Regens, J L. Political economy of acid rain. United States: N. Copy to clipboard. Science , — Reed, P. Law Inst. Sequeira, R. Stensland, G. The Conservation Foundation, Washington, D. Tyree, Jr. Weinberg, A. Environment 27 1 28— Whelpdale, D. Wilson Quarterly 9 1 Wisniewski, J. Yavetz, Z. Latomus 17, Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Mr Eney is a lecturer and Dr.
They have recently completed research on the spatial distribution of acid rain over the Washington, D. Reprints and Permissions. Eney, A. The problem of acid rain: An overview. Environmentalist 7, 95— Download citation. Issue Date : June Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search.
Summary The solution to the problem of acid rain is perhaps one of the main environmental and political issues facing the peoples of the industrialized nations, and their neighbours today. References Barnes, R. Google Scholar Bell, J. Article Google Scholar Carroll, J. Normal pH levels in unpolluted areas are slightly acidic between 5. But over much of the Northeast United States, the pH of rain has dropped to less than 4 at which many vegetal types are severely affected.
Similar values have been measured in much of northern Europe. These falls of pH correlate closely with sulfur emissions and atmospheric transport and dispersion of the resulting acids.
Impacts of acid rain are poorly understood as ecological degradation is usually the result of multiple, simultaneous, interdependent and often non-linear causal relationships. But generally, acid rain is believed to modify the rate of nutrient leaching from soils and biomass; diminish or destroy fish populations in flowing water or lakes; affect soil bacteria and fungi; increase uptake of heavy metals such as cadmium; and exacerbate other pre- existing stresses such as pesticide contamination.
Large-scale forest degradation has been attributed to acid rain in Europe, as well as more localized impacts on urban structures. It relates intimately with energy, land use, urban, transport, and other socioeconomic issues. It interacts with other stresses on ecosystems which are already poorly endowed in terms of fertility, sunlight etc, and on species at the limits of their natural range. Acid rain also has major ramifications for commercial and cultural values including forests, agriculture, and tourism.
But acid rain is firmly on policy agendas in these two regions. Moreover, control strategies adopted in these regions have made a difference. In Europe, for example, 24 of the 33 parties to the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution have reduced their net emissions relative to those of , and 12 have reduced them by 30 percent or more—with much larger, long-range reductions in the offing.
Scientists and policymakers—including ordinary citizens—have long suspected that acid rain is also a problem in the Asian region. Localized impacts in Asian megacities, high economic and associated energy consumption growth rates, and apparent transport of acid rain across national borders have generated a perception that acid rain affects Asia as badly or worse than in Europe or North America.
Indeed, one early estimate suggests that Asian SO2 emissions may surpass those of Europe and US combined early in the next millenia, rising to 75 million tonnes in Preliminary assessments by regional institutions such as the Asian Development Bank surmised that acid rain is already a major problem, but could muster little hard data to press the case for action to mitigate the driving emissions.
Early data from monitoring show that acidity of rainfall has indeed risen in some areas, but some Asian ecosystems may be less susceptible to such deposition than European or North American ecosystems.
Moreover, determining liability—that is, ascertaining whose acid rain is responsible for the damage—is a highly political issue that has slowed the pace of regional cooperation on the issue. Relatedly, security dilemmas at the geopolitical level bind the states of NEA into on-going conflicts over a variety of issues including territorial disputes, ethnic issues, military threat projection, etc.
Transborder air pollution in Northeast Asia has the potential to add to these already existing problems as well as to promote cooperation between states to solve them. Acid rain is the single most important regional air pollution affecting interstate relations. The north and south eastern regions of the PRC have especially high levels of sulfur dioxide emissions. Even low sulfur coals can result in high levels of sulfur dioxide emissions when the coal is burned in inefficient plants.
Some have also noted that Mongolia may receive acid rain originating over its northwestern border with Russia. Depending on the time of year, some countries may be originators and recipients of acid rain, especially the DPRK. In winter January , the air flows are generally from the Asian land mass to the ocean, while in summer July , the opposite is the case.
According to an early study by the Asian Development Bank and recent interim reports of the RAINS-ASIA project, Northeast China, Japan and the two Koreas are relatively vulnerable to acid rain degradation due to the combination of high deposition and sensitive soils, vegetation, and materials.
The scale and impact of transfrontier acid rain deposition remains unclear, in part due to the lack of monitoring stations and ecological studies. Initial studies indicate, however, that the levels may be on a par with Europe.
China itself has noted the possibility that acid rain may be transmitted long distances and has seriously affected areas of China. In the area adjacent to the Yellow Sea, Chinese industry has been estimated to emit about , tonnes of sulfur dioxide per year, some of which could be transported across the Yellow Sea to Korea by the predominantly northwesterly winds. Fortunately, the problem is amenable to technological controls at source: a modern power plant with glue-gas desulfurization equipment can remove more than 90 percent of the emissions.
Countries in the region are also establishing facilities to monitor acid rain deposition. Much remains to be done, however, in terms of establishing common monitoring methodologies, comprehensive baseline monitoring, and ecosystem impact studies.
Analysis of the acid rain issue is a problem that demands multi-disciplinary, transnational, and multi-institutional analytical capabilities. But beyond the scientific, technological, and economic methods normally brought to bear on the acid rain problem are a set of broader conceptual concerns.
What, for example, is the domain of regional environmental cooperation over responding to the acid rain threat?
What can—and should—governments accomplish through joint action at a regional level that they could not accomplish by acting unilaterally or in global concert in relation to a problem such as acid rain? In broad terms, we argue that the domain embraces three broad categories of environmental management:. Common pool resources such as the atmosphere do not respect political boundaries, whether of one nation singly or many nations collectively.
Rather, nations and sub-regions within them may be simultaneously part of many regions as defined by a common sea, watershed, desert, forest, air current system, etc. The governance of each common pool resource requires the participation of those who use it.
Likewise, nations and sub-national areas are part of multiple economic regions. The United States, for example, and especially the state of California, are simultaneously part of the Asia-Pacific and North American trading areas.
This designation reflects the UN propensity to draw regional boundaries in politico-geographical terms and to promote within them cooperative relations across a broad spectrum of issues.
It also reflects the interests of central governments in Northeast Asia to maintain control over foreign relations. Finally, the designation reflects political and security interests in excluding the United States, even though Alaska stretches well into geographical proximity. Nurtured by the UN Economic and Social Commission on Asia and the Pacific and the UN Development Program, the primary initiatives toward regional environmental cooperation have embraced these six countries.
Thus, there is no reason to restrict regional analysis to broad concepts of region. Returning now to the conceptual framework in which we believe the acid rain problem should be situated, we address the primary characteristics in three dimensions.
Common pool resources are those which are not exclusively utilized by a single agent or source. Generally, such resources are considered common pool if de facto or de jure property rights to them are communal. Property rights consist of formal and informal norms, rules and institutions which specify who can utilize a resource, including who can appropriate income streams from it, as well as how they can utilize it, that is, user obligations.
Examples of common pool resources include air, oceans, and atmosphere, as well as communal forests, pasturelands, fisheries, and local water management associations. In the context of international relations, common pool resources are those which extend across national boundaries; or which are not claimed exclusively by any nation.
Formal and effective forms of collective governance are required to ensure that common pool resources are utilized in ways which promote longterm sustainability. Individual users have no pecuniary or non-pecuniary incentive to limit their use and to invest in the long-term provisioning of the resource. Without use limits and investment, the resource will be undermined.
The solution, they believe, is either for the state to act as a leviathan to appropriate and control the resource; or to transform communal into private property by assigning private property rights to communal resources.
In the context of state-centered international relations, this would suggest either that one state appropriate and regulate a transboundary common pool resource; or that states collectively allocate all resource rights to private citizens.
Neither strategy is attractive or feasible. Rather than carve up or appropriate common pool resources, states can cooperate in establishing Common Pool Regimes CPRs. CPRs specify property rights and create mechanisms to enforce them. Even so, the EU program appears to have stabilized and gained acceptance in the business community.
It now covers 11, power plants, factories, and other facilities in 31 countries. In , Congress declined to establish such a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions in the United States.
California and three Canadian provinces are now banding together on a similar program. It will be the largest cap-and-trade program in the world.
None of this would have happened without the initial intellectual spark struck by the theories of social scientists Pigou, Coase, and Dales.
For big transformative ideas like a marketplace in pollution, it takes basic research broadly defined and insulated from short-term considerations.
For Dudek, there is consolation in knowing that China at least will still benefit from such basic research, even as the United States is, at least for the moment, holding back. This and other articles in the series can be found at www. The Academy, located in Washington, DC, is a society of distinguished scholars dedicated to the use of science and technology for the public welfare. For more than years, it has provided independent, objective scientific advice to the nation.
Annotated version. Please direct comments or questions about this series to Cortney Sloan at csloan nas. These materials may be reposted and reproduced solely for non-commercial educational use without the written permission of the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Terms of Use and Privacy Statement.
0コメント