Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

The proliferation of global trade and commerce provides both challenges and opportunities for addressing transboundary pollution and furthering global sustainability. In addition to international policy instruments and legislation, standardised approaches to environmental management can improve environmental performance and reduce the escalating levels of pollution that are being experienced worldwide, and particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

In Hong Kong, 35 organisations have been certified to the ISO 14001 international environmental management system (EMS) standard, joining over 5000 more worldwide. While this trend is encouraging, Hong Kong's experience demonstrates that significant barriers exist for EMS to become a mainstream tool for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

As is it unlikely that certification will become mandatory at the international level, additional effort is therefore required to overcome these barriers, such as raising the awareness of all stakeholders to the benefits of the EMS and facilitating access to the necessary financial and technological assistance.

Recent years have seen attempts to design and implement environmental accounts for a number of countries, in response to perceived inadequacies in the existing national income accounts. This has led to much discussion of the feasibility and desirability of different approaches. This paper discusses three key issues: what use is envisaged for environmental accounts? What type of development are they intended to promote? And what view of consumption do they incorporate? The paper concludes that there is a strong case for developing environmental accounts in physical units as a tool of analysis, but that the case for developing accounts in money terms, on the other hand, largely with the aim of arriving at a "Green National Income", is quite weak. If the objective is to monitor progress towards sustainable welfare, the development of a set of social and environmental indicators would be preferable.

Policy makers are turning to market-based mechanisms to engender innovative ways of reducing polluting air emissions. As with any emerging market, environmental policies must be carefully crafted so that the institutions and incentives needed to form working markets are developed. Attention must be paid to creating avenues for communities and other "non-moneyed" or unorganised interests to be involved in the new market processes. This paper proposes a strategy to create sustainable, community-based methods to reduce polluting air emissions within the context of market-based incentive programs. By enabling communities to effectively participate in environmental solutions, they will truly be able to "think globally, act locally".

The public is demanding more democratic decision making processes that take into account their opinions and views. In order to make large societal decision making processes inclusive, it is necessary to find a way of communicating the issues involved in a decision without becoming swamped with the technical aspects. Many of the societal decisions that have to be made, e.g., about the greenhouse effect and radiation, have very long-term impacts, which make them even more complex.

One of the more controversial issues in evaluating long-term impacts is the choice of discount rate, or indeed whether discounting is appropriate. When the decision is societal and there are many stakeholders, the debate about the discount rate can become very heated. Using exponential discounting focuses attention on the discount rate and does not help stakeholders explore their opinions and beliefs. Atherton and French (1998) suggested an alternative methodology based upon a time-era structuring of attributes. By dividing time into distinct eras and weighting these rather than applying one discount rate over the whole lifetime of the project, a seemingly more transparent way of dealing with time preferences was developed.

To further investigate the acceptability of the methodology to a broad range of people, an interactive World Wide Web page was set up. The page was not context specific and talked about an undefined project, not a particular decision situation. The subjects were asked to define the time eras themselves and to weight them. They were then asked to indicate what had motivated their weights and finally they were asked how their weights would change if the issues changed.

Most subjects found the ideas easy to comprehend and commented positively about the experiment. Seventy-five per cent of the subjects divided time into increasing intervals in line with the suggestions made in Atherton and French (1998). Sixty-five per cent of them had decreasing time era weights, but their weights decreased more slowly than those prescribed by constant discounting. This paper describes the results of the experiment, indicating the implications they may have for societal decision making.

After reviewing the development of public participation in environmental decision making, empirical/theoretical principles for public participation are proposed, based on Habermas's theory of communicative action. These principles are used to assess the Aarhus convention (AC), as well as the implications of the AC for the interpretation of EIA directive 85/337/EEC (amended by directive 97/11/EC) and the proposed directive on SEA.The results show that the AC falls short of the proposed principles in four fundamental aspects: (1) its need to ensure the participation of cognitively and lingually non-competent actors; (2) the need to have a two-way communication process; (3) the need to ensure normative and subjective claims are adequately recognised; and (4) the need to establish conflict management procedures. As well, the results show that the AC will set stricter standards for the interpretation of the public participation provisions in both the EIA directive and the proposed SEA directive.

Aggregate quarrying plays an important role in the local economy of the UK's national parks, providing local jobs and expenditure on local services. There are also adverse local impacts from traffic, dust, noise and blasting. However, it is the status of the parks as crucial features of the nation's landscape capital that increases the significance of localised landscape impacts to a level which outweighs any benefits that quarrying provides. This article is based upon commissioned research into the impact of quarrying on the national parks and assesses those impacts against the functions of the parks as nationally important designated landscapes.