acid rain. Our present knowledge of forest damage is summarized as an example of atmospheric impact on nature. Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, tackles the question of how the changing chemical composition of the atmosphere influences global chemistry and climate. The future environmental impact of traffic is described from the point of view of the motor industry. These and other contributions illustrate the interaction which exists between atmosphere, technology and nature.

This book explores the part that electric vehicles can play in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Further, it explains the impact of public support, technological advances, lower costs and better battery performance in making electric vehicles a viable alternative. The book begins by analyzing the international context of electric vehicles and how they are being developed in different countries, and by offering a forecast of the electricity demand they may create. It then discusses technological innovations in electric vehicle recharging systems. The book is concerned not only with the economic potential of electric vehicles, but also with environmental aspects; consequently, it examines the raw materials supply chain and performs a lifecycle assessment. The book concludes with a chapter on alternative energies in transport, which may also help to facilitate the energy transition. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for researchers, graduate students, policymakers and industry professionals interested in the energy transition and transport.

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management discusses the ethical issues associated with deliberately engineering a cooler climate to combat global warming. Climate engineering (also known as geoengineering) has recently experienced a surge of interest given the growing likelihood that the global community will fail to limit the temperature increases associated with greenhouse gases to safe levels. Deliberate manipulation of solar radiation to combat climate change is an exciting and hopeful technical prospect, promising great benefits to those who are in line to suffer most through climate change. At the same time, the prospect of geoengineering creates huge controversy. Taking intentional control of earth s climate would be an unprecedented step in environmental management, raising a number of difficult ethical questions. One particular form of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), is known to be relatively cheap and capable of bringing down global temperatures very rapidly. However, the complexity of the climate system creates considerable uncertainty about the precise nature of SRM s effects in different regions. The ethical issues raised by the prospect of SRM are both complex and thorny. They include: 1) the uncertainty of SRM s effects on precipitation patterns, 2) the challenge of proper global participation in decision-making, 3) the legitimacy of intentionally manipulating the global climate system in the first place, 4) the potential to sidestep the issue of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, and, 5) the lasting effects on future generations. It has been widely acknowledged that a sustained and scholarly treatment of the ethics of SRM is necessary before it will be possible to make fair and just decisions about whether (or how) to proceed. This book, including essays by 13 experts in the field of ethics of geoengineering, is intended to go some distance towards providing that treatment."

The over-exploitation of important earth resources such as land and water has led to a number of environment-related problems the world over. At the same time, land-use change caused by various human activities has led to extinction of many plant and animal habitats and species. In this context, the relevance of biodiversity for human survival is becoming a major international political issue as scientific evidence builds on the global health implications of biodiversity loss. These issues are closely linked with the issue of climate change, as many of the health risks due to climate change are associated with rapid degradation of biodiversity. This present work focuses on holistic natural resource-based spatio-temporal planning, development and management and considers them as essential to save the degraded ecosystem for sustainable resource management. Contributions are compiled in two volumes: 1. Climate Change and Biodiversity and 2. Landscape Ecology and Water Management. Geoinformatics along with its tools such as remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been used in assessing the results of various environmental problems both physical and social. These volumes will be useful for geographers, geoscientists, hydrologists, landscape ecologists, environmentalists, engineers, planners and policy makers.

This book discusses how climate change and heat islands are a main contributor to water related problems in urban areas in Kosice, Slovakia. Green roofs are used as a tool to assist in solving these water related issues. The need to provide housing in urban areas is expected to rise to 66% in 2050, according to the United Nations. Many urban areas have seen natural permeable green areas replaced with concrete constructions and hard, non-permeable surfaces. The densification of existing built-up areas is responsible for the decreasing vegetation, which results in the lack of evapotranspiration cooling the air, thereby creating urban heat islands. Several studies, discussed in this book, have shown that natural and permeable surfaces, as in the case of green roofs, can play a crucial role in mitigating this negative climate phenomenon and providing higher efficiency for buildings, leading to savings such as water, one of the focal points of this research.

not only for land use systems that depend on the regular supply of rain or irrigation water but also for the future development of natural rainforests as drought stress has been shown to a?ect tree growth and species composition in old-growth forests (Wright 1991, Walsh and Newbery 1999, Engelbrecht et al. 2007). A drought experiment conducted in a cacao agroforestry plantation showed that this plantation was surprisingly resilient to an induced drought of more than a year (Schwendenmann et al. 2009). However, droughts can have a strong impact on household incomes from agriculture, they strongly a?ect the vulnerability to poverty and thus have to be analyzed as important exogenous shocks to households, forcing them to adjust their behaviour and develop strategies to cope with these problems. The stability of rainforest margins is a critical factor in the protection of tropical rainforests (Tscharntke et al. 2007). At present, however, rainf- est margins in many parts of the tropics are far from stable, both in soc- economic and in ecological terms. For example, protected areas may attract, rather than repel, human settlement, which may be due to international donor investment in national conservation programs (Wittemeyer et al. 2008). An alternative hypothesis is that protected areas might be compromised if leakage takes place, that is, if impacts that would take place inside the restricted area are displaced to a nearby, undisturbed area (Ewers and Rodrigues 2008).

This book provides a collection of the state-of-the-art methodologies and approaches suggested for detecting extremes, trend analysis, accounting for nonstationarities, and uncertainties associated with extreme value analysis in a changing climate. This volume is designed so that it can be used as the primary reference on the available methodologies for analysis of climate extremes. Furthermore, the book addresses current hydrometeorologic global data sets and their applications for global scale analysis of extremes. While the main objective is to deliver recent theoretical concepts, several case studies on extreme climate conditions are provided. Audience The book is suitable for teaching in graduate courses in the disciplines of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth System Science, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences.

This book examines how the news media in general, and investigative journalism in particular, interprets environmental problems and how those interpretations contribute to the shaping of a discourse of risk that can compete against the omnipresent and hegemonic discourse of modernisation in Chinese society.

This book examines the way that lead enters the biosphere and the subsequent environmental impact. The contributing authors include international experts who provide methods for assessing and characterizing the ecological risk of lead contamination of soil and plants. Information is provided on the consequences for human health as a result of lead pollution. This book reveals that approximately 98% of stable lead in the atmosphere originates from human activities. Lead in Plants and the Environment reports on methods for detecting, measuring, and assessing the concentration of lead in plants. The authors provide a method for the measurement of 210Pb isotopes in plants. This method can be applied extensively in different environmental settings, not only as a way of revealing sources of lead, but also as a way to monitor lead transport in plants and animals that ingest them. The chapters include coverage on the following topics: * Lead bioavailability in the environment and its exposure and effects * Radioanalytical methods for detecting and identifying trace concentrations of lead in the environment * Lead contamination and its dynamics in soil plant systems * Lead pollution monitoring and remediation through terrestrial plants in mesocosm constructed wetlands * A review of phytoremediation of lead This book is a valuable resource to students, academics, researchers, and environmental professionals doing field work on lead contamination throughout the world.

This book advocates a fresh approach to planning that anticipates, rather than reacts to, the changes in climate currently in process. Today's spatial planning procedures rely on historical evidence instead of preparing for factors that by definition lie in the future, yet which are relatively uncontroversial: shortages of water, sea level rise and rises in average temperatures being but three examples. Arguing for more flexibility, the contributors view 'complexity' as the key to transforming the way we plan in order to better equip us to face uncertainties about our future environment.

This book aims to come up with views to address the queries of planners, policymakers, and general people for water resources management under uncertainty of climate change, including examples from Asia and Europe with successful adaptive measures to change the challenge of climate change into opportunities. The availability of clean water is a major global challenge for the future due to a rapidly growing population and urbanization where further stress in water resources is expected due to the impact of climate change. The wide range of impacts includes for example changes in hydrology, moisture availability, spatial and temporal variations in magnitude of stream flow, and dwindling of water levels with adverse effect on wetlands and ecosystem. As a consequence, water management has become a serious issue and was identified as a global societal challenge, and climate change forecasting has become one of the key issues in recent research on sustainable water resources management.

This volume addresses in detail both livestock's role in climate change and the impacts of climate change on livestock production and reproduction. Apart from these cardinal principles of climate change and livestock production, this volume also examines the various strategies used to mitigate livestock-related GHG emissions, and those which can reduce the impacts of climate change on livestock production and reproduction. Presenting information and case studies collected and analyzed by professionals working in diversified ecological zones, the book explores the influence of climate change on livestock production across the globe. The most significant feature of this book is that it addresses in detail the different adaptation strategies and identifies targets for different stakeholders in connection with climate change and livestock production. Further, it puts forward development plans that will allow the livestock industries to cope with current climate changes and strategies that will mitigate the effects by 2025. Lastly, it provides researchers and policymakers several researchable priorities to help develop economically viable solutions for livestock production with less GHG emissions, promoting a cleaner environment in which human beings and livestock can live in harmony without adverse effects on productivity. Given that livestock production systems are sensitive to climate change and at the same are themselves a contributor to the phenomenon, climate change has the potential to pose an increasingly formidable challenge to the development of the livestock sector. However, there is a dearth of scientific information on adapting livestock production to the changing climate; as such, well-founded reference material on sustaining livestock production systems under the changing climate scenarios in different agro-ecological zones of the world is essential. By methodically and extensively addressing all aspects of climate change and livestock production, this volume offers a valuable tool for understanding the hidden intricacies of climatic stress and its influence on livestock production.

This book presents major hydrological, physicochemical and biological processes determining the formation of hydro-physical properties and chemical composition of terrestrial surface water. Generalized hydro-physical, hydro-chemical and hydro-biological parameters affecting surface water quality, in particular in the Ukraine, are provided. Furthermore, a general description of the anthropogenic factors affecting the process of forming natural water's properties is presented. This volume is of interest to ecologists, and scientists, lecturers and students in higher educational institutions investigating patterns of formation of water properties and working on the development of methodologies to model and assess surface water quality, and water quality classifications.

Why do business organisations contribute to climate change governance in areas of limited statehood? In many countries, governments are too weak and often also not willing to set and enforce climate change regulations. While companies have the capacities to fill the resulting governance gap, conventional wisdom expects them to take advantage by relocating their production sites in order to escape strict national regulation. Studies on South Africa, Kenya and Germany demonstrate that business contributions to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change vary significantly between countries, sectors and firms. In order to explain these variations, the contributors bring together two important literatures that rarely speak to each other - governance and business management - arguing that the threat of public regulation has an important role in motivating business efforts.

Even with significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, a certain degree of climate change will inevitably occur. Adapting to climate change, then, will become a necessary step in reducing the vulnerability of many regions across the globe. This is especially true for urban areas where climate change has been shown to have particularly destabilizing effects. Through the identification and analysis of the most relevant impacts facing urban areas, this book makes clear the need to incorporate climate change concerns into the mainstream of local planning, governance and policy making practices. Adaptation as a workable concept within urban areas cannot be treated in isolation from the many pre-existing challenges facing cities. By offering numerous examples of ongoing adaptation programs and strategies across a wide range of contexts, the authors show the growing potential of cities in the fight against climate change. This book has its origins in a collection of papers originally presented at the Resilient Cities 2010 Congress in Bonn, Germany (May 2010), the first global forum on cities and adaptation to climate change, convened by ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability. In this volume, the first in a new series dedicated to this annual event, a range of contributors bring their perspectives to bear on the most pressing issues and controversies surrounding adaptation to climate change within cities. These writings will prove invaluable to anyone interested in understanding and confronting climate change at the local level.

This book reviews the sources of the air pollutants responsible for building damage and the mechanisms involved. Studies investigating the relationships between pollution concentration (dose) and the resulting damage (response) are described and the latest research findings for dose-response functions are presented.

Trends in pollutant emissions, ambient concentrations and building damage over time are described and future predictions are presented. Methodologies for assessing the extent of the potential problem in a region the stock at risk are presented. Procedures for estimating the economic implications are described and the consequences are discussed in detail, because economic factors are important for reaching policy and management decisions at local, national and international scales.

Damage to cultural heritage buildings is an important additional effect which needs to be considered as the standards are revised and the factors which will need to be brought into the assessment are presented.

This volume presents the outcome of an Agriculture Workshop organized by the Gulf Research Centre Cambridge (GRCC) and held at Cambridge University, UK during the Gulf Research Meeting 11-14 July 2012. Co-directed by the editors, the workshop, entitled Environmental Cost and Changing Face of Agriculture in the Gulf States was attended by participants from Australia, Bahrain, India, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, UK and Morocco. These scientists, educators, researchers, policy makers and managers share their experience in agriculture in the Gulf States, with the aim of helping to improve agriculture production and thus bridge the gap between local production and the food import.

The papers gathered here were presented at the workshop and have all passed through rigorous peer review by renowned scientists. The diverse papers present various aspects of agriculture production in the evolving face of climate change and dwindling water resources in the region. The book covers topics such as the prospects of agriculture in a changing climate; the potential of climate-smart agriculture; the impact of food prices, income and income distribution on food security; improved efficiency in water use; challenges in using treated wastewater in agriculture; investment in foreign agriculture and agricultural research and development. The papers span the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, with specific case studies set in Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait."

A major objective of this volume is to create and share knowledge about the socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions of climate change. The authors analyze the effects of climate change on the social and environmental determinants of the health and well-being of communities (i.e. poverty, clean air, safe drinking water, food supplies) and on extreme events such as floods and hurricanes. The book covers topics such as the social and political dimensions of the ebola response, inequalities in urban migrant communities, as well as water-related health effects of climate change. The contributors recommend political and social-cultural strategies for mitigate, adapt and prevent the impacts of climate change to human and environmental health. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in new methods and tools to reduce risks and to increase health resilience to climate change.

To comprehensively address the complexities of current socio-ecological problems involved in global environmental change, it is indispiseble to achieve an integration of ecological understanding and ethical values. Contemporary science proposes an inclusive ecosystem concept that recognizes humans as components. Contemporary environmental ethics includes eco-social justice and the realization that as important as biodiversity is cultural diversity, inter-cultural, inter-institutional, and international collaboration requiring a novel approach known as "biocultural "conservation. Right action in confronting the challenges of the 21st century requires science and ethics to be seamlessly integrated. This book resulted from the 14th Cary Conference that brought together leading scholars and practitioners in ecology and environmental philosophy to discuss core terminologies, methods, questions, and practical frameworks for long-term socio-ecological research, education, and decision making.

Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology attempts to provide concise, critical reviews of timely advances, philosophy and significant areas of accomplished or needed endeavor in the total field of xenobiotics, in any segment of the environment, as well as toxicological implications.

This book documents the advantages and limitations of various electricity generation methods. It illustrates how both electricity and motor fuel can be cost-effectively derived from coal, natural gas or other indigenous fuels, thereby eliminating our dependence on imported oil and the power of OPEC. It favours electricity generation systems powered exclusively by natural gas, coal, nuclear and renewables and motor vehicles powered by hydrogen (electricity from coal gasification with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen as the fuel powering fuel-cell electric vehicles produced from natural gas or by gasifying coal With CCS.) The book also demonstrates that the US can meet the Climate Change goal of reducing all greenhouse gases by 80% below 1990 levels in both the transportation and electric utility sectors using hydrogen and coal.