In Belgium recent national and community legislation regulates emission levels of "acid pollutants" (SO2, NOx) and apply to large combustion facilities whose pollutants are transported over large distances. Complying with these legislations requires costly emission control equipment. In order to minimize the costs of clean-up operations, this paper analyses the potentialities of an emission trading programme by means of a linear programming model. Six retrofit power plants have been chosen to test the model. As the results suggest, substantial credits are obtained for either SO2 or NOx emissions reduction. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published
Most papers propose extended producer responsibility (EPR) as an incentive for the future development of cleaner production processes. In this paper, we propose an EPR calculation method as an instrument to collect funds to offset past environmental degradations that occurred before environmental legislations were enforced. However, often an unfortunate side effect of EPR is the legal disputes over who should be considered liable. To solve that problem, we suggest a scientifically rigorous method that identifies liable economic agents and calculates the apportionment of restoration costs between producers responsible for direct environmental degradations and their intermediate and final consumers responsible for indirect degradations. We apply our method to the case of fish nurseries – a marine habitat – that have been continually destroyed by industrial harbours since the industrial revolution in the Seine estuary (France). Our EPR calculation method should diminish losses of profit per polluter caused by the restoration costs. Such diminution is expected to reduce lobby pressures responsible for lower environmental targets in environmental legislations. EPR is also expected to preserve harbor activities that contribute to the general interest and generate a positive externality for climate change mitigation, justifying restoration costs to be borne by a larger number of sectors than harbours alone. In the EPR restoration scenario involving polluters, users, users of users and final consumers, profit losses for the main destructors of habitats – harbours and the mining sector – reaches 12.6% and 6.3% respectively. For the other sectors, profit losses do not exceed 3.4% (estimated with an input-output model). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published
In European environmental water legislation, costs are deemed disproportionate when the total cost of a supplementary environmental measure appreciably exceeds the total benefit generated by the measure (cost-benefit concept). Moreover when costs are lower than benefits, they are deemed disproportionate if polluters cannot afford them (affordability concept). The implication of both disproportionality concepts for ecosystem protection is important given that they condition the possibility for environmental targets to be postponed or made less stringent. But what if this twofold concept of disproportionate cost were replaced by the affordability concept alone? A first argument supporting our suggestion is that cost-benefit analysis encounters difficulties in taking into account the important ecological functions provided by biological structures and processes from which ecosystem services stem. A second argument is that there is no reason for not implementing an environmental legislation democratically decided by representatives if polluters can bear the costs. The problem is that the affordability concept strongly depends on the range of the "Polluter Pays Principle" considered. In order to improve environmental equity and reduce the number of cases where environmental targets are postponed or made less stringent, we develop two extensions of the "Polluter Pays Principle". The extension method is based on an ecological-economic input-output model and tested on the case of natural marine habitat destroyed by harbour extension in the Seine estuary. The results suggest that disproportionate costs can be transformed into affordable ones when the "Polluter Pays Principle" is extended to economic sectors with indirect responsibilities of second order ("User Pays Principle") and third order ("User of User Pays Principle"). To ensure that such extension is fair to the ecosystem and to economic sectors, equity issues are considered. Our results suggest that if the method developed in this paper were applied, economic ...
In this paper we present a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of the Achziv Rocky reefs marine protected area (MPA) in Israel as a case study following the implementation of the international Barcelona Convention.The Marine Strategy Framework Directive requires that Member States and affiliates members achieve "Good Environmental Status" (GES) of marine ecosystems by 2020 including improvement of Marine Protected Area (MPA) networks in EU marine waters.EU guidance documents recommend using economic valuation and CBA to support environmental decision-making. We therefore propose the application of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) requirements in Israel, and its methodology as marine conservation guidelines by the year 2020.We reveal constraints of the Cost-Benefit-Analysis (CBA), appraising the Ecosystem Services Approach (ESA) and we show the relevance of MPA's economic analysis.We analyze these challenges with respect to Israel, an affiliate MSFD country that has not yet carried such CBA on MPAs. In this case study, we compare the current MPA situation with the expected positive outcome of MPA expansion.Our analysis shows that benefits from a marine reserve and its associated ecosystem services can largely exceed their protection costs, which should entice other organizations, from regional to governments, to follow MPA protection recommendations. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published
