Acid Rain In Europe

The environmental impacts of acid rain: on human health, on buildings and materials, on forests, freshwaters, crops and biodiversity and on global warming have been well-documented. Less is known about the extent and economic costs of these impacts. This book describes the first major implementation of an integrated scientific and economic assessment of the consequences of acid rain. It provides an extensive data review and examines how this unique approach to assessment modelling can be can be used to calculate an acidification cost per unit of pollutant in monetary terms. Part One focuses on the methodological issues of scientific measurement of acidification, dose-response relationships and economic approaches to acidification control. Part Two looks at the environmental impacts and economic consequences of acidification. Affected environmental media and human health are investigated in separate chapters, each including both scientific and economic analyses. Part Three provides a summary of the findings and makes recommendations for further application of these types of results to policy actions.

The report examines the extent of environmental damage in the Community and in certain other European countries that may be attributable to acid pollutant emissions within Member States. The study assesses the evidence for possible causal effects and considers the physical, chemical and biological processes which have been suggested as damage mechanisms. Concern in Europe has grown in the past few years as a result of observed damage to forests found principally in central and southern Germany, and also because of the loss of fish populations in the lakes of parts of south west Norway and Sweden. More recently, a few lakes, rivers and streams in Scotland, England and Wales, with geological and upper river catchments similar in character to those areas of Scandinavia referred to, have also reported absence or death of fish. Acid precipitation is considered a possible contributory cause. Loss of needles from pine trees has also been found in other areas of the Community. Less well appreciated is the existence of damage to building materials, caused by short range acid pollutant effects and the possibility under certain conditions that yields of some crops and vegetables are affected by the dry deposition of acid pollutants and their derivative products. Historically most attention has focused on S02, and its oxidised 'wet' form, sulphuric acid. Overall emissions of S02 in the Community have declined in the last ten years and this trend may well continue.

With the European Union's increasing powers its environmental legislation has grown rapidly. This study investigates the dynamics of the Europeanization of environmental policy and concludes that the domestic environmantal policies of relatively green member States are actually hardly affected. The text focuses on policy making in the field of air pollution and acidification between the (former) European Community and one Member State, the Netherlands. Included in the text is a concise history of EC environmental policy, an explanation of the theories of sovereignty, European integration and power-dependance, and final commentary on the future of environmental policy in the European Union.

This title was first published in 2002: The adoption of the 1999 Gothenburg Protocol within the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) and the 2001 EU National Emission Ceilings (NEC) directive has made for much stronger European air pollution policies. This volume offers the first in-depth analysis available of this key development. Central questions discussed include: -What role did the three new Green member states joining the EU in 1995 play in this development? -Will these significantly stronger policies only be followed by weaker implementation? -Why are the EU emission ceilings more ambitious than those of CLRTAP? -Do these more ambitious EU NEC emission ceilings and wider trends such as EU enlargement signal that CLRTAP is fading away as a central forum for European policy development? Decision makers, negotiators and international and non-governmental organizations will benefit from this book as it discusses important institutional issues. Students and academics will also find it extremely useful.

Originally published in 1994 this volume includes contributions from environmental scientists, consultants and research workers. The incidence and effects of the phenomenon of acid rain in the late 1970s, 80s and early 1990s , as well as certain remedies, are discussed at length. The roles of vehicles and power stations are examined in detail and legal aspects of curbing acid rain are considered.