European Technical Democracy? How Consumer Associations Did-or Did Not-Shape the 1980s Automotive Environmental Standards.

Did the 1980s automotive standards reflect the European Economic Community's move toward a "technical democracy" or a broader democratic deficit? In the early 1980s, Europe's automotive sector faced multiple challenges: the European Commission's desire to harmonize technical standards and achieve greater European integration, intense competition between manufacturers, and environmental issues like acid rain. Debates on reducing air pollution focused on unleaded petrol and catalytic converters. Two associations representing civil society in Brussels responded to the increase in environmental concerns with a 1982 joint campaign. Despite a rich historiography on pollutant emission standards, highlighting the strategies of governments and companies, no study has dealt with the role nongovernmental organizations played. Based on public and private archives, particularly those of the European Bureau of Consumers' Unions, this article argues the new regulations did not result from the EU's consultation with civil society organizations like consumer groups but rather with the automotive industry.

Mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental justice in United States federal policy, 1980-2016 : Why, with much known, was little done?

Toxic chemicals - "toxicants" - have been studied and regulated as single entities, and, carcinogens aside, almost all toxicants, single or mixed and however altered, have been thought harmless in very low doses or very weak concentrations. Yet much work in recent decades has shown that toxicants can injure wildlife, laboratory animals, and humans following exposures previously expected to be harmless. Additional work has shown that toxicants can act not only individually and cumulatively but also collectively and even synergistically and that they affect disadvantaged communities inordinately - and therefore, as argued by reformers, unjustly. As late as December 2016, the last full month before the inauguration of a president promising to rescind major environmental regulations, the United States federal environmental-health establishment, as led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), had not developed coherent strategies to mitigate such risks, to alert the public to their plausibility, or to advise leadership in government and industry about their implications. To understand why, we examined archival materials, reviewed online databases, read internal industry communications, and interviewed experts. We confirmed that external constraints, statutory and judicial, had been in place prior to EPA's earliest interest in mixture toxicity, but we found no overt effort, certainly no successful effort, to loosen those constraints. We also found internal constraints: concerns that fully committing to the study of complex mixtures involving numerous toxicants would lead to methodological drift within the toxicological community and that trying to act on insights from such study could lead only to regulatory futility. Interaction of these constraints, external and internal, shielded the EPA by circumscribing its responsibilities and by impeding movement toward paradigmatic adjustment, but it also perpetuated scientifically dubious policies, such as those limiting the evaluation of commercial chemical formulations, including pesticide formulations, to only those ingredients said by their manufacturers to be active. In this context, regulators' disregard of synergism contrasted irreconcilably with biocide manufacturers' understanding that synergism enhanced lethality and patentability. In the end, an effective national response to mixture toxicity, cumulative risk, and environmental injustice did not emerge. In parallel, though, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which was less constrained, pursued with scientific investigation what the EPA had not pursued with regulatory action.

Abuse of Rachel Carson and Misuse of DDT Science in the Service of Environmental Deregulation.

Fake news?? The contact insecticide DDT has been reappraised as a safe, life-saving compound by special interest groups committed to repealing environmental regulations. It is shown in this essay how some specific toxicological data has been misused by those aiming to disingenuously influence public policy. Graphic: Pestroy, a DDT-laced coating marketed in 1946 by Sherwin-Williams Research Laboratories.

A post-Kyoto partner: considering the stratospheric ozone regime as a tool to manage nitrous oxide.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the largest known remaining anthropogenic threat to the stratospheric ozone layer. However, it is currently only regulated under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol because of its simultaneous ability to warm the climate. The threat N2O poses to the stratospheric ozone layer, coupled with the uncertain future of the international climate regime, motivates our exploration of issues that could be relevant to the Parties to the ozone regime (the 1985 Vienna Convention and its 1987 Montreal Protocol) should they decide to take measures to manage N2O in the future. There are clear legal avenues to regulate N2O under the ozone regime as well as several ways to share authority with the existing and future international climate treaties. N2O mitigation strategies exist to address the most significant anthropogenic sources, including agriculture, where behavioral practices and new technologies could contribute significantly to reducing emissions. Existing policies managing N2O and other forms of reactive nitrogen could be harnessed and built on by the ozone regime to implement N2O controls. There are several challenges and potential cobenefits to N2O control which we discuss here: food security, equity, and implications of the nitrogen cascade. The possible inclusion of N2O in the ozone regime need not be viewed as a sign of failure of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to adequately deal with climate change. Rather, it could represent an additional valuable tool in sustainable development diplomacy.

The role of agri-environment schemes in conservation and environmental management.

Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern in Europe depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri-environment schemes (AES) are designed partly to address this. They are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We reviewed the structure of current AES across Europe. Since a 2003 review questioned the overall effectiveness of AES for biodiversity, there has been a plethora of case studies and meta-analyses examining their effectiveness. Most syntheses demonstrate general increases in farmland biodiversity in response to AES, with the size of the effect depending on the structure and management of the surrounding landscape. This is important in the light of successive EU enlargement and ongoing reforms of AES. We examined the change in effect size over time by merging the data sets of 3 recent meta-analyses and found that schemes implemented after revision of the EU's agri-environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision. Furthermore, schemes aimed at areas out of production (such as field margins and hedgerows) are more effective at enhancing species richness than those aimed at productive areas (such as arable crops or grasslands). Outstanding research questions include whether AES enhance ecosystem services, whether they are more effective in agriculturally marginal areas than in intensively farmed areas, whether they are more or less cost-effective for farmland biodiversity than protected areas, and how much their effectiveness is influenced by farmer training and advice? The general lesson from the European experience is that AES can be effective for conserving wildlife on farmland, but they are expensive and need to be carefully designed and targeted.

El Papel de los Esquemas Agro-Ambientales en la Conservación y el Manejo Ambiental Batáry et al. Resumen Más de la mitad de las tierras europeas está bajo manejo agrícola y así ha sido durante milenios. Muchas especies y ecosistemas de interés de conservación en Europa dependen del manejo agrícola y están mostrando una declinación continua. Los esquemas agro-ambientales (EAA) están diseñados en parte para encarar esto. Los esquemas son una gran fuente de financiamiento para la conservación dentro de la Unión Europea (UE) y el mayor gasto de conservación en Europa. Revisamos la estructura de los EAA actuales a lo largo del continente. Desde que en 2003 una revisión cuestionó la efectividad general de los EAA para la biodiversidad, ha habido una plétora de estudios de caso y meta-análisis que examinan su efectividad. La mayoría de las síntesis demuestran un incremento general en la biodiversidad de las tierras de cultivo en respuesta a los EAA, con la magnitud del efecto dependiente de la estructura y el manejo del terreno circundante. Esto es importante a la luz del crecimiento sucesivo de la UE y las continuas reformas a los EAA. Examinamos el cambio en la magnitud del efecto a través del tiempo al fusionar los conjuntos de datos de tres meta-análisis recientes y encontramos que los esquemas implementados después de la revisión de los programas agro-ambientales de la UE en 2007 no fueron más efectivos que los esquemas implementados antes de la revisión. Además, los esquemas enfocados en las áreas fuera de producción (como los márgenes de campo y los setos vivos) son más efectivos en el mejoramiento de la riqueza de especies que aquellos enfocados en las áreas productivas (como los cultivos arables y los pastizales). Las preguntas sobresalientes de la investigación incluyen si los EAA mejoran los servicios ambientales, si son más efectivos en las áreas agrícolas marginales que en las áreas de cultivo intensivo, si son más o menos rentables para la biodiversidad de las tierras de cultivo que las áreas protegidas, y en cuánto influye sobre su efectividad los consejos y el entrenamiento dado a los granjeros. La lección general de la experiencia europea es que los EAA pueden ser efectivos para la conservación de la vida silvestre en las tierras de cultivo, pero son caros y necesitan ser diseñados y enfocados cuidadosamente.

Agri-environmental policies from 1960 to 2022.

For both research and practice, it is paramount to understand what, where and when agri-environmental policies have been put in place. Here we present a database of 6,124 agri-environmental policies implemented between 1960 and 2022 in about 200 countries. The database comprises a wide range of policy types (including regulations and payment schemes) and goals (such as biodiversity conservation, safer pesticide use and reducing nutrient pollution). We illustrate the application of the database by exploring the association between economic development and agri-environmental policies and between the soil-related, agri-environmental policies of countries and their border discontinuities in cropland erosion. A strong, positive link between economic development and implemented agri-environmental policies is revealed, and it is found that 43% of all global border discontinuities in soil erosion between countries can be explained by differences in their policies.