Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

This paper investigates the current state of corporate Australia's environmental management accounting practices and environmental management accountants' perceptions of how environmental management accounting information should be accounted for and reported in the annual report of an environmentally sensitive corporation. The results indicate that many Australian companies have not yet developed a holistic approach to environmental costing, and that environmental management accountants believe that environmentally induced costs and expenses should be reported as notes to financial statements, rather than in the profit and loss statement in the corporate annual report. However, results are inconclusive as to whether certain environmentally induced expenditure should be capitalised and amortised separately in the balance sheet, while there is some support for environmentally induced end-of-pipe and integrated technologies being recognised separately as assets in the balance sheet.

In 1994, Sunpine Forest Products Ltd. sought permits from Alberta government to construct a permanent log hauling road and approvals from the federal government for construction of required bridges associated with the road. A concerned citizens group challenged the Federal Government's subsequent bridge approvals in court, claiming that cumulative effects assessment was not adequately conducted under Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The original Sunpine court decision agreed with the citizen group that the federal government erred in law by not including related projects and adequately considering associated cumulative effects, sending the approval back to the federal government for reconsideration. Government regulators, industrial foresters, and environmental groups across Canada awaited the appeal to the Sunpine federal court decision. The Sunpine Appeal reversed the original position with much relief from industry and government. The Sunpine case raises important issues about how federal and provincial authorities address environmental impacts, uncertainty in scoping assessments, factors to be considered, and cumulative effect assessments. This paper evaluates the cumulative effects assessment processes followed in the Sunpine case study under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act within an analysis framework of comprehensiveness, fairness, efficiency, and effectiveness. Land use planning models, like the British Columbia land resource management plans and Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, offer alternative approaches to legislated cumulative effects processes. Sustainability may be better realised with a combination of strategic environmental assessment tools, utilising environmental assessment at the project-level within the context of a regional resource planning process.

Sustainable development is an issue that has attracted a considerable amount of academic interest since the publication of the Brundtland Report. With Agenda 21, it is an issue which has also found its way into the policy and action programmes of the European Commission. For Europe and its member states, the issue has become one of sustainable urban development and this paper reports on the interim findings of a concerted action programme undertaken to foreground the urban question, develop a framework for the analysis of sustainable development and compile a directory of methods to assess the sustainability of urban development. It classifies the assessment methods in question and goes on to map their applications across the sustainable development issues represented in the framework for analysis. Having done this, the paper goes on to set out how the said methods are being used to build the environmental capacity that is needed for the city of tomorrow to carry its cultural heritage and develop forms of human settlement which are sustainable.

A Bayesian Network approach to developing effective policies for more sustainable rural land use and development is presented which:

• incorporates several different stakeholder viewpoints

• integrates and balances the results from different viewpoints, and thus facilitates compromise land use solutions

• elucidates the main factors affecting stakeholders' decisions, on which policy levers will operate more effectively

• allows differences between "expected change" and "observed change" to be understood as arising from uncertainty and variation about "the average situation"

• demonstrates the crucial roles of beliefs and uncertainties in determining the preferred options of different groups

• emphasises the need to know the beliefs and uncertainties of local land managers

• incorporates public participation and social learning while such necessary data are gathered.

The approach's merits for fostering pro-active policy design and subsidiarity, and for focusing the research needed to underpin rural policy are discussed.

Solid waste disposal facilities have become scarce in both developed democratic and lower-income socialist states such as the mainland China. The cases of Guangzhou, Jiangmen and Dongguan are analysed to elucidate the factors for siting difficulties and the unique siting style in China. A number of factors are contributing to siting difficulties in Southern China. Irrational applications of the self-sufficient principle at local waste management, poor environmental track records of previous and existing disposal facilities have all severely restricted the supply of waste disposal sites. In addition, rapid increase in waste generation and the use of old-fashioned equipment in waste facilities are speeding up the consumption of landfill space. While the top-down approach is still the norm in waste facility siting, local governments and host communities in China can effectively block the establishment of waste facility as a result of increasing decentralisation of decision making power where even grass root level governments are granted more autonomy in decision making.