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ABSTRACTThe benefits accruing from good environmental management of companies are most often linked to economic benefit and the concept of moving towards sustainable development. However, the link between environmental liabilities, assets, or performance, and the financial valuation of a company remains obscure at best. Operational improvements, for example from implementing a waste minimization programme, can give a clear short‐term reduction in costs, and impact immediately on profits. Many environmental risk management programmes also need to deal with long‐term issues such as historical land contamination and changes in manufacturing technology. These have a much more protracted and ultimately fundamental impact on the perceived capital value and future prospects of a company. This paper seeks to describe how the relationship between environmental and financial risk management is becoming clearer, and uses examples to show how this is brought into focus during merger and acquisition activities.

AbstractThe stringency of building protection measures which are required to mitigate the accumulation of the hazardous gases carbon dioxide, methane and radon is a reflection of the perceived risk. About 2500 deaths per year in the UK are attributed to radon, while incidents of deaths involving methane and carbon dioxide derived from landfills and mine gas average less than one per year. Potentially about 5% of all UK premises are at risk from contamination by these hazardous gases. This compares with a lower proportion of buildings affected by forms of previously contaminative use, which are to be collated into a register of potentially contaminated land when s. 143 of the Enviromental Protection Act 1990 is implemented. The potential hazard, migration, principles of control, and design of building protection measures, are reviewed for all three gases.

AbstractThis paper describes the work carried out to protect both ground and surface waters close to the Suffolk County Council Foxhall landfill sites. Monitoring of groundwater showed that a deterioration was occurring, likely to impact adversely on water quality in the adjacent stream. The National Rivers Authority expressed their concern, and measures have been introduced to eliminate this pollution risk. Contaminated groundwaters flowing towards a local watercourse are intercepted by a 'Trammel'type geotextile cut‐off drain and flow to a central collection sump. Automatic monitoring of contaminant levels at this point controls the treatment and disposal options. Where quality is unacceptable for discharge to the local watercourse, the intercepted groundwaters are treated by irrigation onto the capped surface of a restored landfill. If quality remains unacceptable for discharge, further irrigation treatment or discharge to a percolation area utilizing aquifer attenuation properties is possible.

AbstractThe paper discusses the definition of contaminated land, its legislative controls, how it is identified and how a hazard ranking exercise may be carried out on a property portfolio in order to deal constructively with the problem of contaminated land. Such land is important because it can have substantial financial penalties attached to its investigation and remediation. The potential liabilities now arising from environmental impairment are such that anyone involved in the acquisition, ownership or disposal of land has to take an interest in it. The legislative background and environmental policy considerations which affect contaminated land are described, as well as the role of the National Rivers Authority in dealing with the subject. The principal types and sources of contaminated land are identified and current guidelines and standards for dealing with it are discussed. A technique developed for Scottish Enterprise whereby a property portfolio can be ranked in order of its potential hazard by combining the sensitivity of a site with its contamination potential in order to define environmental risk is described, and the necessity to seek professional and experienced advice in evaluating the consequences of contaminated land is highlighted.

ABSTRACTEffective risk‐management measures concerning the health, legislative and financial implications of environmental risk rely fundamentally on a robust risk assessment. Risk‐assessment strategies exist at various levels of sophistication, and their application should be staged and matched to (a) the magnitude and significance of risks under study, (b) the sensitivities of receptors, (c) the quality of data available, and (d) the means by which risks are to be communicated. Three risk‐assessment approaches are examined and their role is reviewed with respect to the completion of multimedia environmental management projects.

11 pags., 8 figs., 1 tab. -- Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 4.0 ; Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow. Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios. The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt. Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5% ($33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and +4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current national pledges. Considering the nonlinear Arctic feedbacks makes the 1.5 °C target marginally more economically attractive than the 2 °C target, although both are statistically equivalent. ; This work is part of the ICE-ARC project funded by the European Union's 7th Framework Programme, (grant 603887, contribution 006). D.Y. received additional funding from ERIM, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Paul Ekins at the ISR, University College London. K.S. was funded by NSF (grant 1503559) and NASA (grants NNX14A154G, NNX17AC59A). E.J. was funded by the NGEE Arctic project supported by the BER Office of Science at the U.S. DOE. Y.E. was funded by the NSF (grant 1900795). E.B. was supported by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and DEFRA. Publication of this article was funded by Lancaster Environment Centre, the University of South Florida St. Petersburg's Open Access Publication Fund, NSF (grant 1900795) and NASA (grants NNX14A154G, NNX17AC59A).

49 pags, 10 figs, 2 tabs. -- Supplementary data is available at the Publisher's web ; The goal of the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) is to provide the research community with an up-to-date scientific assessment of tropospheric ozone, from the surface to the tropopause. While a suite of observations provides significant information on the spatial and temporal distribution of tropospheric ozone, observational gaps make it necessary to use global atmospheric chemistry models to synthesize our understanding of the processes and variables that control tropospheric ozone abundance and its variability. Models facilitate the interpretation of the observations and allow us to make projections of future tropospheric ozone and trace gas distributions for different anthropogenic or natural perturbations. This paper assesses the skill of current-generation global atmospheric chemistry models in simulating the observed present-day tropospheric ozone distribution, variability, and trends. Drawing upon the results of recent international multi-model intercomparisons and using a range of model evaluation techniques, we demonstrate that global chemistry models are broadly skillful in capturing the spatio-temporal variations of tropospheric ozone over the seasonal cycle, for extreme pollution episodes, and changes over interannual to decadal periods. However, models are consistently biased high in the northern hemisphere and biased low in the southern hemisphere, throughout the depth of the troposphere, and are unable to replicate particular metrics that define the longer term trends in tropospheric ozone as derived from some background sites. When the models compare unfavorably against observations, we discuss the potential causes of model biases and propose directions for future developments, including improved evaluations that may be able to better diagnose the root cause of the model-observation disparity. Overall, model results should be approached critically, including determining whether the model performance is acceptable for the problem being addressed, whether biases can be tolerated or corrected, whether the model is appropriately constituted, and whether there is a way to satisfactorily quantify the uncertainty. ; A portion of the work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the NASA Aeronautics and Space Administration. A portion of the work was carried out the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. PY acknowledges support from the Faculty of Science and Technology, Lancaster University. JB and UI acknowledge NordForsk under the Nordic Programme on Health and Welfare Project #75007: Understanding the link between air pollution and distribution of related health impacts and welfare in the Nordic countries (Nordic Welf Air); and the H2020-LCE project: Role of technologies in an energy efficient economy – model based analysis policy measures and transformation pathways to a sustainable energy system (REEEM), Grant agreement no.: 691739. GZ acknowledges the New Zealand Government's Strategic Science Investment Fund (SSIF) through the NIWA programme CACV. This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/N027736/1] and the Natural Environment Research Council [grant number NE/N003411/1]. ; Peer reviewed