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Transferring development rights as a viable option for preserving farmland and open space in the villages of the La Cienega Valley, New Mexico, is discussed. Although no development rights have yet been transferred in the state, county officials and village residents feel this might preserve traditional values.

Some corporations and environmental groups are making cooperative efforts at environmental protection. These alliances can be formal or informal. One example of a formal alliance are the McDonald's Corp-Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) efforts which grew into the McDonald's Solid Waste Task Force, aimed at reducing the amount of solid waste generated by the company. Cooperative efforts sometimes spread to foreign countries. One example is the Suriname Biodiversity Prospecting Initiative. These cooperative efforts bode well for future relations between government, business and environmental organizations.

Byline: D.H. Drury Environmental protection has become an important public concern. Major threats to continued prosperity, and perhaps existence, are widely recognised, nationally and internationally. Resolution has not proven simple given the competing demands on the environment and the seeming human difficulty of making current sacrifices to achieve future welfare. This paper focuses on a growing approach to governance, namely environmental committees. It views environmental committees as administrative innovations that are adopted and evolve. The experience gained from another governance mechanism, financial audit committees, is used in order examine issues. The focus is on the characteristics of the development stages specifically addressing (1) structure and composition, (2) orientation and support, (3) reporting and measurement, and (4) responsibility. Environmental committees are found to change and evolve. As they change, the structure promotes improvements in the effectiveness of the governance mechanisms.

Byline: Vanessa Oltra, Maider Saint Jean This paper provides a framework for the analysis of clean technology which covers the factors inducing, stimulating and constraining environmental innovations of firms. Such a framework relies on recent empirical and theoretical contributions to environmental innovations. The representation of clean technology draws from several industrial case studies on the reduction of the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the chemical and the metallurgical industries. Our conceptual background is based on the theoretical analysis of innovation put forward by evolutionary thinking. We provide an interpretation of clean technology in terms of trajectories guided by environmental innovations within the boundaries of particular paradigms. Such interpretation enables us to emphasise the sources of impediments to the adoption of clean technology and to underscore some policy implications.

Byline: Robert Gross, Tim Foxon This paper presents the case for direct policy support for environmental innovation, aimed at improving resource productivity, as a complement to standard regulatory or market-based instruments of environmental policy. This case is that investments in environmental innovation create options, reduce uncertainties and give rise to positive externalities, i.e. wider benefits to society and future generations, thus reducing the long-term costs of tackling environmental problems. It is argued that these policy instruments can be classified according to how they: support basic R&D; help to develop markets for innovative new products or processes; or provide financial incentives for the development or deployment of cleaner technologies. The paper argues that more widespread adoption of such policy instruments is needed, together with systematic analysis and assessment of their effectiveness in stimulating environmental innovation in different industries and at different stages of the innovation cycle.

It is shown that the implementation of a tax-based economic-incentive policy makes total private compliance costs increase (potentially) when new, less expensive pollution control technologies are introduced despite the benefits in terms of lower real control outlays. The conditions present when the 'cost-increasing' innovations occur are described, and the process is shown numerically. Ways to avoid the cost-increasing technologies, including coupling the tax incentive with a net revenue lid for the pollution control authorities, are discussed, and support for private permit plans relative to tax-based incentive plans is shown.

Annual deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon declined in 2010 and 2011, according to Peru's first comprehensive analysis, released last week. Peru is the second country, after Brazil, to systematically track [...]

Allied-Signal recently began pilot-scale testing of a new technology to help coal-fired power plants reduce 99 percent of the sulfur dioxide-rich ([SO.sub.2]) smoke-stack emissions that cause acid rain as well […]