Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the number of firms publicly touting the environmental merits of their products or their operational practices. This is driven by the changing societal concern and public discourse around environmental issues. What was once an infrequent conversation has emerged as a moral obligation. While the number of "green" products available in the market has grown, these conditions have also resulted in firms deliberately misleading consumers about their environmental performance or the environmental benefits of their products, a condition commonly known as "greenwashing."

This paper will argue that the urgency to address our rapidly deteriorating environment requires that tangible steps be taken to control incidents of greenwashing. It examines the merits and drawbacks associated with government's taking an active role in the regulation of greenwashing and argues that the current regulatory instruments being used by governments to address greenwashing are not likely to be successful in addressing the problem. Finally, the paper proposes a new regulatory instrument where governments and interested stakeholders work together to collect and disseminate information on sustainable business practices and the impact of goods and service production on the environment.

The object of this paper is to ascertain the level of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) compliance of mining companies in selected mining communities in Ghana. Over the past three decades, Ghana has demonstrated considerable commitment to the conservation and management of bio-physical and socio-cultural environment. Laws and regulations have been enacted to monitor and ensure compliance for sound environmental management by mining companies. Contextually, this paper examines how communities affected by large-scale mining perceive EIA compliance and their expected role in the design and implementation of the process. The paper opines that despite the excellent environmental regulations in place, the level of enforcement and compliance has not been satisfactory. This is partly due to the neglect of priority issues affecting local communities during the processes of EIA. A higher commitment to the involvement of all stakeholders, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in environmental decision making in mining communities is highly recommended.

We conducted a deliberative participatory process for social impact assessment (SIA), where interactive, community-based forums (ICFs) gathered public input about community impacts of alternatives for salmon recovery in the Inland Northwest of the United States. After residents were provided information about alternatives and engaged in facilitated discussions, we elicited their understandings of community conditions and judgments of socio-economic impacts.

The present analysis focuses on the proposition that citizens engaged in the ICF process who represented diverse roles, based on community domains such as business, health-care, and education, would significantly differ in their judgments about those socio-economic impacts. We collected data on 705 community residents in forums conducted in 27 communities across the Inland Northwest. Results affirm that differences in roles and associated lifestyles, ideologies, and political viewpoints were related to differences in judgments of community conditions and contentiousness of planning alternatives. Implications for the ICF process and its effectiveness for SIA, as well as for other kinds of participatory processes, are discussed.

The Clean Air Act (CAA) and Clean Water Act (CWA) have been the lynchpins of the U.S. environmental policy for the last half century. Under both acts the federal government sets standards and the states implement, the outcomes of the CAA and CWA have not been the same however. While criteria air pollutants across the nation have been reduced or maintained under the management control strategies of the CAA, far less is known about the effects the CWA has had on water quality, even though, most agree water quality has improved since its implementation. These acts are built on similar frameworks, but the real difference lies on the embedded identification of assessment criteria. The CAA creates a rigid framework for the consistent identification and monitoring of air pollutants, while the CWA relies on a much more flexible system that varies over space and time. Thus, it is the embedded environmental assessment criteria within these acts that have led to different outcomes for similar policies.

There has been increasing demand in Canterbury, New Zealand for the abstraction of water from rivers. This demand has led to the increased interest in dam projects. But, while river impoundment can result in significant benefits, it also can come at "cost", especially to river ecology. Given these benefits and costs, it is essential that impounded rivers are systematically evaluated for their sustainability. In this paper the ecosystem services approach is applied for the purposes of evaluating the sustainability of the Opihi River located in South Canterbury. Indicators are used to represent the set of ecosystem services provided by the river. Both the criteria of weak and strong sustainability are evaluated in a novel way. Weak and strong sustainability are operationalised through an ecosystem services index and the safe minimum standard concept, respectively. In applying these evaluation methods it is observed that since the construction of the Opuha Dam, the Opihi River has progressed towards weak and strong sustainability.

Bangladesh has been identified as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change and rising sea-level. This is because it is located at the northern end of the funnel-shaped Bay of Bengal, and as a consequence it has experienced a number of severe storm surges in the last three decades. The inhabitants of the coastal region are very poor, and the surges have pushed them to a "tipping-point"; that is, the point of desperation which is exacerbating the socio-economic threats to their existence. The study reported here aimed to explore the perceptions of coastal communities with regard to vulnerability and adaptation (V & A) strategies in four different areas of Bangladesh in order to reduce their vulnerability to future storm surges. After reviewing the impact assessment guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), United States Country Studies Program (USCSP) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the researchers applied the Participatory Rapid Appraisal (PRA) method (a behavioural environmental decision-making tool) to survey 160 participants in four case-study areas, with 20 participants in two sessions in each case. The evaluation of V & A was implemented and prioritised in this study by a measuring scale, called the "weighted matrix index". This study not only considered the integrated assessment of V & A but it also classified the levels of vulnerability and adaptation in different categories. Additionally, it provides a comparative picture of the vulnerabilities for similar risks in different types of communities. These key aspects demonstrate and emphasise that adaptation policy needs to be implemented immediately in Bangladesh in order to reduce and manage future vulnerability in the coastal region under the potential climate change regimes.

Within the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, momentum has been building to define and manage the human footprint of research stations in Antarctica. This has been reflected by national operators and researchers offering varied approaches to measuring "footprint". By not having a standard method, comparative measurements have shown great disparity. By formulating a standard approach, this study delivered a method that enables comparison. To achieve this, recognition was needed of the vastly different environments in which Antarctic stations are situated. To aid this, defining what to measure, resources consumed, and location descriptors were developed to represent the actual impact of the footprint. The model was then tested on Australia's Davis Station. Inspection of aerial photography and mapping with geographical information systems was supported by field measurements. The model was found to be applicable, with on-the-ground measurements detecting additional footprint area not obvious from the desktop methods. While open to refinement, this study offers a standardised and comparable approach to measuring the footprint of Antarctic research stations.

Energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with life cycle stages of road infrastructure are currently rarely assessed during road infrastructure planning. This study examines the road infrastructure planning process, with emphasis on its use of Environmental Assessments (EA), and identifies when and how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can be integrated in the early planning stages for supporting decisions such as choice of road corridor. Road infrastructure planning processes are compared for four European countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands).

The results show that only Norway has a formalised way of using LCA during choice of road corridor. Only the Netherlands has a requirement for using LCA in the later procurement stage. It is concluded that during the early stages of planning, LCA could be integrated as part of an EA, as a separate process or as part of a Cost-Benefit Analysis.