Environmental Impact Assessment is one of internationally recognised tools providing environmental protection. Purpose of the assessment is to identify and comprehensively evaluate environmental impact of a project with participation of the public, professionals and administrative bodies, prior to the realisation of the project. Information gained through this process is then used as a basis for decision making in procedures granting development or other consents. The thesis aims to analyse in particular the Czech environmental impact assessment law with emphasis on its recent amendment and reasons of its implementation.

The subject of this dissertation is the process of the Environmental Impact Assessment in relation to the respective European legislation. The dissertation aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of the current Environmental Impact Assessment legislation, including its historical, international and European contexts. The dissertation proceeds in five chapters. Chapter One outlines the general characteristics of the Environmental Impact Assessment procedure and the principles that govern it. Chapter Two examines the development of the Environmental Impact Assessment process in international law, with emphasis on the Aarhus Convention. Chapter Three focuses on the anchoring of the procedure in European law. The core part, then, is Chapter Four, which delineates the separate phases of the Environmental Impact Assessment process as defined in Czech legislation. In the last chapter, the expected changes in the concept of the Environmental Impact Assessment are sketched.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent about 90% of global businesses. SMEs account, on the average, for about 50% of gross domestic product (GDP) of all countries and up to 60% of employment. In South Africa, SMEs account for about 91% of all formally registered business entities, contributing to about 57% of the GDP and providing about 60% of all formal employment. However, SMEs are said to contribute up to 70% of all industrial pollution globally. SMEs individually perceive little or no impact on the environment and may attempt to relieve themselves of environmental responsibility. Although, the environmental footprint of individual SMEs may be small, collectively they contribute substantially to environmental damage globally. Research on environmental activities of SMEs is rare and mostly neglected. This research attempts to close this gap by exploring the understanding, practices, barriers and motivation for environmental practices by SMEs in South Africa. This research was realised through semi-structured interviews of nine SMEs located in Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / pagibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

The topic of this thesis is Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). This is a very significant cross-sectional and preventive environmental protection tool. Its purpose is to identify as soon as possible any probable averse environmental impacts of presented project proposals. The whole process is led by a competent state offices. Necessary expert participants of the procedure are so-called "authorized persons" supplying specific technical studies on which the impact assessment is made. Another important factor, public participation, helps to improve efficiency of the EIA process. The whole procedure results in so-called Statement, which should define necessary conditions for the implementation of the project in effort to minimize negative impacts. If the project proposal is unacceptable under any circumstances it can not be given a consent to implement it and the statement must reject it. Conclusions formulated in the Statement serve as a basis for administrative decisions on project approval. Given the considerable breadth of the thesis topic it is focused on several key tasks, namely to provide a comprehensive explanation of the legal development of the EIA process, to analyze its current legislation and mapping legal rules of public participation in the EIA process. The following section...

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MSc (Soil Science))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Plant Production and Soil Science / unrestricted

Please read the abstract in the 00front part of this document / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology / MSc / Unrestricted

In the household appliance industry, heat pump systems have been used for a long time in refrigerators and freezers to cool food, and the industry has driven the development of small, high-quality, low-price heat pump components. In the last few decades, heat pump systems have been introduced in other household appliances, with the express purpose of reducing electricity consumption. Heat pump tumble dryers have been on the market since 2000 and dominate the market today. A heat pump dishwasher was introduced on the market in 2014 and a heat pump washing machine in 2016. The purpose of adding a heat pump system in these three products was to decrease electricity consumption. Papers I and II used a methodology where transient simulation models were developed and used to increase knowledge about how to decrease electricity consumption for a tumble dryer and a dishwasher by adding a heat pump system. Papers II to V showed that a lower electricity consumption and lower global warming potential together with an energy-efficient drying method, where no humid air evacuates to the kitchen, give a heat pump dishwasher competitive advantages compared to any conventional dishwasher currently on the market. Using simulations, this dissertation concludes that a future commercial heat pump dishwasher, using R600a as a refrigerant, will reduce electricity consumption and total equivalent warming impact (TEWI) by 50% compared to the conventional dishwasher. The willingness from the customer chain to pay extra for this heat pump dishwasher is because of the decreases electricity consumption and the fact that no humid air evacuates to the kitchen. This willingness makes the heat pump dishwasher to a variant which have possibility to succeed on the future market. The challenge for the manufacturer is to develop and produce a high-quality heat pump dishwasher with low electricity consumption, predict future willingness to pay for it, and launch it on the market at the right moment with the right promotion in order to succeed. / The competition in the household appliances industry is strong. Manufacturers are continuously trying to develop, produce and sell product functions and features with good profit. To continually develop new features that the customer chain is willing to pay for is a key factor for a manufacturer to survive. In this study has a heat pump system been added as a new feature to a dishwasher. The first heat pump dishwasher was introduced on the market in 2014 and the heat pump system was only used to heat the dishwasher. Comparing that first heat pump dishwasher was a new closed drying method introduced in this study where no humid air evacuates to the kitchen. Experiments and simulations showed that a dishwasher with an added heat pump system can decrease the total electricity consumption by 50% when cleaning and drying the dishware comparing to an on market conventional dishwasher. The willingness from the customer chain to pay extra for this heat pump dishwasher is because of the decreases in electricity consumption and the fact that no humid air evacuates to the kitchen. This willingness makes the heat pump dishwasher to a variant which have possibility to succeed on the future market.

Environmental impact assessment is a widely accepted planning tool used in environmental management. Internationally it has been adopted as a formal permitting requirement for development projects in many jurisdictions. Historically the focus has been on the pre-decision making stages of environmental impact assessment. It has, however, been widely acknowledged that post-decision environmental impact assessment follow-up is an important component in confirming initial predictions, enabling responsible adaptive management of environmental impacts and ensuring compliance with permit conditions. It is this last function which is the focus of this study. Specifically, the role of permit conditions in enabling compliance and facilitating compliance monitoring is addressed. Permit conditions of twenty-one environmental authorisations were examined and tested for conformance with legislated requirements, and practicality of monitoring for compliance (monitorability). It was found that there are many contributors to achieving monitorable permit conditions. Amongst the most significant of these are conformity in interpretation of the regulations specifying permit content by officials, gaps in guidance on the part of the regulations themselves, and a tendency to focus on construction related impacts. The lack of clarity regarding the roles and functions of environmental control officer and environmental auditor further contribute to poor monitorability of permit conditions. Specific areas of shortcoming and best practice in the permit conditions analysed were identified and discussed. Finally, recommendations are made for the improvement of permit condition monitorability.

Early in 2012, the Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver released an open letter to Canadians where he identified 'an urgent matter of Canada's national interest': 'radical groups' were 'threaten[ing] to hijack [Canada's] regulatory system' for major projects and argued they should 'be accomplished in a quicker and more streamlined fashion'. This came on the eve of the first day of oral hearings for the public review into the controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker project that would allow for oil sands from Alberta to access outside markets other than the United States. A few months later, Canada's environmental decision-making process was dramatically reformed, resulting in a significant outcry across the country over the likely effects on environmental oversight and Aboriginal rights. In Haida Gwaii, a series of islands off of the north coast of British Columbia (BC) around which the proposed tanker traffic would navigate, a process of reconciliation is in its early stages. The forestry sector is now subject to a collaborative provincial and Haida (First) Nation planning and decision process and a Haida-owned company is the biggest tenure holder and forestry sector employer. However, the Government of Canada has refused to participate in this reconciliation process in any meaningful way. It has, instead, encountered the Haida Nation through the court-like environmental review process for the proposed Enbridge project, the very same process that has been used to justify the dramatic environmental planning reforms. This research constructs a framework for tracing the spatial and institutional dynamics of the reconciliation process in planning. A significant amount of the Crown's approach to reconciliation relies upon the consultation that takes place within and alongside planning and regulatory decision making for natural resource developments. While the process does not, in itself, lead to any meaningful engagement over reconciliation, a central research question is: What opportunities might exist for reconciliation to take place in planning? And, how do these opportunities change? Contributing to the Indigenous planning literature, this dissertation examines some of the discursive and institutional factors that led to (a) the collaborative planning taking place on Haida Gwaii today and (b) the 2012 federal planning reforms. For each case, the opportunities available in planning for modifying the dominant view of reconciliation are considered. The dissertation begins with an overview of the very initial discussions on reconciliation between the Haida Nation and the Province of BC. It is argued that this move was facilitated by the Haida Nation shifting their concerns to various venues that were more or less receptive to their interests: the courts, a road blockade, collaborative planning, and bargaining. On the other hand, Canada has attempted to regain control by actively modifying the venues available to the Haida Nation in ways that excluded them or moved them to a venue that was less receptive to their concerns. It is reasoned that while planning spaces operate in ways that tend to be colonial, certain conditions and mechanisms are available in these systems that can be used to open up (perceived) opportunities for changing the way reconciliation is implemented across this system. These spaces reveal information about Indigenous-state power relations that are usually not observable until a conflict arises, at which point analysts may observe how actors respond to these perceived opportunities. Evidence is collected from numerous sources. Interviews with key informants, observation, and policy document review composed the bulk of the data collection for both cases. Four days of oral hearings in Haida Gwaii were observed in 2012, offering a window into the encounter between the Haida and Canada just as a streamlined environmental review process was being developed and implemented. In contrasting the two cases, this research finds that planning is used both to control development and as an opportunity to engage with the Crown over the long-standing dispute about overlapping title to and, thus, jurisdiction over Haida Gwaii. The process by which one use prevails over another is the central research problem; indeed, there remains an important disconnect between Indigenous political actors and the Crown (and, in some examples, industry) on how environmental planning institutions ought to be used. This tension is present within a planning venue and across the planning system, opening up potential opportunities, such as those used by the Haida Nation to regain control over Haida Gwaii, or closing down these opportunities. For these reasons, planning is one of the most useful arenas for influencing and for understanding the politics of reconciliation in Canada.

This dissertation describes a model that predicts airline flight network, frequency and fleet changes in response to policy measures that aim to reduce the environmental impact of aviation. Such airline operational responses to policy measures are not considered by existing integrated aviation-environment modelling tools. By not modelling these effects the capability of the air transport system to adjust under changing conditions is neglected, resulting in the forecasting of potentially misleading system and local responses to constraints. The model developed follows the overriding principle of airline strategic decision making, i.e., airline profit maximisation within a competitive environment. It consists of several components describing different aspects of the air transport system, including passenger demand forecasting, flight delay modelling, estimation of airline costs and airfares, and network optimisation. These components are integrated into a framework that allows the relationships between fares, passenger demand, infrastructure capacity constraints, flight delays, flight frequencies, and the flight network to be simulated. Airline competition is modeled by simulating a strategic game between airlines competing for market share, each of which maximizes its own profit. The model is validated by reproducing historical passenger flows and flight frequencies for a network of 22 airports serving 14 of the largest cities in the United States, using 2005 population, per capita income and airport capacities as inputs. The estimated passenger flows and flight frequencies compare well to observed data for the same network (the R2 value comparing flight segment frequencies is 0.62). After validation, the model is applied to simulate traffic growth and carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions within the same network from 2005 to 2030 under a series of scenarios. These scenarios investigate airline responses to (i) airport capacity constraints, (ii) regional increases in costs in the form of landing fees, and (iii) major reductions in aircraft fuel burn, as would be achieved through the introduction of radically new technology such as a blended wing body aircraft or advanced open rotor engines. The simulation results indicate that, while airport capacity constraints may have significant system-wide effects, they are the result of local airport effects which are much greater. In particular, airport capacity constraints can have a significant impact on flight delays, passenger demand, aircraft operations, and emissions, especially at congested hub airports. If capacity is available at other airports, capacity constraints may also induce changes in the flight network, including changes in the distribution of connecting traffic between hubs and the distribution of true origin-ultimate destination traffic between airports in multi-airport systems. Airport capacity constraints are less likely to induce any significant increase in the size of aircraft operated, however, because of frequency competition effects, which maintain high flight frequencies despite reductions in demand in response to increased flight delays. The simulation results also indicate that, if sufficiently large, regional increases in landing fees may induce significant reductions in aircraft operations by increasing average aircraft size and inducing a shift in connecting traffic away from the region. The simulation results also indicate that the introduction of radically new technology that reduces aircraft fuel burn may have only limited impact on reducing system CO2 emissions, and only in the case where the new technology can be taken up by the majority of the fleet. The reason for this is that the reduced operating costs of the new technology may result in an increase in frequency competition and thus aircraft operations. In conclusion, the modelling of airline operational responses to environmental constraints is important when studying both the system and local effects of environmental policy measures, because it captures the capability of the air transport system to adjust under changing conditions.