Perspectives on the challenge posed by potential future climate change are presented including a discussion of prospects for carbon capture followed either by sequestration or reuse including opportunities for alternatives to the use of oil in the transportation sector. The potential for wind energy as an alternative to fossil fuel energy as a source of electricity are outlined including the re...

Environmental issues constitute a significant driver of innovation in business companies. The paper starts from the historical perspective by identifying which have been the factors and significant steps in technological innovation that have been related to increasing environmental awareness in recent history. Then we analyse the dimensions of technological innovation as related to environmenta...

The world population is aging. In fact, between 2000 and 2050 the global population ≥ 60 years of age is projected to more than triple, reaching nearly 2 billion, and the elderly population is growing faster than the total population in practically all regions of the world (United Nations 2001). Recently, aging has received increasing attention. The theme of World Health Day in 2012 was aging a...

How do we study long-term policy challenges where the outcomes are difacult to anticipate far into the future? After a brief overview of the broad classes of methods used to inform long-term policy decisions, this article will review in more depth three analytic methods—statistical methods, robust decisionmaking, and adaptive agent-based models—that provide innovative examples. The article cons...

Over the last fifteen years, Payments for Environmental Services (PES) schemes have become very popular environmental policy instruments, but the academic literature has begun to question their additionality. The literature attempts to estimate the causal effect of these programs by applying impact evaluation (IE) techniques. However, PES programs are complex instruments and IE methods cannot b...

Recognizing the Signal Within the Natural Variability This first challenge is, of course, at the crux of the global warming conundrum. Are steady increases in global temperature (and accompanying climate changes) in the past 150 years simply an expression of natural variability, or are they a direct result of mankind’s activities that have resulted in an increase in greenhouse gases? The weight...

Although DNA microarray technology has been used successfully to analyze global gene expression in pure cultures, it has not been rigorously tested and evaluated within the context of complex environmental samples. Adapting microarray hybridization for use in environmental studies faces several challenges associated with specificity, sensitivity and quantitation.

Since the first commercial release of genetically modified (GM, also referred to as genetically engineered, GE) crops in the middle of 1990s, the research and development of transgenic biotechnology has made dramatic progress. To date, global cultivation area of GM crops has exceeded 120 million hectares (James, 2009) with extensive cultivation of herbicide-tolerant soybean and canola, insect-r...