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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Beyond environmental management to quantifiable pollution management

Rowland-Jones, Rhys January 2003 (has links)
Stakeholders increasingly have a heightened expectation of organisational commitment to good environmental and societal practice. Proponents of the link between environmental and financial performance have argued that pollution reduction provides future cost savings by increasing efficiency, reducing compliance costs, and minimising future liabilities. Environmental management systems such as BS EN ISO 14001:1996 or the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) do not require organisations to comment on overall environmental performance. BS EN ISO 14001: 1996 simply advocates that the organisation should have viewed each particular function of the business process and applied a self- formulated quantitative/qualitative analysis to the function in question, providing no incentive to add a level of independently verifiable transparency to the analysis process. This thesis investigates whether it is possible to develop an environmental management system that is capable of delivering a quantitative social/economic statement based on the pollutant aspects/effects of the organisation. A model for quantitative pollution management (QPM) is developed, and a scoring mechanism is defined which enables an indicator of pollution performance to be derived. This indicator reviews the organisation as a whole system, as well as commenting on its constituent parts. The indicator is based upon evaluation of five areas, those of management /leadership, inputs, controls, activities, and outputs. The model is tested in industry by an audit of a manufacturing organisation in South Wales, and a numeric QPM indicator is derived. The numeric QPM indicator is subsequently considered by means of a qualitative interpretation of the quantitative indicator score. The qualitative interpretation is then considered against the impression of the organisation gained by the author during the conduct of the audit. Potential future work in relation to QPM is considered, and the possible application of the concepts of fuzzy logic to QPM is given.
2

The impacts of street lighting on bats

Day, Julie January 2017 (has links)
As human population grows and develops, more urban areas are expanding. Urbanisation has many impacts on the natural environment and one understudied pollutant is artificial light at night. The aims of this thesis were to examine the impacts of street lighting on bats and investigate the exposure of British bat species to artificial light at night and explored the mitigation option of part-night lighting. The current exposure of British bat species to artificial lighting was assessed using roost locations and population sizes from a long-term dataset (1997-2012) from the Bat Conservation Trust’s National Bat Monitoring Programme on seven bat species (Eptesicus serotinus, Myotis nattereri, Pipistrellus pipistrellus, P. pygmaeus, Plecotus auritus, Rhinolophus hipposideros and R. ferrumequinum). These data were combined with satellite imagery in roost sustenance zones and home ranges. Bat roosts were found in areas with brighter light levels than random locations for P. pipistrellus, P. pygmaeus and Plecotus auritus. Species that forage around streetlights (P. pipistrellus and P. pygmaeus) had significantly higher light levels in the landscape around their roosts than species which avoid street lit areas (R. hipposideros, M. nattereri and P. auritus). Colony size was negatively correlated with light levels. This study highlights that different species have different requirements in the landscapes around their roosts. To investigate landscapes effects of artificial light at night on the understudied light avoiding species R. ferrumequinum, eight maternity roosts were surveyed to explore the interaction between habitat features and street lighting. At each maternity roost, bat detectors were deployed at 25 paired street lit and dark locations. Street lighting had a significant negative effect on bat activity. Locations closest to the maternity roost had higher bat activity than those further away and road type had a significant effect on bat activity, with the highest bat activity recorded at minor roads compared with A and B roads. These results highlight the large negative impact street lighting can have on bat activity patterns and the need for mitigation. Several mitigation strategies have been suggested to combat the effects of artificial light at night but few have been tested. One of these suggestions is to restrict the hours of lighting through the night, often called part-night lighting. Part-night lighting has been implemented by many local authorities, often switching the lights off after midnight and switching them back on before dusk. To explore the effects of part night lighting on bats, the hourly patterns of activity for R. ferrumequinum were studied. Bat activity was bimodal, with a peak in the first few hours after sunset followed by a smaller peak before sunrise. To capture more than 50% of bat activity during the dark period of the night, street lights would be required to switch off before 11pm. To explore this further, a before-and-after study of part-night lighting was conducted at towns across Devon. Following the conversion from full-night lighting to part-night lighting, switching street lights off at 2 am, there was a significant reduction in P. pipistrellus and a significant increase for P. pygmaeus and Nyctalus noctule activity. Although part-night lighting is not often operational during peak activity periods for bat species, reducing the duration of lighting at night has impacts on activity patterns for several species. This thesis shows that artificial light at night has impacts on bats across the landscapes around their roosts. Artificial lighting has impacts for species in different ways, depending on whether they forage around street lights or avoid street lit areas. For species that avoid street lit areas such as R. ferrumequinum, street lighting can have very significant negative impacts on the availability of areas around their roosts. This highlights the need for conservation measures to reduce impacts of artificial lighting. Although mitigation schemes such as part-night lighting may help to minimize impacts of nighttime lighting, more tailored schemes for bats should devised to achieve greater conservation impacts.

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