Greenhouse gas (GHG) offsets have long been promoted as an important element of a comprehensive climate policy approach. Offset programs can reduce the overall cost of achieving a given emission goal by enabling emission reductions to occur where costs are lower. Offsets have the potential to deliver sustainability co-benefits, through technology development and transfer. They can also develop human and institutional capacity for reducing emissions in sectors and locations not included in a cap and trade or a mandatory government policy. However, offsets can pose a risk to the environmental integrity of climate actions, especially if issues surrounding additionality, permanence, leakage, quantification and verification are not adequately addressed. The challenge is to design offset programs and policies that can maximize their potential benefits while minimizing their potential risks. This handbook provides a systematic and comprehensive review of existing offset programs. It looks at what offsets are, how offset mechanisms function, and the successes and pitfalls they have encountered. Coverage includes offset programs across the full swath of applications including mandatory and voluntary systems, government regulated and private markets, carbon offset funds, and accounting and reporting protocols such as the WBCSD/WRI GHG Protocol and ISO 14064. Learning from the successes and failures of these programs will be essential to crafting effective climate policy. This is an essential reference for all regulators, policy makers, business leaders and NGOs concerned with the design and operation of GHG offset programs world-wide. Published with SEI

Greenhouse gas (GHG) offsets have long been promoted as an important element of a comprehensive climate policy approach. Offset programs can reduce the overall cost of achieving a given emission goal by enabling emission reductions to occur where costs are lower. Offsets have the potential to deliver sustainability co-benefits, through technology development and transfer. They can also develop human and institutional capacity for reducing emissions in sectors and locations not included in a cap and trade or a mandatory government policy. However, offsets can pose a risk to the environmental integrity of climate actions, especially if issues surrounding additionality, permanence, leakage, quantification and verification are not adequately addressed. The challenge is to design offset programs and policies that can maximize their potential benefits while minimizing their potential risks.

This handbook provides a systematic and comprehensive review of existing offset programs. It looks at what offsets are, how offset mechanisms function, and the successes and pitfalls they have encountered. Coverage includes offset programs across the full swath of applications including mandatory and voluntary systems, government regulated and private markets, carbon offset funds, and accounting and reporting protocols such as the WBCSD/WRI GHG Protocol and ISO 14064. Learning from the successes and failures of these programs will be essential to crafting effective climate policy. This is an essential reference for all regulators, policy makers, business leaders and NGOs concerned with the design and operation of GHG offset programs world-wide. Published with SEI

Little Joey finds out about a snowman contest and enters it right away. The winner is to receive 50 dollars for the best snowman. Joey practiced hard at making different types of snowmen. Unknown to Joey he received a special kind of help with his snowman. The help comes from a tiny snowflake that feels he is too little to do anything. The Itty Bitty Snowflake doesn't know how special he is and what a difference he makes for Joey until after the contest.

The "Mind" characters used in this book are metaphors. Their physical appearance is dictated by the state of mind they represent. They have no choice to change their original appearance, but they do have the power to modify the social set of expectations that are attached to their identity. Each mind will experience life as a series of tests within scenarios that are uniquely presented according to their personal appearance. This is where the entertainment begins. It is our hope that you identify with at least one of the minds, maybe even several of them. Each of us have likely faced some of the challenges The Minds will be dealt. We may be confronted in the future with some of their choices. Many of the situations are not age specific, therefore easily relatable. Our hope is that you will laugh hard and cry softly as you are introduced to The Minds. Most of all, we hope you will conquer all your fears and recognize the beauty within yourself, just as you are. The changes we go through in life will serve us in affirming ways. Regardless which choices you make, right or wrong, each will make you stronger. Refuse to give up. Do not allow others to dictate your actions and feelings should they judge you based on your appearance alone. Your mind belongs to you. Decorate it as you wish, with love.

Stieg Larsson was an unabashed feminist in his personal and professional life and in the fictional world he created, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are full of graphic depictions of violence against women, including stalking, sexual harassment, child abuse, rape, incest, serial murder, sexual slavery, and sex trafficking, committed by vile individual men and by corrupt, secretive institutions. How do readers and moviegoers react to these depictions, and what do they make of the women who fight back, the complex masculinities in the trilogy, and the ambiguous gender of the elusive Lisbeth Salander? These lively and accessible essays expand the conversation in the blogosphere about the novels and films by connecting the controversies about gender roles to social trends in the real world.

Stieg Larsson was an unabashed feminist in his personal and professional life and in the fictional world he created, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are full of graphic depictions of violence against women, including stalking, sexual harassment, child abuse, rape, incest, serial murder, sexual slavery, and sex trafficking, committed by vile individual men and by corrupt, secretive institutions. How do readers and moviegoers react to these depictions, and what do they make of the women who fight back, the complex masculinities in the trilogy, and the ambiguous gender of the elusive Lisbeth Salander? These lively and accessible essays expand the conversation in the blogosphere about the novels and films by connecting the controversies about gender roles to social trends in the real world.

The strategies that North American nonprofit theatre companies employ to ensure pragmatic survival and artistic advancement prove critical to their abilities to continue working. When the artists in these companies utilize alternative approaches to creation, the abstract quality of the resulting productions often exacerbates the need for successful survival tactics, as performances may appeal to a limited number of paying audience members. Theatre practitioners who emphasize long term performer training and the lengthy development of devised productions, such as companies building upon the artistic tradition of Jerzy Grotowski, represent one extreme sect of these marginalized artists. Relying on data gleaned from North American Cultural Laboratory in New York and Number Eleven Theatre in Toronto, two companies influenced by this artistic tradition, this study employs a grounded-theory method of analysis to examine the strategies marginalized nonprofit alternative theatre companies use to negotiate the tension between economic viability and artistic integrity.