By Justin M. Feldman, Sofia Gruskin, Brent A. Coull, Nancy Krieger
American Journal of Public Health
2019
Efforts to monitor, prevent, and respond to police-related deaths should consider neighborhood context, including levels of segregation by income and race/ethnicity.
By Solomon Hsiang, Paulina Oliva, Reed Walker
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Volume 13, Issue 1
2019
Most regulations designed to reduce environmental externalities impose costs on individuals and firms. A large and growing literature examines whether these costs are disproportionately borne by different sectors of the economy and/or across different groups of individuals. However, much less is known about how the environmental benefits created by these policies are distributed, which mirror the differences in environmental damages associated with existing environmental externalities. We review this burgeoning literature and develop a simple general framework for empirical analysis. We apply this framework to findings concerning the distributional impacts of environmental damages from air pollution, deforestation, and climate change and highlight priorities for future research. A recurring challenge to understanding the distributional effects of environmental damages is distinguishing between cases in which populations are exposed to different levels or changes in an environmental good and those in which an incremental change in the environment may have very different implications for some populations. In the latter case, it is often difficult to empirically identify the underlying sources of heterogeneity in marginal damages because damages may stem from nonlinear and/or heterogeneous damage functions. Nevertheless, understanding the determinants of heterogeneity in environmental benefits and damages is crucial for welfare analysis and policy design.
By Lawrence A. Palinkas, Marleen Wong
Social Work and Sustainability in Asia
2019
Maintaining social sustainability in the context of global climate change is among the most pressing challenges facing contemporary societies in the Asia-Pacific Rim. These societies are increasingly being confronted with a host of changes in the physical environment, ranging from natural disasters, rising air and water temperatures, rising sea levels and ocean acidification, prolonged droughts and scarcity of fresh water in some regions, and extensive flooding in other regions. All of these changes are contributing to the wholesale destruction of natural ecosystems on land and sea. They also have profound social implications, threatening human health and well-being, destabilizing assets, coping capacities, and response infrastructures, and substantially increasing the number of socially, economically, and psychologically vulnerable individuals and communities. Moreover, these impacts will not affect everyone equally, leading to new social inequities with significant social justice implications. In this chapter, we summarize the human impacts of global climate change with a focus on the sustainability of individuals, families, and communities. We then address strategies for promoting sustainability in the face of two specific impacts: population displacement and disaster response and recovery. These strategies adhere to a three-tier model of climate change impact and response, and include microlevel interventions designed to prevent and mitigate behavioral and mental health impacts; mezzo-level interventions to prevent and mitigate social conflict within families and communities; and macro-level policies and programs designed to build and support individual, families, and community resilience, assets, and action.
By Antonio M. Bento, Teevrat Garg, Daniel Kaffine
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
2019
Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) are commonly promoted as a policy tool to reduce emissions associated with fossil generation, while also stimulating development of local renewable resource endowments. We develop a general equilibrium model of an RPS policy that captures key features such as a fixed factor renewable endowment, substitution across sectors of the economy, and endogenous price responses. We analytically decompose the effects of an RPS into a) a substitution effect, b) an output-tax effect, and c) an output effect. We show that an increase in the RPS can either deliver large resource booms or large emissions savings but not both. Our framework can translate different renewable resource endowments and pre-existing standards across states into economic and environmental impacts to inform current renewable energy and climate policies.
By Behrokh Khoshnevis, Mahdi Yoozbashizadeh, Iraj Ershaghi
Society of Petroleum Engineers
2019
In this paper we describe a novel method for water unloading of natural gas wells in mature reservoirs experiencing low reservoir pressures. Current methods for water unloading from gas wells have at least one of the drawbacks of restricting gas production, requiring external energy, using consumable surfactants, or being labor intensive. The proposed design offers a new approach to water unloading that does not restrict or interrupt gas production. It can operate without external energy, and uses no consumables. Virtual and physical simulators have been developed and the full-scale version of the concept has been studied in test wells to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of the new water-unloading concept. An industrial-grade preproduction prototype was tested successfully in a test gas well to validate this study.
By Jill E. Johnston, Mitiasoa Razafy, Humberto Lugo, Luis Olmedo, Shohreh F. Farzan
Science of the Total Environment
2019
Changing weather patterns, droughts and competing water demands are dramatically altering the landscape and creating conditions conducive to the production of wind-blown dust and dust storms. In California, such factors are leading to the rapid shrinking of the Salton Sea, a 345 mile2 land-locked “sea” situated near the southeastern rural border region known as the Imperial Valley. The region is anticipated to experience a dramatic increase in wind-blown dust and existing studies suggest a significant impact on the health and quality of life for nearby residents of this predominantly low-income, Mexican-American community. The discussion calls attention to the public health dimensions of the Salton Sea crisis. We know little about the possible long-term health effects of exposure to mobilized lakebed sediments or the numerous toxic contaminants that may become respirable on entrained particles. We draw on existing epidemiological literature of other known sources of wind-blown dust, such as desert dust storms, and related health effects to begin to understand the potential public health impact of wind-blown dust exposure. The increased production of wind-blown dust and environmental exposures to such non-combustion related sources of particulate matter are a growing health threat, due in part to drought coupled with increasing pressures on limited water resources. Recent population-based studies have linked dust storms with cardiovascular mortality, asthma hospitalization and decrease in pulmonary function in both adults and children. A growing number of studies provide evidence of the acute health effects of wind-blown dust exposures among children, which with repeated insults have the potential to influence respiratory health over time. The shrinking of the Salton Sea illustrates a public health and environmental justice crisis that requires action and attention to protect the health and well-being of local communities.
By Azad M. Madni
IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Magazine
2019
We are living in an era driven by exponentials and defined by hyperconnectivity, growing complexity, and increasing convergence among disciplines. In response to these trends, and at the urging of the research community, systems engineering (SE) is undergoing a timely transformation that includes developing formal underpinnings and reaching out to other disciplines to make connections and identify synergies. The impetus for this transformation stems, in part, from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges, which are mostly complex systems problems requiring contributions from multiple disciplines. Against this backdrop, this article defines various convergence types and the integrative discipline of transdisciplinary SE (TSE). TSE, enabled, in large part, by the growing convergence of engineering with other disciplines, has the potential to achieve unprecedented advances in both the thinking and the methods needed to address complex sociotechnical system problems. Using an NAE Grand Challenge problem as an example, this article illustrates the relevance of TSE and the opportunities available to the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) to contribute to this important area through collaboration between its technical committees and working groups from sister societies, such as the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE).
By Hilda Blanco, Alexander Wikstrom
National Center for Sustainable Transportation
2018
This paper explores opportunities for the redevelopment of failing regional shopping malls as Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) to improve transit ridership, focusing on Southern California. In effect, the study suggests an alternative to the typical sequence of first providing transit infrastructure and then changing land uses and densities to develop a TOD around new transit stations. Instead, the study suggests that failing shopping malls can provide the footprint for their redevelopment as TODs that could then be linked to transit lines. The study focuses on several major topics and reviews recent literature on the following steps in the argument for this policy: 1. The rationale for redeveloping declining malls as TODs, the supporting federal and California policies for TODs, and evidence for how different characteristics of TODs and their combination can reduce vehicle miles traveled, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions; 2. The issues that hinder the development of TODs around transit stations, e.g., difficulties in up-zoning, land assembly; loss of existing affordable housing; 3. Changes in retail, focusing on factors affecting the closing of shopping malls, e.g., the effect of Internet shopping on shopping malls, and the increasing failure of shopping malls; and 4. The potential and rationale for the redevelopment of failing regional malls into TODs. In conclusion, the paper identifies follow-up studies to test the viability of the approach, including: a. identifying failing malls in specific metropolitan regions; b. analyses of potential sites as transit markets—including studies of the density of the development around failing malls, population characteristics, current level of transit service, etc.; c. studying the feasibility of providing different types of transit stations adjacent to the identified redevelopment sites; d. the development of a model (s) of how such malls could be redeveloped, including the steps to achieve TOD objectives, and, especially, modeling the types of housing, the number of housing units, as well as different mixes of affordable and market rate housing that such TODs could contain at different height and bulk standards, alternative retail and housing mixes, as well as different parking restrictions; and iii e. proto-types of public-private partnerships (Friedman 2016) that could be used in the redevelopment process, for example, in the case of California, examining the feasibility of raising revenue with California’s scaled back tax increment financing, and potential rezoning and affordable housing scenarios. Such studies would also require an understanding of different lender-owner arrangements in the failing malls, and the feasibility of redevelopment and public private partnerships under different shopping mall lender-owner arrangements.