Governments around the world are introducing single-use plastics bans to alleviate plastic marine pollution. This paper investigates whether banning single-use plastic items is an appropriate strategy to protect the environment. Product life cycle assessment was conducted for single-use plastic and single-use non-plastic alternatives. The life cycle impacts of the two product categories were compared and scaled according to EU consumption of 2016. The results show that a single-use plastics ban would decrease plastic marine pollution in the EU by 5.5% which equates to a 0.06% decrease globally. However, such a ban would increase emissions contributing to marine aquatic toxicity in the EU by 1.4%. This paper concludes that single-use items are harmful to the environment regardless of their material. Therefore, banning or imposing a premium price on single-use items in general and not only single-use plastic items is a more effective method of reducing consumption and thereby pollution. The plastics ban only leads to a small reduction of global plastic marine pollution and thus provides only a partial solution to the problem it intends to solve.
Sound water resources planning and management requires adequate data with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution. This is especially true in the context of irrigated agriculture, which is one of the main consumptive users of the world’s freshwater resources. Existing remote sensing methods for the management of irrigated agricultural systems are often based on empirical cropland data that are difficult to obtain, and that put into question the transferability of mapping algorithms in space and time. Here we implement an automatic irrigation mapping procedure in Google Earth Engine that uses surface reflectance satellite imagery from different sensors. The method is based on unsupervised training of a pixel-by-pixel classification algorithm within image regions identified through unsupervised object-based segmentation, followed by multi-temporal image analysis to distinguish productive irrigated fields from non-productive and non-irrigated areas. Ground-based data are not required. The final output of the mapping algorithm are monthly and annual irrigation maps (30 m resolution). The novel method is applied to the Central Asian Chu and Talas River Basins that are shared between upstream Kyrgyzstan and downstream Kazakhstan. We calculate the development of irrigated areas from 2000 to 2017 and assess the classification results in terms of robustness and accuracy. Based on seven available validation scenes (in total more than 2.5 million pixels) the classification accuracy is 77–96%. We show that on the Kyrgyz side of the Talas basin, the identified increasing trends over the years are highly significant (23% area increase between 2000 and 2017). In the Kazakh parts of the basins the irrigated acreages are relatively stable over time, but the average irrigation frequency within Soviet-era irrigation perimeters is very low, which points to a poor physical condition of the irrigation infrastructure and inadequate water supply.
Climate change and an increased interest in renewable energy have resulted in a burgeoning wind energy sector. However, in the recent past, wind farms have faced resistance in acquiring permits due to concerns about their long-term effects on the local community. To understand the extent of these externalities, this study qualitatively meta-analyses four socio-economic impacts of interest, namely: house prices, tourism, catalytic effects of supply chain clustering, and social change. Geographically, the analysed reports include Europe, Canada and the US, and deductions are made for the EU. In order to bridge the gap of unavailability of primary data on the wind sector, relevant conclusions are drawn from other comparable sectors. Based on a rigorous review of primary qualitative research, this study concludes that offshore wind farms should be located more than 40 km away from the coast to eliminate risks of housing price devaluation and tourist activity reduction, which would directly affect the economic value of the region. In addition, the study found limited evidence to acknowledge the employment benefits in the local economy and social change in the community due to offshore wind farms. Monitoring mechanisms should be set up to prove or disprove the creation of local employment, crime and substance abuse. Furthermore, the study finds that adequate planning and management can ensure better socioeconomic outcomes in the community. Further research is recommended for the specific impact of overhead transmission lines and substations on property values and tourism.
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