Policy solutions for addressing carbon leakage: Insights from meta-regression analysis.

Carbon leakage has become a key issue in global climate initiatives. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of various policy solutions for mitigating carbon leakage, as explored extensively in the literature. Employing a meta-regression analysis, this paper analyzes 416 leakage ratio estimates extracted from 39 economic studies published in English and Chinese between 2004 and 2022. These estimates evaluate the effects of diverse climate policies and modeling assumptions on carbon leakage. The results confirm that both 'intra-region' and 'cross-border' anti-leakage policies significantly impact carbon policy regions. The findings imply to policymakers that, although the implementation of border carbon adjustments provokes international debate under current WTO regulations, the 'intra-region' policies, which are more politically feasible, can achieve comparable effectiveness.

Consumers and citizens: Identity salience in choice settings focusing on local wind turbines.

We explore and illustrate the potential consequences of identity salience on stated choice valuation outcomes. The dual role of individuals as citizens and as consumers is brought to the foreground when considering investments in wind energy. To this end, we use two different settings in a stated choice experiment to elicit household preferences: one based on the decision to buy a home with particular characteristics in the neighbourhood of a wind farm and one based on the decision to support a policy to locate a wind farm in the respondent's municipality. By including a shared set of attributes to describe the wind farm in both settings, we are able to analyse the impact of identity salience on stated preferences. In the home setting, identity salience has no significant effect. In the policy setting, the consumer framing mitigates (when positive) or reinforces (when negative) the identity effect of the setting for the preferences regarding the number of wind turbines, the visibility of the wind turbines and the noise levels associated with the wind park. This finding suggests that it may be easier to shift a respondent's focus from public to private than vice versa. Our results illustrate that valuation exercises triggering a different role at the individual level will likely result in different valuation outcomes. By doing so, we issue a warning to researchers and policy makers to reflect about the objectives and set-up of valuation studies when using them for policy evaluation purposes. If the context of such a study is not adequately taken into account, potentially misleading messages and policy conclusions can emerge.

Public Awareness of Nature and the Environment During the COVID-19 Crisis.

As our behavioral patterns change due to the COVID-19 crisis, our impact on nature and the environment changes too. Pollution levels are showing significant reductions. People are more aware of the importance of access to local green and blue spaces. By analyzing online search behavior in twenty European countries, we investigate how public awareness of nature and the environment has evolved during the COVID-19 crisis. We find that the crisis goes hand in hand with a positive shift in public awareness of nature-related topics, but that awareness of environmental topics remains unaffected. While the decreasing pollution levels and media attention may reduce the overall sense of urgency to tackle pollution problems, the increased experience with local natural resources may strengthen public support for a recovery program that puts the transition towards a more sustainable economic system centrally.

Drivers of legal and illegal solid waste disposal in the Global South - The case of households in Yaoundé (Cameroon).

Managing municipal solid waste is a challenge for many policy makers, but even more so in the Global South. Regulatory instruments are often limited, available resources are scarce and illegal waste disposal is an easy opt-out. We analyze a unique dataset regarding waste disposal choices by households in Yaoundé, Cameroon, including information on illegal waste dumping. Overall, households in Yaoundé seem to act predominantly as rational, cost-minimizing agents. While social criteria also play a role, waste disposal choices are mainly determined by the accessibility of the different alternatives. In particular the output of a multinomial logit model shows that households with (easy) access to legal alternatives such as centralized drop-off containers or curbside waste collection are less likely to dispose of their waste in an illegal manner. In addition, illegal disposal becomes more attractive when the illegal waste dumpsite is closer to the family home and transportation costs are lower. Although these results might seem unspectacular, in the context of the Global South, these findings also reveal that investing in waste collection infrastructure offers great potential in improving waste disposal, particularly in combination with other measures such as removing illegal dumpsites, incorporating pre-collection and composting into institutional programs, raising awareness and increasing the level of compliance.

Friends or foes? Monetized Life Cycle Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis of the site remediation of a former gas plant.

Site contamination is a global concern because of the potential risks for human health and ecosystem quality. Every contaminated site has its own specific characteristics and the increased availability and efficiency of remediation techniques makes the choice of remediation alternative increasingly complicated. In this paper an attributional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the secondary environmental impacts of a site remediation is performed and its results are monetized using two different monetization techniques, namely Stepwise 2006 and Ecovalue 08. Secondly, we perform a social Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) on the same case study using the same data sources. The case study used in this paper entails the soil and groundwater remediation of a tar, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and cyanide contamination of a school ground by a former gas plant. The remediation alternative chosen in this case study is excavation with off-site thermal treatment of the contaminated soil. The outcome of the social CBA, stating that the remediation project is socially beneficial in the long term, is critically compared to the outcome of the different LCA monetization methods. This comparison indicates that monetized LCA is a good complement to social CBA when it comes to the assessment of secondary environmental impacts. Combining the two methods provides decision makers with a more extensive and detailed assessment of the soil remediation project.

Dredged sediments as a resource for brick production: possibilities and barriers from a consumers' perspective.

A possible solution for the oversupply of dredged sediments is their use as a raw material in brick production. Despite the fact that several examples (e.g., Agostini et al., 2007; Hamer and Karius, 2002; Xu et al., 2014) show that this application is feasible, some economic, technical and social limitations interfere with the development of a market of dredged materials in brick production in Flanders. While we describe the main characteristics of the supply side, we focus on the limitations and barriers from the demand side in the present study. Based on a consumers survey we analyze consumers' risk perceptions and attitudes towards bricks produced from dredged sediments. Consumers in Flanders are rather suspicious with respect to bricks produced from dredged sediments and their risk perception is mainly determined by the possibility of a bad bargain (brick of inferior quality) and the connotation with chemical contamination. The willingness to pay for bricks made from dredged sediments is mainly influenced by the age of the respondents, as well environmental awareness, and the respondents' belief in their ability to influence environmental problems. Sensitization and information of customers seems to be of primary importance to make dredged-sediment-derived bricks a successful product.

A non-orthogonal SVD-based decomposition for phase invariant error-related potential estimation.

The estimation of the Error Related Potential from a set of trials is a challenging problem. Indeed, the Error Related Potential is of low amplitude compared to the ongoing electroencephalographic activity. In addition, simple summing over the different trials is prone to errors, since the waveform does not appear at an exact latency with respect to the trigger. In this work, we propose a method to cope with the discrepancy of these latencies of the Error Related Potential waveform and offer a framework in which the estimation of the Error Related Potential waveform reduces to a simple Singular Value Decomposition of an analytic waveform representation of the observed signal. The followed approach is promising, since we are able to explain a higher portion of the variance of the observed signal with fewer components in the expansion.

Catalase activity and expression in developing sunflower seeds as related to drying.

Changes in catalase (CAT) activity and in CAT isoform pattern and expression were investigated in developing sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) seeds during desiccation on the mother plant and after artificial drying on the flowerheads. Seeds regularly desiccated during their development on the mother plant and reached mass maturity at c. 42 d after flowering (DAF). Freshly harvested seeds did not germinate at any stage of development because they were dormant, but their dormancy was broken after 5-6 months of dry storage. Immature seeds were desiccation-tolerant at 24 DAF since they were able to germinate fully after artificial drying on the flowerheads followed by dry storage. CAT activity increased in non-dehydrated seeds during their development, reaching a maximum a little after seed mass maturity and after artificial drying in immature seeds. This stimulation of CAT activity by natural and artificial drying was related to changes in CAT isoform pattern. Of the four constitutive CAT subunits, that of 59 kDa was always present, but dehydration induced the synthesis of a 55 kDa subunit. This synthesis of the CAT 55 kDa subunit resulted from an activation of the CATA1 gene, suggesting that the regulation of catalase activity and synthesis by drying occurred at the transcriptional level. The increase in CAT activity induced by seed drying was associated with a decrease in hydrogen peroxide level and in lipid peroxidation. These results suggest that CAT plays a role during seed desiccation by preventing dehydration-related oxidative damage and that H(2)O(2) may play a role in the regulation of CAT gene expression and the transduction pathway of the dehydration signal.