Thesis (MCom. (Accounting)) -- University of Limpopo, 2014 / This study explored the impact of Environmental Management Practices on firm financial performance through a case study of selected JSE SRI South African mining companies. Previous studies focused more on disclosure or international research but none focused on this impact in JSE SRI South African mining firms hence this study attempted to fill this gap. Using a mixed methods approach, the study examined whether the firms’ carbon emissions, energy usage and water usage had any impact on the firms’ return on equity. The study concluded that Environmental Management Practices did impact firms’ financial performance and offers many opportunities for academia, industry, managers, regulators and society to use these findings as a means for more research into and better understanding of these environmental management practices and their potential benefits to society.

In recent years, one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in New Zealand has been the Resource Management Act (New Zealand Government 1991) that has empowered local government agencies to manage the use of natural resources in their regions. Three Government Departments have been responsible for developing policies directly relating to the use of natural resources in New Zealand. The Department of Conservation has been mainly concerned with the management of natural resources on public land. The Ministry for the Environment has particularly addressed environmental policy issues of national significance. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has worked with New Zealand's agricultural, horticultural and forestry industries to encourage sustainable resource use and development for the benefit of all New Zealanders. In general, local and central government agencies carrying out policy analyses have drawn upon highly goal driven theories such as Rational Choice or Incremental Policy Theories or alternatively they have applied more loosely framed theories such as Systems Policy Thinking or Garbage Can Theory. Policy formulation and instrument selection may have been based upon instrumentalist, proceduralist, contingentist or constitutivist selection criteria, depending upon the assumed influence of peoples' behavioural and social contexts in addition to the technical characteristics of the tools themselves. However, there has been a limited range of policy theories to guide the integration of policy analysis, and formulation and operational planning into a management strategy for effective policy delivery. Such theories would have assisted policy agencies to identify the human and social behaviours most closely related to policy issues and to better match policies to differences in the political and social context of each of the issues that they were dealing with. In academic articles a number of behaviour models from social psychology have been used to explain and predict human behaviour. One of those, the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) has a long history of use in research and application. It has been adapted to suit the needs of policy makers in human health, marketing, and education. Applications of the TRA have been reported to have achieved coefficients of determination for behaviour of on average, 53% in one study and 71% in another. Some of the modified models based upon the Theory such as the Theory of Planned Behaviour, have in themselves been able to make additional contributions to peoples' understanding of how to explain and predict human behaviour in more complex situations. In this report, unless otherwise stated, references to the TRA are inclusive of all associated models, such as the Theory of Planned Behaviour. This thesis has examined the application of the Theory of Reasoned Action in the formulation of environmental policy. Five research questions were considered. 1. Could a human behaviour model based upon the Theory of Reasoned Action be developed sufficiently for environmental policy makers to explain landowner behaviour associated with managing indigenous vegetation? 2. How well could the social psychology model of human behaviour based upon the TRA have predicted public responses to a policy programme? 3. How well could the social psychology model of human behaviour based upon the TRA have distinguished between the policy-intervention needs of different stakeholder groups? 4. How much have peoples' values, attitudes and beliefs affected their behaviour? 5. What would be the immediate antecedents to peoples' behaviour and how have they led to behaviour change? This has been a quantitative study to develop and test models of human behaviour specific to the preservation of indigenous vegetation. Three data sets were compared from surveys of peoples' bush protection behaviour, the establishment of indigenous woodlots and the protection and planting of riparian areas with indigenous vegetation. The results from the analyses have shown that accounting for peoples' intentions could have been used to improve the estimates of peoples' use of policy-desired practices. The coefficients of determination in multivariate equations to predict peoples' natural resource behaviour based upon non-specific (external) variables, varied between 3 - 10%. By including intentions in the models, the level of explanation increased to 10 - 17%. The results may have been lower than expected from other examples in the literature due to poorly specified measures of behaviour relative to the measures used for intentions. When it came to estimating intentions (rather than the actual behaviours), the TRA variables in regression equations achieved coefficients of determination of 55 - 75% and these provided a measure of how well the underlying values, attitudes and beliefs could have given policy makers an understanding of peoples' behaviour. Comparing the beliefs of people with high and low intentions to perform the behaviours, clear differences have been identified that could have been the basis of policy strategies for behaviour change. After analysing and considering these examples, this thesis has argued that the TRA could be used in the future to provide policy agencies with an increased level of understanding of human behaviour and so enable them to formulate policy interventions for achieving predictable levels of behaviour change.

Government is constantly attempting to balance the competing interests within society, and is itself active in a variety of different roles. The conflict between these roles becomes particularly clear when an attempt is made to implement a "regulatory market" - that is a market that exists only because of government action- such as an electricity or environmental market - to implement some policy objective, since it is the nature of markets to candidly reveal weaknesses that in a non-market management framework may have remained hidden for some time. This thesis examines the difficulty that government has in setting market rules that implement an efficient market design for such markets. After examining the history and development of the Australian Electricity Industry market reform process, we examine more closely some of the electricity related environmental markets developed specifically to drive a policy outcome in Australia -- in particular the Australian Mandatory Renewable Energy Target Market (MRET) and the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. By comparing these environmental markets with established financial markets, and using the techniques of experimental economics, we show that these environmental markets have significant inefficiencies in their design. We argue that these come about because lessons from the financial markets have not be learned by those implementing environmental markets, that stakeholders are lobbying for market design characteristics that are not in fact in their own best interests, and that governments struggle to manage the divergent pressure upon them. For example, in MRET we show experimentally that one of the market design characteristics most fought for by generators (the ability to create renewable energy certificates from qualifying energy without declaring the certificates to the market until a later time of the creator's choosing) in fact leads to market volatility, and ultimately inefficiently low prices. We also examine the impact on the overall MRET market of simple rule changes upon market performance. Key conclusions of this thesis are that it is more difficult than has been appreciated to successfully use a market to implement public policy and that important lessons have not yet been learned from the existing financial markets.

Michael Porter於1991年首先對於以往環保政策會傷害廠商營運的論點提出反對的觀點，Porter認為環保政策可以刺激廠商進行創新及研發，最終將使廠商的營運情況提升，變得更有競爭力。Porter hypothesis(PH)提出之後，許多學者便針對PH的主張進行實證研究，然而至今學者間對於PH的存在與否仍無明確的共識。然而PH的主張對於像是中國大陸等發展中的國家尤為重要，而中國近期的十二五計畫亦將經濟發展及環境保護放在同等重要的位置，因此驗證PH是否成立以了解環保政策對於廠商及至國家經濟發展的影響則有助於政策的制定。本研究以實證分析的方式研究PH的主張是否存在於廠商的生產效率之中，並試圖找出造成過去實證研究矛盾的可能因素。本研究使用中國大陸的面板資料，分析模型對環保政策及廠商生產效率進行分析。

Contrary to popular belief, the L.A. region is more of a desert than a tropical oasis. Little rainfall during the winter months and practically no rainfall during the summer months is characteristic of Southern California’s desert-like weather patterns. Due to these low precipitation levels, water is considered the most important commodity in the Los Angeles region. Prior to 1900, the inhabitants of this area were fully aware of the importance of water. Most settlements were established near water sources and had adopted various techniques and constructed small-scale dams to conserve and reuse rainwater. Yet these measures were not sufficient to sustain large populations during drought conditions. Most settlers were forced to seek other areas where more reliable sources of water were found. The construction of early engineering feats like the Los Angeles aqueduct quickly changed prior perceptions of the region’s potential. Such systems allowed for cheap and previously inaccessible water to flow to the abundant land, spurring an unprecedented population and agricultural boom. For decades, the construction of more aqueducts and canals provided a sufficient amount of water to meet the demand in the region’s growing agricultural and financial economy. As the abundance of land and favorable weather attracted more businesses and industries into the region, more and more homes were built to accommodate the workforce. By 1936, the Hoover Dam had been built and California had signed and agreed to the Colorado River Compact, which granted Southern California 4.4 million acre-feet annually of the Colorado River’s water. As a result, relatively cheap water was able to meet the demands, thus catapulting California’s agricultural industry and residential development.

Energy storage technologies have the potential to revolutionize the electric grid by allowing for the integration of renewable generation while increasing the utilization and efficiency of current grid assets. These technologies include pumped hydroelectric storage, compressed air energy storage (CAES), flywheels, batteries, thermal energy storage (TES), super capacitors, and superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES). While energy storage has been implemented in some areas, its benefits are greatly undervalued by current regulatory frameworks leading to suboptimal outcomes for grid operators, utilities, and ratepayers. Large-scale adoption of storage technologies will require regulatory frameworks that recognize the benefits of grid-scale storage across generation, and transmission and distribution. This thesis discusses the need for storage, currently available and developing storage technologies, and the present regulatory environment.

This work explores how authors employ literary modes to persuade readers towards one side or another of the environmental debate and whether the works promote constructive discourse on environmental issues. It uses two seminal works from each side of the environmental discourse, Silent Spring and The Population Bomb and The Ultimate Resource and The Skeptical Environmentalist, to analyze stylistic differences and similarities, to compare public reception, and to explain the increasing polarization of environmental discourse.

Ecological research, both basic and applied, can inform management decisions on public land in a number of ways. Most importantly, it can illuminate any negative effects of a given land use practice as well as the causes behind that effect. This type of information can be important to a management agency, such as the BLM, with a multi-use mission as these studies indicate under what management regimes a land use is in contradiction with other goals, such as conservation or restoration. The current body of research, however, is flawed. In order to make fully informed decisions, land managers are in need of site or ecosystem-specific studies, which may not be available for the ecosystem in question. In addition, as is the case with investigations of the effects of extraction of natural gas, lack of baseline data and systematically controlled experiments lead to incomplete answering of questions pertinent to land managers. To produce research that is more pertinent to land managers, researchers and managers can work together more closely. This could be facilitated if funding were available to BLM field offices to solicit investigation into questions they need answered locally. This may necessitate a certain level of decentralization or at least more discretionary power given to local managers within the agency. Close collaboration between researchers and land managers from the beginning would ensure the produced results could better inform management decisions. Public land managers of the BLM cannot only consider scientific research when making land use decisions, however. Its multi-use mission statement requires an integration of conservation, restoration, recreation and resource use and extraction. This can lead to a number of conflicts or contradictions between goals. In addition, national, state, and local values and priorities play into which land use practices are deemed acceptable, often regardless of scientific research. In order to remedy the situation, boundary spanning, a transdisciplinary approach, and decentralization have been suggested.

This study looks at the process of local policy change in environmental policy decisions. It employs a comparative case study research design to analyze the creation of a new recreational water right in Colorado to support whitewater boating. It compared the 12 communities that have applied for the new water right to 6 non-adopter communities. Factors including stakeholder groups, citizens, policy entrepreneurs, mass media, policy knowledge, policy timing, and politicians' motivations are analyzed to determine their role in local policy decisions. This research also considers how policy change in local communities promoted new state laws, and was in turn influenced by them. The dataset includes interviews with 75 Colorado water experts and community decision makers, mass media coverage of the policy process, and legal and legislative documentation of the process. These data were then analyzed within cases and across cases to create a model of community policy change. This research found that three elements were present when a community's policies changed regarding the use of natural resources. First, the community was dependent on the resource, either economically or socially. Second, a policy entrepreneur was present to influence the community's decision makers to enact a new policy regarding natural resource use. These policy entrepreneurs were most often experts in water law or management. Finally, the community had access to accurate information regarding the new policy. The case study analysis found that neither mass media coverage of the issue nor citizen participation influenced policy change. This may have occurred primarily because water rights were viewed as a technical detail to be handled by experts. Citizens usually became engaged in the process only after the decision to file for the water right had been made. Similarly, media coverage of recreational water rights was present in most cases only after the policy decision had been made. This study provides an understanding of the processes that communities go through in deciding to change policies to account for new non-consumptive uses and the factors that influence those decisions. This research is not only relevant to water law in Colorado, but also to environmental policy in general. / Dissertation

Concern about environmental injustice has been driving the recent effort to characterize risks from exposures to air toxics at very fine spatial resolutions. However, few studies seek to understand the potential policy implications of regulating risks at increasingly finer spatial resolutions and the impact of resulting policies on distribution of risks. To address this gap, the broad question for this research is how could the choice of spatial resolution for regulation of risks from toxic air pollutants affect emission controls and the consequences thereof? This research develops a formal model of a hypothetical decision maker choosing emission controls within a risk-based regulatory framework. The model suggests that optimal controls on air toxics emissions vary depending on the spatial resolution chosen to regulate risks; net social costs are non-decreasing as one regulates at finer and finer spatial resolutions. An empirical application of the model using air toxic emission data for Escambia and Santa Rosa Counties in Florida demonstrates the sensitivity of optimal emissions to spatial resolution chosen for regulation. The research then investigates the equity implications of regulating at different spatial resolutions with regard to the spatial distribution of cancer risks. The empirical results indicate that regulation at finer spatial resolutions could involve a tradeoff between costs and equitable distribution of risks. For example, at a threshold cancer risk of 100 in a million, regulating at census block level resolution could be twice as costly as regulating at census tract resolution while reducing the maximum individual risk by almost half. Further, regulation at finer spatial resolutions might not address environmental injustice by itself unless such concerns are more explicitly incorporated into emission control decisions. Finally, this research shows that spatial resolution at which air toxics risks are regulated could matter in predictable ways even after taking into account the uncertainties that the decision maker faces.