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Fires have attracted interest and generated alarm since the early 1980s. This con- cern has been particularly evident in tropical forests of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, but disastrous fires in recent summers in Australia, Europe, and the United States have drawn worldwide attention. Concern about forest fires, and related air pollution and biodiversity impacts, led inter- national organisations and northern countries - such as the Asian Development Bank, the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the government of Germany - to undertake fire assessments and provide technical assistance. Nongovernmental organisations, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and World Wide Fund for Nature, have also devoted increased attention to fires. Aiming at prevention of future fires, 40 fire projects and missions costing well over US$30 million have worked in Indonesia over the last 20 years. Despite the money and effort spent on them, fires continue to burn every year. It may appear to some that efforts to address the 'fire problem' have not been effective as fires still occur.

Price floors in greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes can guarantee minimum abatement efforts if prices are lower than expected, and they can help manage cost uncertainty, possibly as complements to price ceilings. Provisions for price floors are found in several recent legislative proposals for emissions trading. Implementation however has potential pitfalls. Possible mechanisms are government commitments to buy back permits, a reserve price at auction, or an extra fee or tax on acquittal of emissions permits. Our analysis of these alternatives shows that the fee approach has budgetary advantages and is more compatible with international permit trading than the alternatives. It can also be used to implement more general hybrid approaches to emissions pricing.

The global community has been struggling with the issue of how to effectively respond to the threat of climate change for several decades. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced a landmark treaty on climate change that undertook to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. By focusing on stabilization, however, the treaty implicitly adopted the position that the risks posed by climate change require that emissions be reduced no matter what the cost. The agreement, signed and ratified by more than 186 countries, including the United States, spawned numerous subsequent rounds of climate negotiations aimed at rolling back emissions from industrialized countries to the levels that prevailed in 1990. To date, however, the negotiations have had little effect on greenhouse gas emissions and have not produced a detectable slowing in the rate of emissions growth. The treaty’s implementing protocol, the 1997 Kyoto agreement, has stalled after being heavily diluted at subsequent negotiations in Bonn and Marrakesh.2 The survival of the Kyoto Protocol in its current form is waiting for ratification from Russia. More than a decade of negotiations has produced a policy that is very strict in principle but completely ineffective in practice.

Metal use and modern society are intrinsically linked and it is no surprise that global processes of industrialization and urbanization have led to ever increasing amounts of metal use. In recent decades, global supply and demand networks for metals have become increasingly complex. Industrial Ecology research is well placed to unpack this complexity and to explore potential resource efficiencies for metals. This is especially important during the current period of rising ore prices. We examine patterns of supply and demand for iron ore and bauxite, and recent trends in resource productivity of these two important metal ores. We introduce a consumption perspective and compare the material footprint of metal ores to the GDP of countries to look at how much economic benefit countries achieve per unit of metal footprint. We find that for the past two decades global amounts of iron ore and bauxite extractions have risen faster than global GDP, that both supply and demand of iron ore and bauxite have been concentrated in a handful of countries and that resource productivity from a consumption perspective has fallen in developed nations, as well as globally. The research shows no saturation of metal ore consumption at any level of income. Policies will be required to enhance both the productivity of metal production and the economic productivity of consumption (GDP per metal footprint) through more efficient mining, product design, reuse and recycling.

Considerable effort has been put into developing sustainability assessment frameworks for biofuel production in developing countries. Nevertheless, their successful implementation remains problematic in sub-Saharan Africa. To address this challenge in this paper, through a thorough examination of academic and grey literature, repeatedly occurring sustainability aspects/issues were drawn from internationally recognised biofuel assessment frameworks. Theoretical framings that corresponded with the interlinking socio-environmental-economic qualities and issues for achieving sustainability through ethical implementation conformity (political ecology, development economics, social capital and institutional economics) were then used to inform development of a conceptual framework that could guide biofuel project implementation in sub-Saharan Africa to address complex sustainability issues. The supporting theories pursue sustainable development through, amongst others, an emphasis on the more equitable dispersal of costs and benefits through transparent networking in rural settings and the integration of contrasting viewpoints of diverse stakeholders in emerging economies.

AbstractAt the 2002 International Sustainable Development Research Conference in Manchester, a great number of the 53 papers presented addressed exciting methodological developments associated with action research. Many of these initiatives can be linked with the rich tradition of operational research (OR). OR and environmental planning for sustainable development share three traditions: first, both have wide boundaries in terms of clientele, range of methodological approaches used and attention to multiple (and often conflicting) values; second, both traditions have an interest in fostering interdisciplinarity; third, both OR and environmental planning are concerned with the implementation, as well as the design, of planning strategies. Given these shared traditions, we recently engaged in a systemic intervention project to explore the possibilities of improved collaboration between OR practitioners and environmental planners. In a literature review and interviews with stakeholders, three generic issues were found to recur: complexity and uncertainty (regarding the unpredictability of natural and social phenomena); multiple and often conflicting values (of those involved in environmental planning) and political effects (on those not involved in planning processes, including non‐human nature). This paper reveals a pattern of how these generic issues are perceived in the public, business and voluntary sectors, and explains how, through a series of workshops and a mini‐conference, three interrelated agendas for future action took shape. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Abstract Global climate change presents long-term risks to agriculture. In general, global climate change is expected to positively affect Russian agriculture. In high and middle latitudes, global warming would expand the growing season. Acreages of agricultural crops may expand toward the north, although yields would likely be lower due to less fertile soil. However, in the south there is a possibility of drier climate, which has a negative impact on crop yields and livestock productivity. In addition, climate change is expected to increase the scarcity of water resources and encourage weed and pest proliferation, and it is expected to increase the short-term risks associated with an increase in extreme weather events and natural disasters. This paper uses data on current conditions to simulate future scenarios and examine possible impacts on crop production in the Russian Federation. It also considers adaptive measures for agriculture in response to climate change.