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Climate change, rising energy prices, and declining supplies of fossil fuels have changed how governments balance energy needs with environmental protection. Strategic Environmental Assessments in the Province of Nova Scotia are based on core principles that seek to lay the foundation for integrated decision-making in ways that contribute to broader governmental policy commitments. This process places a particular emphasis on early stakeholder consultation and engagement, regulatory streamlining, and future-oriented approaches to sustainability issues. In 2007, the Province of Nova Scotia commissioned the Offshore Energy Environmental Research Association (OEER) to carry out a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) concentrated in the Bay of Fundy on Nova Scotia's west coast — an area known for its immense tidal energy potential. This assessment focused on offshore renewable energy development in the area and culminated in a report outlining strategic recommendations for action. Overall, this process provided the Nova Scotia Government with a path forward in developing and deploying its marine renewable energy industry. This case study outlines the steps of the Nova Scotian SEA process including the scope, timeline, purpose, responsibility, and main steps taken to assess the environmental, economic, and social issues associated with marine renewable energy development in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy.

China’s marine areas are vast, and can be utilized to generate marine energy. Marine renewable energy is natural and clean and has much potential for development, which makes it important in our future development. This paper describes the utilization status of China’s three species of marine renewable energy: marine tidal energy, wave energy, and wind energy. We then assess the environmental impacts of these alternative energy sources through an environmental benefit assessment method. We also estimate the environmental benefits of marine tidal power, wave energy, wind energy. This paper concluded that China’s marine renewable energy has made huge environmental benefits, which amount to about 290 million yuan. Finally, we put forward two suggestions to develop our country’s marine renewable energy: draw lessons from other countries’ experience in the development of marine renewable energy to an appropriate extent and construct a strategic and overall plan to develop marine renewable energy.

Tidal energy is one of the clean and non-depleting renewable energy sources. In contrast to other clean sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal etc., tidal energy can be predicted for years ahead. Also, the medium, seawater, is more than 800 times denser than air and the astronomic nature of the underlying driving mechanism results in an essentially predictable resource, although subject to weather-related fluctuations. These features make it an important energy source for global power production in the near future. There are various types of tidal power plants across the world with varying tidal elevation. Also the method of conversion of the tidal energy into electrical energy is site specific. For example, we can adopt conventional method to extract energy in high tidal regions. But when it comes to low tidal regions like the southern India where tidal elevation measurements does not exceed 2.5m, there is a need of low flow turbines which can extract higher energy from lower head. An important factor that is responsible for the velocity of tidal stream is the tidal inlet dimensions. In this paper, an attempt has been made to identify the feasible locations for extraction of potential tidal energy along the Indian Coast.