Browsing by Subject "environmental policy"
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Item Air-quality related health impacts of food in the United States(2021-05) Domingo, Nina GabrielleThe challenge of feeding a growing and increasingly affluent population has spurred interest in identifying diets and food production practices that improve human health and protect the environment. The environmental impacts of our food system on climate change, on land, energy, and water use, and on water quality are well established. Less is known about the role of food in influencing human health via reduced air quality. This is despite the food sector being a major contributor to air pollution and reduced air quality being the largest environmental risk to premature mortality. This dissertation addresses that gap by advancing understanding of the air-quality related health impacts of US food in three ways: (i) by examining air-quality related health impacts of individual foods and diets, I find that 80% of the 15,900 annual death from food-related fine particulate matter is attributable to animal source foods; (ii) by estimating the air-quality related health impacts of pork and chicken along 79 company-specific supply chains, I find that the associated air-quality related health damages are concentrated in a small fraction of the total companies and the slaughter facilities they operate; and (iii) by calculating the external costs linked to the air-quality related health impacts and climate impacts of individual foods, I find that total external costs of food production are comparable to the net cash income of the US farm sector. These findings can inform decisions of food producers, processors and distributors, policymakers, and the broader public interested in improving the health and environmental outcomes linked to the food we eat. Future work should explore the air-quality related health impacts of the food system at a global scale, examine the relationship between food’s air-quality related health impacts and other environmental impacts, and evaluate solutions with respect to broader social and environmental goals.Item Brazil’s Soy Moratorium: Current Expansion Capacities, Extension to the Cerrado, and Increasing Compliant Production(2017-08) Nepstad, LucyBrazil’s Soy Moratorium has been credited with reducing deforestation rates in Amazonia, yet compliant land is finite and diminishing in response to rapidly increasing international demand for exports. Furthermore, whereas the Soy Moratorium has lessened the role of soy as a direct driver of Amazonian forest loss, it does not apply to the Cerrado, where recent soy expansion has come at the cost of ecologically valuable vegetation. Here we quantify the remaining potential for Soy Moratorium-compliant expansion at the microregion level in both the Amazon, where the current Soy Moratorium applies, and in the Cerrado, under a scenario where the Soy Moratorium is extended to the biome. We evaluate 189 microregions including all soy producing area in the Amazon and all area in the Cerrado. We determine potential compliant production increases for both regions using three approaches: expanding soy onto all Soy Moratorium-eligible land, closing yield gaps on current lands, and introducing integrated-crop-livestock systems with soy (ICLS) onto established pasture. We find 18.0 Mha of additional remaining eligible area in the Amazon and a hypothetical 67.9 Mha in the Cerrado, of which 81.0% and 62.3%, respectively, are estimated to be suitable for soy production. Utilizing all available land could over quintuple production from 2014 levels (466% increase), while restricting expansion to suitable land would result in a quadrupling of soy production (324% increase). However, any new soy expansion on eligible land would displace existing land uses, which may lead to leakage. Closing yield gaps on current lands could increase production only marginally (21.8% increase), while ICLS could generate meaningful production increases through areal expansion (37.5% increase) without facing leakage obstacles and while increasing financial benefits for farmers. Our findings suggest that adoption of a Cerrado Soy Moratorium would lead to a spatial shift in production away from rapidly transforming soy centers such as Matopiba and Central Mato Grosso, and into central and southwestern Cerrado where there is more concentrated eligible expansion area.Item Environmental Assessment and Design: Proceedings of a Seminar(Water Resources Research Center, University of Minnesota, 1975-01) Water Resources Research CenterThe purpose of this publication is to provide information on Federal and State (Minnesota) environmental impact statement requirements. Topics discussed include the intent of the environmental impact legislation as well as discussion regarding projects which require impact statements, and information which should be included in environmental impact statements. Case studies detailing positive and negative aspects of the environmental impact statement process are presented.Item Introduction: Envisioning Legal and Policy Pathways for Energy Innovation(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, 2014-02-20) Osofky, Hari M.Introduction to special symposium edition (Issue 15.1) of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, which emerged from the conference Legal and Policy Pathways for Energy Innovation organized by the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences at the University of Minnesota on April 24–25, 2013. The conference brought together leading scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and business people to discuss how to make critical progress on energy law and policy. The issue contains contributions from several conference participants, who highlight the complexity of energy transition and possibilities for creative, practical solutions.Item Mitigating the Impacts of the Renewable Energy Gold Rush(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, 2014-02-20) Morris, Amy Wilson; Owley, JessicaThis Article questions where the push for utility-scale solar energy development in the California desert leaves endangered species preservation. We begin in Part I by providing some general context for the boom in renewable energy projects and outlining the main mechanisms for expediting endangered species permitting. Part II details offsite mitigation requirements for recently approved projects. Finally, in Part III, we draw some conclusions about the challenges posed by the current strategies for balancing renewable energy development and endangered species protection, and we make recommendations for strengthening mitigation outcomes. Our research highlights general concerns with perpetual off-site mitigation and the lack of oversight and information about mitigation projects. Through examining the development of two specific solar power facilities in the California desert (Ivanpah and Genesis), we demonstrate the mitigation choices, the time lag between project approval and developed mitigation plans, and the roles scientific uncertainty plays in making project decisions. Overall, the picture we paint is a disturbing one where decisions regarding desert development are made without full consideration or understanding of the mitigation measures. The urge to approve projects and get them operational quickly increases this problem. In such an uncertain realm, infusing concepts of reevaluation and adaptive management can provide routes to incorporate new information and alter mitigation or development plans as necessary. Current efforts at consolidated landscape-level planning may help ameliorate some of these concerns, but a better solution may be to slow down the pace of project approval to enable better understanding of the desert ecosystem and full evaluation of mitigation prior to plant construction.