Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

This paper outlines a Decision-Maker's Tool (DM Tool), designed to guide practitioners and their inter-disciplinary teams through a typical strategic environmental assessment (SEA) process. While SEA properly includes post-decision follow-up, the DM Tool covers the SEA process up to the creation of a Briefing Note for the decision maker. Together, use of the DM Tool and the Briefing Note should facilitate positive contributions to sustainability through well considered and aligned policies, plans and programmes (PPPs), by enhancing the comprehensiveness, consistency, clarity, accessibility and credibility of decision making information.

The discussion presumes that the SEA is central to the PPP development process, rather than being a separate exercise. The DM Tool and Briefing Note are designed to recommend PPP action based on clearly stated needs and purposes, addressing the key issues, and application of explicit sustainability criteria in the comparative evaluation of feasible alternatives. Particular attention is paid to recognising trade-offs and residual risks, and presenting all this information concisely for the decision maker.

This paper describes two marine renewable energy stakeholder workshops in North Scotland that were held in March 2009 to discuss industry requirements for developing the Pentland Firth and Orkney waters between Scotland's north coast and the northern isles. This is an area of considerable interest for the development of renewable energy in Scotland. If the area is developed (mainly with wave and tidal power) it could make a significant contribution to both meeting government renewable energy targets and to the local economy. However, following accelerated applications by developers for site leasing, development of the area was delayed by uncertainty in environmental data shortages and subsequent slow progress in government formulation of marine spatial planning policy. In order to proceed, the marine renewable energy industry in Scotland required timely investment in regional infrastructure and a clear policy direction from government. Energy industry stakeholders who attended the workshops called for a single authority to take responsibility for both regulation and direct investment from government so that national renewable energy targets could be met in the required timeframe. Ultimately, government and policy makers were expected by industry to take responsibility for this with a central authority to decide and importantly communicate where and when marine turbines could be built. This required by government a proper understanding of the resources and not just the constraints in identifying the most suitable areas. Local knowledge in the community offered to dispel some of the uncertainty regarding the physical environment in a way that could also guide policy and perhaps accelerate marine spatial planning in designating workable areas for wave and tidal power.

Organised mining and extraction of mineral resources began in 1903 in the Northern Protectorates and in 1904 in the Southern Protectorates of modern Nigeria with the establishment of Mineral Survey of the Northern Protectorates and the Mineral Survey of Southern Protectorates respectively, by the British colonial government. Over a century later, extraction of mineral resources in the country is still highly underdeveloped. There are great conflicts that surround oil extraction in the Niger Delta region, and Nigeria imports solid minerals which she is capable of producing domestically. The extraction of solid minerals and oil resources also calls into question issues of environmental neglect in the country. This paper provides for a descriptive analysis of Nigeria's mineral and oil resources extraction and management policy since the colonial period. It is observed that public policies in the sector have been interventionist, marginal, disjointed and elitist, and, have not properly included issues of sustainability for peace and development. Key recommendations of the paper are that public policy in the mineral and oil sector should seek to include more stringent regulations in relation to the environment, ensure equity in rent or royalty distribution especially to the host communities and develop the extraction of solid minerals with which the country is abundantly blessed.

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the current situation of natural resources consumption in the world and its relationship with the level of social development. The Ecological Footprint concept is used to indicate human beings' environmental impact, and the Human Development Index (HDI) is used as a process for the social development level. Based on the dataset of 136 countries from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), we calculate the Gini coefficients of the total Ecological Footprint per person (EF) and its sub items, i.e., Renewable Resources Footprint per person (REF) and Energy Footprint per person (EEF). The results indicate that significant inequality exists in natural resources consumption among the 136 countries from 1996 to 2005, and inequality of the EEF is the largest. We also calculate the Lorenz asymmetry coefficients of EF, REF and EEF, which are all greater than 1, indicating that the inequality results from some countries having extremely high resources consumption. The regression analyses of EF, REF and EEF with HDI, respectively, are made to show that there is a significant U-shaped relationship between natural resources consumption per person and the social development level rather than an inverted U-shaped relationship. Therefore, the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis is not supported by this research.

This article attempts to adapt the Monte Carlo method to the quantitative risk management of environmental pollution. In this context, the feasibility of stochastic models to quantitatively evaluate the risk of chemical pollution is first discussed and then linked to a case study in which Monte Carlo simulations are applied. The objective of the case study is to develop a Monte Carlo scheme for evaluating the pollution in a lake environment. It is shown that the results can be of interest as they define the risk margins that are important to the sustainability of the ecosystem in general, and human health in particular. Moreover, assessing the environmental pollution with the help of the Monte Carlo method can be feasible and serve the purpose of investigating and controlling the environmental pollution, in the long and short terms.