The Motueka Catchment is located at the north-western tip of the South Island of New Zealand. After decades of productive intensification, the ecological and social identity of this catchment is still largely intact. To keep things this way, local residents, scientists and planners have been...

In 1996, the Danish government launched an ambitious energy plan, Energy 21, describing a way to develop the energy sector in a more sustainable direction. Wind power plays an important role in the plan, and as a consequence there will be a very high penetration of wind energy in the electricity...

In the face of the changes in the planet's natural resources and of their unequal distribution, it is becoming more urgent that contemporary societies oversee environmental assets in a global manner. Although international directives, when they are transposed into national laws, may set specific...

The implementation of activities aimed at mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions is more cost-efficient in developing countries than in most of the industrialised world. Nevertheless, efficient mitigation may have adverse effects on equity. A Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is therefore to...

This paper discusses some of the new challenges that the quest for sustainable development poses to scientific research and the interface between science and policy. One of the issues fundamental to both science and policy is that of integration. Integration of scientific research requires a...

The Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC) hypothesis suggests that the environmental impacts of a population increase in the early stages of its development, and decline once a certain level of income is attained. After examining different criticisms that can be addressed to studies that validate...

Emerging concerns for environmental flows translate into reforms that aim to preserve minimal flows in rivers. These policy measures have consequences for traditional right-holders: how to share between consumptive users the new scarcity created by the protection of instream flows? This paper...

This paper reports on research empirically focused on the Brittany region in France, its agricultural sector and the impacts of agricultural activity on water quality. Our goal was to define and estimate indicators that illustrate the confrontation between environmental performance and economic...

It is possible today, to construct a house of comparable cost to a conventional one that will gain all of its energy from renewable energy sources. However, there are very few examples of such houses. This paper argues that the slow take up of these ideas has a parallel with the development and...