Environmental Planning

As corporations attempt to move toward environmental sustainability, management must extend their efforts to improve environmental practices across their supply chain. The literature characterizing environmental management within the supply chain has been slowly building but remains sparse. Using a survey of North American manufacturers, this paper examines the impact of collaborative green supply chain practices (GSCP) on manufacturing performance. Collaborative GSCP were defined to include the interactions between organizations in the supply chain, including such aspects as joint environmental goal setting, shared environmental planning, and working together to reduce pollution or other environmental impacts. These practices can be directed either upstream toward suppliers or downstream toward customers. The influence of collaboration in each direction was empirically assessed for multiple objective and perceptual measures of manufacturing performance using a sample of plants in the package printing industry. Generally, the benefits of collaborative green practices were broadest with suppliers. In contrast, collaboration with customers yielded mixed outcomes. Overall, evidence emerged that upstream practices were more closely linked with process-based performance, while downstream collaboration was associated with product-based performance.

Modernity and a True Return to Nature 0. Point of Departure Question How are human-nature relations and the attainment of virtue through human-nature relations understood in the classical urban theory of Geddes and Mumford? How is technology and technological power seen as mediating the relationship between humans and nature?

Infrastructure threatens to lock-in societies to fossil fuels, unless something is done about it now. This is because infrastructure lasts for such a long-time, meaning that any infrastructure built or rebuilt now will last well into the 21st century – even until the end of the century in some cases. Consequently, there is a need to integrate climate change, especially adaptation, into infrastructure now or societies will be left with infrastructure designed around an unsustainable socio-technical system (e.g. combustion engines, roads, suburbanization, etc.). Such change is conceptualized in the literature as a sustainability transition. However, any attempts at such transitions have to address the materialities of infrastructure systems (e.g. physical form, environmental context, etc.). In this paper I develop the concept of socio-material systems and apply it to transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada.

The paper reports on both methodological and substantive findings. It presents a method for generating simplified representations for regional urban populations, their geographical sub-populations and communities. the method generates greatly simplified high-resolution socio-economic profiles of populated geographical areas from complex large census data sets.

The number of cultural parks and heritage areas is increasing in Europe and the United States. Those are spreading over other areas where the economic sectors related to tourism and leisure gain weight. Heritage areas or parks are heterogeneous initiatives that place cultural heritage at the heart of spatial planning policy and economic development, aiming at the reinvention of large territories and local community participation in planning. Their relevance stems from their potential influence on the territorial configuration of broad regions and their impact upon the articulation of traditional protected areas. Notwithstanding this, they have attracted scant academic attention so far.

Moving from Barnesmoore's (2016) theorization of humans as beings with the potential for conscious (epistemological) evolution, this article argues that a revolution in the ideas by which ('world view' in which) we conceive of potential practice must necessarily precede a revolution of academic and social practice (that theory necessarily precedes practice). Revolution must be rooted in revolutionary ideas and cannot be facilitated by practices that rise from (are rationalized within) the hegemonic essence (ideas, axioms and logics) of the regime against which revolution is being waged.

Landfills are the most common and easiest methods to dispose the municipal waste in Romania and still prevails in current waste management options. This type of critical infrastructure was designed to dispose urban waste generated over years or even decades and ultimately led to create new landforms in urban landscape. On the other hand, these sites are major sources of complex pollution unfulfilling EU regulations, being scheduled to be closed. This paper aims to analyze landfills as anthropogenic landforms by applying GIS techniques emphasizing them in a geographical context and not only in situ. The location of these sites usually on alluvial plains of rivers leading to positive landforms that may change hydrogeomorphology dynamics or to be exposed to the floods. The other side, their location in hilly or mountainous regions increase vulnerability to other geomorphological process (gully erosion, landslide). Also, the extension of human settlements and land use is influenced by the presence of such a site either it is closed. The implications of these landforms are varied and must be linked to geographical realities from around. Thus, the mapping of these anthropogenic landforms contribute to a better understanding of the systemic interactions from local environment. This approach may be an important tool for EIA studies, in the process of rehabilitation, post-monitoring and reintegration of these landfills.

Municipal waste management in the last two decades has become a global environmental priority in the context of increasing amounts of waste generated due to the development of a mass consumer society. Various issues of waste management , territorial and temporal variability, spatial analysis of treatment or disposal facilities, systemic implications on the environment, the harmonization of international policy at national, regional and local level are solid arguments for studying this field by geography. Mostly technical or economic studies, lacking a vision of territory are supplemented in the conceptual and methodological level by geographers. This paper performed on the one hand, an overview of various approaches in current literature on waste management issue and on another hand analyses the geographical contributions in this field. Our conclusions lead to the idea that waste management must be performed according to the geographical features of the territory concerned.

This paper examines the delivery of infrastructure requirements related to the plan-making (LDF) process in England introduced as part of the 2004 planning system reforms. Success or otherwise in terms of plan implementation and infrastructure delivery is crucial if the reformed spatial planning system is to be successful. The paper draws on research undertaken as part of a government-sponsored research project into the operation of the new LDF process. The research reveals a significant gap between government expectations and current practice. It suggests that longer-term commitments by central government, alongside improved understanding of the spatial planning process and the role of local government as part of a continued drive for ‘culture change’ among local planning authorities and delivery partners, will be required if the current barriers to the delivery of infrastructure are to be overcome. Otherwise, the new-style LDFs are as likely to be plagued by implementation gaps as were their predecessors.

"It might, at first glance, seem to many that industry and ecology make strange bedfellows. For proponents of sustainable development, however, such a union is crucial. How else are we to make the industries that are so central to modern societies consistent with our visions of a sustainable future?

Linking Industry and Ecology explores the origins, promise, and relevance of the emerging field of industrial ecology. It situates industrial ecology within the broader range of environmental management strategies and concepts, from the practices of pollution prevention through life cycle management, to the more fundamental shift toward dematerialization and ecological design. The book makes a compelling argument for the need to think ecologically to develop innovative and competitive industrial policy.

The contributors to this volume draw on their experience in a variety of disciplines to chart a clear path for industrial ecology. Their work not only affirms what has been learned to date in this nascent field but also provides new insight for a discourse traditionally dominated by natural scientists and engineers, by demonstrating that technologies are socially and politically embedded.

This book will be of interest to educators and students in environmental studies, business management, environmental and industrial engineering, and environmental planning. While many of the examples are drawn from Canada, it will also appeal to readers interested in fostering ecologically sustainable industrial and community development in other industrializing and industrialized nations."

See: http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=4527

Critical natural capital (CNC) is commonly defined as that part of the natural environment, which performs important and irreplaceable functions. So far, the challenge to determine the criticality of natural capital (NC) has mainly been taken up by the natural sciences, and the critical functions of nature mainly associated with its life-support and ecological services. Little attention has been paid to the socio-cultural functions of NC and to their values for the health and well being of human societies. The aim of this paper is to encourage a more complete accounting of the critical functions of NC and its associated values, by highlighting the importance of the information functions (health, recreation, amenity, education, heritage, etc.) for the quality and sustainability of human life. It is argued that, despite their immaterial and often intangible nature, these functions provide many, socio Á/economic benefits, which might be assessed through both qualitative and quantitative valuation methodologies. Integration of ecology, sociology and economics is essential to operationalize the concept of CNC as a tool for more balanced environmental planning and decision making. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

Over the past four decades, a number of tourism studies’, theories and models have emerged concerning host and guest antagonism (Doxey, 1975), tourism area life cycle (Butler, 1980) and carrying capacity (O’Reilly, 1986). These have historically informed academic research as well as practitioners’ thinking, policy and planning interventions (Barcelona City Council, 2016) – however, these have often appeared to be shifting, rather than addressing the problem. Over the last decade, while many scholars have maintained their interest in the classical debate concerning the impacts of tourism, some have attempted new conceptualisations, while others have converged with the narrative of a number of social movements, and the subsequent coining of the terms ‘overtourism’ and ‘tourismphobia’ have emerged (Goodwin, 2017; Dredge, 2017; Milano, 2017a). Saarinen (2006, p. 1121) was prescient in his assertions that in the face of rapidly growing tourism economies, there is a “need for alternative and more environment and host-friendly practices in development, planning, and policies”.  Moreover, Saarinen’s (2013, p. 10) call that “in order to have tools for setting the limits to growth in tourism in a local-global nexus with less tourism-centric evaluation criteria, stronger governmental and inter-governmental policies and regulations are most probably needed” is evidently more pressing today.

In particular, this Special Issue will offer critical reflections on the contemporary evolution of tourism development and the implication of such processes on people, place and space. It is aimed at developing more nuanced insights into current tourism dynamics and to ultimately foster participatory and collaborative responses to what is evidently a rapidly evolving phenomenon with significant policy and practice implications (Dredge, 2017).

For more details, please see full CFP.

The number of cultural parks has been steadily increasing in recent years throughout the world. But what is a cultural park? This book provides a detailed answer to this question and sets out the basis for an academic debate that moves beyond the technical narratives that have prevailed to date. It is important to open up the topic to academic scrutiny given that cultural parks are becoming widespread devices being employed by different institutions and social groups to manage and enhance cultural and natural heritage assets and landscapes. The main problem in dealing with this topic is the predominant lack of theory-grounded, critical reflection in the literature about cultural parks. These remain largely conceived as technical instruments deployed by institutions in order to solve an array of problems they must deal with. As cultural parks are generally regarded as positive and constructive tools whose performance is associated with the preservation of heritage, the overcoming of the nature/culture divide, the reinforcing of identity and memory and the strengthening of social cohesion and economic development, this book critically explores these issues through the analysis of the literature on cultural parks. In addition, it provides a novel theoretical conceptualization of cultural parks that is connected with, and underpins, a tentative methodology developed for their empirical analysis.

Ecosystem services are a powerful tool for land-use and environmental planning, which can help decision makers better understand the tradeoffs between different development scenarios. However, there is limited guidance about how ecosystem services should be used in the land-use and environmental planning context. While existing plan quality guidance for sustainability recognizes benefits of ecosystems by promoting conservation and green infrastructure, it fails to provide specific direction on the type of ecosystem service information to collect and how it should be incorporated into land-use planning processes. We explore this gap by using criteria from American Planning Association (APA) Sustaining Places guidance to analyze two comprehensive plans: Damascus, Oregon, which uses ecosystem services as an organizing framework, and Cincinnati, Ohio, which has received recognition for advancing the science and art of planning. In addition, we compare the extent to which the plans incorporate ecosystem services (both concepts and language) into their goal setting, fact base, policies, and public participation process. We find that incorporating ecosystem services into land-use planning may help achieve sustainability goals by elevating the importance of conservation and providing a lens to link multiple community objectives. APA rewards these attributes of Damascus’ plan, but fails to identify the plan’s strong ecosystem service strategies or weak analysis of ecosystem service information. Based on these findings, we propose additional metrics to help practitioners incorporate ecosystem services into comprehensive plans.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer-based tools used to collect, store, manipulate and display spatially-referenced information. They are used to support decision-making in a wide variety of contexts, including spatial planning and environmental management. Because the process of GIS production, from software development to visualization of GIS output, is characterized by political, economic and social motivations, it is important that GIS practitioners are aware of issues such as access to data and the political economy of information, and the nature of GIS epistemologies vis-à-vis multiple coexisting perceptions of reality. Lack of such appreciation can lead to social and spatial marginalization of communities. Use of GIS in a research program for environmental management of the Cooum River in Chennai, and in support of participatory processes for managing environment and health in slums are used to demonstrate appropriate applications of GIS in India. Internet-distributed GIS as a potential avenue to address issues of public access to data is also considered.

New thinking and new settlement patterns can create a city in harmony with nature.

Our team was asked by the Chattanooga Downtown Planning and Design Studio to study how the downtown plan could be environmentally sound. We were charged with articulating the issues, framing the problems, looking for larger integrative patterns, and proposing innovative solutions for an ecologically healthy downtown. The objective was to find practical ways for natural systems and urban development to reinforce each other.

We make six main recommendations that are necessary to fully take advantage of our integrated approach.

1  An Integral Development Framework
2  A Green Infrastructure Network
3  An Integrated Water Network
4  A Green Neighborhoods Program
5  A Green Buildings Program
6  A Green Policy Framework

In 2004 the English planning system was subject to extensive reforms which introduced a `spatial planning' approach that goes beyond traditional land-use planning in integrating policies for the development and use of land with other policies and programmes which influence the nature of places. At the regional level, regional planning guidance was replaced by regional spatial strategies (RSSs) and, at the local level, existing local land-use planning documents were replaced with a portfolio of documents that make up the new local development framework (LDF). Together, the LDF and RSS make up the statutory development plan for an area. At the heart of the new spatial planning reforms is a heightened emphasis on stakeholder and community involvement. This paper brings together research at two different spatial scales. The `Spatial Plans in Practice' study examined stakeholder involvement in LDF preparation across England. Parallel research examined the experience of stakeholders in the formation of the North West RSS. Drawing on this empirical base, we examine experiences of stakeholder involvement in the reformed spatial planning system and discuss the implications for the future.

The use of typomorphology as a means of understanding urban areas has a long tradition amongst academics but the reach of these methods into urban design practice has been limited. In this paper we present a method to support the description and prescription of urban form that is contextsensitive, multi-dimensional, systematic, exploratory, and quantitative, thus facilitating the application of urban typomorphology to planning practice. At the core of the proposed method is the k-means statistical clustering technique to produce objective classifications from the large complex data sets typical of urban environments. Block and street types were studied as a test case and a context-sensitive sample of types that correspond to two different neighbourhoods were identified. This method is suitable to support the identification, understanding and description of emerging urban forms that do not fall into standard classifications. The method can support larger urban form studies through consistent application of the procedures to different sites. The quantitative nature of its output lends itself to integration with other systematic procedures related to the research, analysis, planning and design of urban areas.

This book chapter is an early version of Cugurullo 2018. Although similar in nature, this chapter explores aspects of experimental urbanism, such as the decomposition of the urban fabric of eco-city projects, which are not discussed in its later incarnation in Environment and Planning A.

The rapid expansion of shale gas exploration worldwide is a significant source of environmental controversy. Successful shale gas policymaking is dependent upon a clear understanding of the dynamics of competing stakeholder perspectives on these issues, and so methods are needed to delineate the areas of agreement and conflict that emerge. This empirical study, based in the United Kingdom, examines emergent perspectives on a range of environmental, health and socio-economic impacts associated with shale gas fracking using Q-methodology: a combined qualitative-quantitative approach. The analysis reveals three typologies of perspectives amongst key industry, civil society and non-affiliated citizen stakeholders; subsequently contextualised in relation to Dryzek’s typology of environmental discourses. These are labelled A) “Don’t trust the fossil fuels industry: campaign for renewables” (mediating between sustainable development and democratic pragmatism discourses); B) “Shale gas is a bridge fuel: economic growth and environmental scepticism” (mediating between economic rationalism and ecological modernisation discourses); and C) “Take place protective action and legislate in the public interest” (reflecting a discourse of administrative rationalism). The implications of these competing discourses for nascent shale gas policy in the UK are discussed in light of recent Government public consultation on changes to national planning policy.

Shale gas has become an energy policy priority in the United Kingdom in light of profitable extraction activities in the United States. Since 2012, the UK Government has created key economic drivers to encourage shale exploration, whilst growing activism in affected site communities has stirred significant media and academic commentary. This study examines the growing national debate as a matter of discourse; adopting an argumentative discourse analytic approach to assess data collected from stakeholder interviews (n=21) and key policy actor statements quoted in broadsheet newspapers. We explore three dominant 'storylines' emerging in relation to shale gas policy.

Over the past decade diverse urban governance innovations and experiments have emerged with the declared aim to foster climate change mitigation and adaptation, involving actors at multiple levels and scales. This urban turn in environmental governance has been accompanied by normative claims and high expectations regarding a leading role of cities in coping with climate change. However, while time pressures for effective action are growing, little is known about the social learning processes involved in such urban climate governance innovations, and what they actually contribute to achieve the required transformations in urban systems. Therefore, this special issue presents eight selected papers that explore learning in urban climate governance practices in a variety of local, national and international contexts. Their findings point to a more ambiguous role of these practices as they tend to support incremental adjustments rather than deeper social learning for radical systemic change. Against this backdrop we propose a heuristic distinguishing basic modes and sources in governance learning that aims to facilitate future empirical research and comparison, filling a critical theory gap. Using this framework for interpretation illustrates that urban climate governance learning urgently requires more openness, parallel processes, exogenous sources, as well as novel meta-learning practices.

The current trend of industrialization and urbanization in developing nations has a huge impact on anthropogenic and natural ecosystems. Pollution sources increase with the expansion of cities and cause contamination of water, air and soil. The absence of urban environmental planning and management strategies has resulted in greater concern for future urban development. This paper advocates the adoption of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) as a means to achieve sustainable development in developing countries. It investigates project-level environmental impact assessment (EIA) and its limitations. The exploration of SEA and its features are addressed. The effective implementation of SEA can create a roadmap for sustainable development. In many developing countries, the lack of transparency and accountability and ineffective public participation in the development of the policy, plan and program (PPP) would be mitigated by the SEA process. Moreover, the proactive and broadly based characteristics of SEA would benefit the institutional development of the PPP process, which is rarely experienced in many developing countries. The paper also explores the prospects for SEA and its guiding principles in developing countries. Finally, the paper calls for a coordinated effort between all government, nongovernment and international organizations involved with PPPs to enable developing countries to pursue a path of sustainable development through the development and application of strategic environmental assessment.

A review is presented of the requirements of a framework for the delineation of housing market areas (HMAs) in the context of undertaking a housing market assessment. This prompts adoption of a methodology that features an iterative application of information obtained from estate agents, to identify HMA cores, and a functional regionalisation of 2001 Census interward migration fl ows. The approach is demonstrated using data for North West England. The concluding section explores some implications of the HMA framework for policy and future research.

Se analizan la estructura y organización de un paisaje forestal del sur de Chile aplicando métricas e índices cuantitativos que describen los patrones espaciales, su dinámica de fragmentación y sus implicancias para el manejo. También se comparan distintas métricas y su aplicación en dos modelos de datos diferentes: formato raster y vectorial utilizando Sistemas de Información Geográfico (SIG). Se realizó un análisis comparativo de la cobertura del suelo para tres horizontes temporales: 1986, 1994 y 2003; incluyendo métricas de área, forma, diversidad y vecindad. Se determinó una pérdida de un 18% del uso del suelo correspondiente a praderas y un aumento concomitante del 9% correspondiente a plantaciones forestales. A su vez, la tasa anual de fragmentación se estimó en un 2,9% y afectó principalmente a bosques de segundo crecimiento nativos. Se determinó que la resolución espacial más apropiada para este estudio fue de 6*6 m y una escala de 1: 20.000.

A B S T R A C T This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how 'hydrocarbon modernity' is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the IndoMet project in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, exploring how assemblages of protest have challenged the material effects, discursive practices and regimes of accumulation attendant within the coal industry. In both countries, campaigns seeking to 'end coal' have built dynamic geographical alliances, and as collective challenges to mining activities have unfolded, we consider how movements targeting specific sites of extraction have sought to disrupt the industry's 'dis-embedding' of coal from the landscape. Drawing on accounts of how hydrocarbon politics shape societies, the approach we present draws attention to changing linkages between economic, environmental and social advocacy while illuminating the varied ways in which coal mining can compound and perpetuate inequality.

In the context of European integration, networks are becoming increasingly important in both social and ecological sense. Since the beginning of the 1990s, societal and scientific exchanges are being restructured as the conceptual approaches towards new nature conservation strategies have been renewed. Within the framework of nature conservation, the notion of an ecological network has become increasingly important. Throughout Europe, regional and national approaches are in different phases of development, which are all based on recent landscape ecological principles. Ecological networks are interpreted in a variety of ways depending on different historical roots of nature conservation, planning and scientific traditions, different geographical and administrative levels, different land uses, and in the end the political decision-making is dependent on actors with different land use interests. This complex interaction between cultural and natural features results in quite different ways for the elaboration of ecological networks and greenways.

China is one of the first countries to explicitly attempt to institute coordinated, ecosystem-based management across local, regional, and national scales. Chinese scientists have been urging policymakers to manage landscapes using the ecosystem services (ESs) approach. However, substantive progress remains elusive due to lack of coordination, weak monitoring, and poor enforcement. China’s new ecological redline policy (ERP) requires policymakers and scientists to address urgent challenges in China that have global implications. This work can advance international understanding of the institutional reforms and scientific capacities needed to move from theory to practice on sustainable development.

In ten years, more than half the world's population will be living in cities. The United Ž . Nations UN has stated that this will threaten cities with social conflict, environmental degradation and the collapse of basic services. The economic, social, and environmental planning practices of societies embodying 'urban sustainability' have been proposed as antidotes to these negative urban trends. 'Urban sustainability' is a doctrine with diverse origins. The author believes that the alternative models of cultural development in Curitiba, Brazil, Kerala, India, and Nayarit, Mexico embody the integration and interlinkage of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Curitiba has become a more livable city by building an efficient intra-urban bus system, expanding urban green space, and meeting the basic needs of the urban poor. Kerala has attained social harmony by emphasizing equitable resource distribution rather than consumption, by restraining reproduction, and by attacking divisions of race, caste, religion, and gender. Nayarit has sought to balance development with the environment by framing a nature-friendly development plan that protects natural systems from urban development and that involves the public in the development process. A detailed examination of these alternative cultural development models reveals a myriad of possible means by which economic, social, and environmental sustainability might be advanced in practice. The author concludes that while these examples from the developing world cannot be directly translated to cities in the developed world, they do indicate in a general sense the imaginative policies that any society must foster if it is to achieve 'urban sustainability'.

A B S T R A C T This article offers a reading of the ideas expressed in Walter Solón Romero Gonzales' mural, the 'History of Bolivian Petroleum' from 1956, and juxtaposes these ideas to the current public discourse that emerges from speeches of high officials and from policy documents of President Evo Morales' government. The objective is to investigate the understanding of the role natural resources vis-à-vis development in Bolivia at these two points in time and show the striking resonance between ideas depicted in the mural more than half a century ago and ideas expressed in contemporary official discourses. These ideas concern the foundational elements of a development model that envisions a central role for natural resources, and especially hydrocarbons, in the development of the country. The elements of this model, that include a prominent role of the state in the extraction of natural resources, expansive social policies, strategies to diversify the economy, neatly overlap with the central tenets of the neoextractivist model. It transpires that the novelty of neoextractivism can be fundamentally questioned. This model also provides the rationale justifying the promotion of extractive activities 'at all costs' in Bolivia and beyond. However, history has shown that it produces fantasies of development rather than actual development.

Beginning with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, the federal government of the United States has enacted numerous pieces of legislation intended to protect or conserve the environment. Other national governments have also enacted environmental legislation during the past two decades. State and local governments have also adopted policies concerned with environmental planning and management. Multiple laws and overlapping governmental agency responsibilities have confused development and resource management efforts. A comprehensive methodology that integrates the legal mandates and the agency missions into a common and unified framework is needed. Ecological planning offers such a method. Application of the method allows planners and resource managers to better understand the nature and character of the land and/or resource and therefore make better decisions about its appropriate use or management. The steps taken in an ecological planning process—1) goal setting, 2) inventory and analysis of data, 3) suitability analysis, 4) developing alternatives, 5) implementation, 6) administration, and 7) evaluation—are outlined and explained. Hand-drawn overlays and computer programs as techniques for handling ecological planning information are compared. Observations and suggestions for further research are offered.

This paper outlines the national approach to stormwater management in Malaysia, and evolving implementation practices by State and Local government authorities. The process of departing from the traditional, monodisciplinary approach is currently going on in Malaysia. Goals of stormwater management have already shifted from the traditional storm drainage and "end of pipe" approaches towards sustainable ecological solutions more in peace with nature. The new approach is based on a deeper understanding of the cyclicity of material and energy flows in nature. The research focused on new concepts for the urban stormwater runoff and the water quality management based on integrated stormwater solutions. The USM Engineering campus is a pilot project for urban stormwater management strategy as an example of an ecologically sustainable development based approach to urban stormwater management. The concept is based on integrating stormwater best management practices into urban plann...

Graph theory and network analysis have become established as promising ways to efficiently explore and analyze landscape or habitat connectivity. However, little attention has been paid to making these graph-theoretic approaches operational within landscape ecological assessments, planning, and design. In this paper, a set of both theoretical and practical methodological developments are presented to address this issue. In highly fragmented landscapes, many species are restricted to moving among small, scattered patches of different resources, instead of one, large patch. A life-cycle based approach is therefore introduced, in which a metapatch is constructed, spanning over these resources, scattered across the landscape. The importance of spatially explicit and geographically defined representations of the network in urban and regional planning and design is stressed, and appropriate, context-dependent visualizations of these are suggested based on experience from real-world planning cases. The study moves beyond the issue of conservation of currently important structures, and seeks to identify suitable redesigns of the landscape to improve its social–ecological qualities, or increase resilience. By introducing both a system-centric and a site-centric analysis, two conflicting perspectives can be addressed. The first answers the question “what can I do for the network”, and the second, “what can the network do for me”. A method for typical planning strategies within each of these perspectives is presented. To illustrate the basic principles of the proposed methods, an ecological study on the European common toad (Bufo bufo) in Stockholm, Sweden is presented, using the betweenness centrality index to capture important stepping-stone structures.

The main purpose of this research is to develop and deploy an analytical framework for measuring the environmental performance of manufacturing supply chains. This work's theoretical bases combine and reconcile three major areas: supply chain management, environmental management and performance measurement. Researchers have suggested many empirical criteria for green supply chain (GSC) performance measurement and proposed both qualitative and quantitative frameworks. However, these are mainly operational in nature and specific to the focal company. This research develops an innovative GSC performance measurement framework by integrating supply chain processes (supplier relationship management, internal supply chain management and customer relationship management) with organisational decision levels (both strategic and operational). Environmental planning, environmental auditing, management commitment, environmental performance, economic performance and operational performance are the key level constructs. The proposed framework is then applied to three selected manufacturing organisations in the UK. Their GSC performance is measured and benchmarked by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multiple-attribute decision-making technique. The AHP-based framework offers an effective way to measure and benchmark organisations' GSC performance. This study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically it contributes holistic constructs for designing a GSC and managing it for sustainability; and practically it helps industry practitioners to measure and improve the environmental performance of their supply chain.

Critical natural capital (CNC) is commonly defined as that part of the natural environment, which performs important and irreplaceable functions. So far, the challenge to determine the criticality of natural capital (NC) has mainly been taken up by the natural sciences, and the critical functions of nature mainly associated with its life-support and ecological services. Little attention has been paid to the socio-cultural functions of NC and to their values for the health and well being of human societies. The aim of this paper is to encourage a more complete accounting of the critical functions of NC and its associated values, by highlighting the importance of the information functions (health, recreation, amenity, education, heritage, etc.) for the quality and sustainability of human life. It is argued that, despite their immaterial and often intangible nature, these functions provide many, socio Á/economic benefits, which might be assessed through both qualitative and quantitative valuation methodologies. Integration of ecology, sociology and economics is essential to operationalize the concept of CNC as a tool for more balanced environmental planning and decision making. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.