W ithout careful thought, policies to promote a goal can end up doing less good than intended and, in extreme cases, can do more harm than good. Actions lead to reactions, namely, changes in human behavior or in biological or physical processes. Such reactions often cause unintended consequences that can render policies inefficient and ineffective. Some unintended consequences are hard to antic...

Thermal technologies for the treatment of waste are once again attracting interest, particularly in Europe and North Amerca, as landfill space becomes scarcer and landfill regulations become more stringent. Plasma technologies can be used to destroy waste at high temperatures, using electricity to convert waste into a fuel gas and an inert rock. The Plasma Arc Waste Destruction System’s (PAWDS)...

Every year millions of square kilometres of the world’s forests are destroyed by fire resulting in huge economic costs, tremendous damage to the environment, destruction of property, loss of timber, and loss of life. Anywhere in the world where there is vegetation subjected to extended hot, dry periods there are frequent fires. This is approximately one third of the land surface of the Earth wi...

Human influence on the environment is now so strong that a new geological era has been proposed (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, the era shaped strongly, for the first time in human history, by humans. It is largely a destructive influence (Nielsen, 2005, 2006, 2007) threatening our own existence, the influence reflected in the human-mediated climate change, in the ...

Biodiversity is today threatened by many factors of which destruction and reduction of habitats are considered most important for terrestrial species. One way to counteract these threats is to establish reserves with restrictions on land-use and exploitation. However, very few reserves can be considered islands, wildlife species roam over large expanses, often via some density dependent dispers...

fragmentation is one of the major spatial processes leading to change in a landscape, which is described as transformation of a specific habitat or land cover to smaller patches with less connectivity and viability. construction of roads is one of the main causes of fragmentation in natural areas and habitats. presence of roads in ecologically sensitive and protected areas, leads to destruction...

The Passage mechanism introduced in this paper provides an easy and intuitive way to transport various types of digital objects by using also normal physical objects without any special identification tags. The current implementation of the Passage mechanism utilizes electronic scales and contact-free identification devices and thus allows for identification of arbitrary physical objects as wel...