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Abstract: Cities across the United States that have considerable vacant land are debating whether to foster community gardens on that land, while cities with land shortages are debating when to replace gardens with other uses. Meanwhile, many cities are looking for new ways to finance green spaces. Little empirical evidence about the neighborhood impacts of community gardens is available, however, to inform the debate or to help cities design financing schemes. This article estimates the impact of community gardens on neighborhood property values, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that gardens have significant positive effects, especially in the poorest neighborhoods. Higher-quality gardens have the greatest positive impact.

by Ioan Voicu 1 and Vicki Been 2
1. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Washington, DC 20219; email: Ioan.Voicu@occ.treas.gov
2. New York University School of Law, New York, NY 10012; email: vicki.been@nyu.edu

Real Estate Economics via Blackwell Publishing www.Blackwell-Synergy.com
Volume 36, Issue 2; Summer, 2008; Pages 241-283
doi:10.1111/j.1540-6229.2008.00213.x
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6229.2008.00213.x

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 has reached an agreement with Black Beauty Coal Co., Evansville, Ind., and with its subsidiary Arclar Co., Equality, Ill., for filling in streams and wetlands without a permit while mining in Indiana and Illinois. Black Beauty Coal is a subsidiary of Peabody Energy. Black Beauty Coal and Arclar will pay a total fine of $75,000, and Black Beauty Coal has agreed to spend $292,344 to create a forested wetland near its Farmersburg mine in Indiana.

EPA alleges that over the last several years, while mining in Sullivan, Vigo and Gibson counties, Ind., and Gallatin and Saline counties, Ill., the companies' operations adversely affected ditches, streams, creeks and wetlands near their mines. About 164,179 linear feet of streams were affected at all three sites with about 17 acres of wetlands affected at the Indiana sites. The companies did not have the required permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to place fill material in the waterways. Under the federal Clean Water Act, a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is required to fill in waters of the United States.

"In order to reduce its penalty, Black Beauty Coal has agreed to carry out a supplemental project to benefit the environment," added Mathur. "It will create a forested wetland that will improve water quality by reducing soil erosion, filtering pollutants and providing habitat for animals and aquatic life."

Black Beauty Coal will create 36.3 acres of forested wetland and 5.5 acres of forested buffer around the perimeter of the wetland. Planning, design, tillage and tree planting will be completed by Oct. 31, 2010. The company will monitor the wetland for an additional seven years and place the entire property into a perpetual conservation easement held by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

Copies of the agreements with Black Beauty Coal and Arclar are available at: http://www.epa.gov/region5/publicnotices/index.htm.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) www.EPA.gov
Press Release date: May 8, 2006
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/5048a29926cca3f285257443006f81cf!OpenDocument

Abstract: Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) vegetables will likely be commercialized in India soon. The technology could reduce pesticide residues in foods. Yet it is unclear whether consumers will appreciate this health advantage, or whether potential GM crop risks will dominate their attitudes. Using contingent valuation methods and a sample of urban households, we find that almost 60% of consumers would purchase Bt vegetables at current conventional vegetable prices, indicating a high acceptance level. The rest would purchase at a certain price discount. Strikingly, the required discount increases for people particularly concerned about pesticide residues, demonstrating that risk-averse consumers do not easily offset technology benefits against perceived risks.

by Vijesh V. Krishna11 1 and Matin Qaim 2
1. Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley.
2. Matin Qaim is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Germany.

Review of Agricultural Economics via Blackwell Publishing www.Blackwell-Synergy.com
doi:10.1111/j.1467-9353.2008.00402.x
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9353.2008.00402.x

Starting next month, people in Washington, D.C. will be able to rent a three-speed bicycle day and night with the swipe of a membership card available for $40 per year.

A new public-private venture called SmartBike DC will make 120 bicycles available at 10 automated spots in central locations in the city and plan to eventually offer 1,000 bicyles.
...
In the deal, Clear Channel will have exclusive advertising rights in the city’s bus shelters. The company has reached a similar deal with San Francisco.

Milan, Amsterdam and Portland have all had lower-tech free bike-sharing programs in the past, with Amsterdam’s dating to the 1960s. However, many bikes were stolen. The Vélib program in Paris and Bicing in Barcelona, Spain, both started around a year ago offer thousands of bicycles and appear to be more successful.

Improved technology allows programs to better protect bicycles. In Washington, users who keep bicycles longer than the three-hour maximum will receive demerits and could eventually lose renting privileges. Bicycles gone for more than 48 hours will be deemed lost, with the last user charged a $200 replacement fee.

The European programs would cost cities about $4,500 per bike if sponsors did not step in.
Martina Schmidt of Clear Channel Outdoor claims that cities “ literally have to spend no money on designing, marketing or maintaining” a program.
...
by Ed Alcock

FOR FULL STORY GO TO
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/us/27bikes.html?_r=1&em&ex=1209614400&en=87b58a129cae0f64&ei=5087&oref=slogin
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
Published: April 27, 2008

About This Report
A scarcity of clean, fresh water presents increasing risks to companies in many countries and many economic sectors. These risks are difficult for investors to assess, due both to poor information about the underlying supply conditions and to fragmentary or inadequate reporting by individual companies. As a result, market prices of securities are unlikely to accurately reflect the potential costs of water-related problems.

In this report, JPMorgan Global Environmental, Social, and Governance Research offers investors a framework for evaluating the impact of water scarcity and water pollution on individual sectors and companies. This is the first of a series of reports on transformational issues that they expect to offer investor clients and corporate managements over the course of 2008.

This report draws on the expertise of the World Resources Institute, which has helped us provide an overview of the issues from a global perspective. Then, with both our corporate and investor clients in mind, JPMorgan equity analysts from around the world lay out the water-related risks and opportunities they see facing companies in specific sectors. They provide criteria for examining these issues, which they hope will be of use to companies seeking to improve communication with investors about environmental issues as well as to investors themselves.

Here are the main points:
• Exposure to water scarcity and pollution is not limited to onsite production processes, and may actually be greater in companies’ supply chains than in their own operations.
• The power-generation, mining, semiconductor manufacturing, and food and beverage sectors are particularly exposed to waterrelated risks, in their view.
• In their opinion, corporate disclosure of water-related risks is seriously inadequate and is typically included in environmental statements prepared for public relations purposes rather than in the regulatory filings on which most investors rely.
• JP Morgan Chase recommends that investors assess the reliance of their portfolios on water resources and their vulnerability to problems of water availability and pollution.

Introduction
Water is increasingly scarce due to the confluence of population growth, urbanization, and climate change. Deteriorating water quality exacerbates the supply problems. These factors play out on a local basis, with some regions clearly more affected than others.

Wall Street appears well aware of the investment opportunities in water supply infrastructure, waste water treatment, and demand management technologies. Much less attention has been paid to those sectors that rely on clean water as an input into supply chains or production processes, or have waste water as an output. Water pollution impacts are as important, and diverse, as impacts due to water scarcity.

Importantly, risks differ between sectors and between countries and regions because of climatic conditions, water resources availability, and water use efficiencies. Regionally, areas such Northern California may well encounter more severe water-supply problems as climate reduces the Sierra Nevada snowpack.

Other areas, such as Northern Europe, may see more intense rainfall. Sectorally, while steel production everywhere may come under pressure as water supplies tighten, plants in China, which use four to nine times as much water per ton of steel as plants in the US or Japan, may face additional competitive burdens as a result.

The financial impact of water shortages on sectors and companies is unclear, because information on water use data and impacts is spotty and partial. The authors believe this will change as the consequences of water-supply shortfalls become more apparent.

• Increased publicity surrounding supply shortfalls can lead to increased government intervention, such as the recent restrictions on water use in the Atlanta area and in Australia, altering companies’ cost structures.
• In many situations, the risk of business interruption due to water scarcity appears to be on the rise, making contingency planning more important.
• As water becomes more precious, companies’ real and perceived behavior with respect to water consumption and discharge is also likely to have greater consequences in the marketplace, with an increased risk of consumer backlash against companies judged to be profligate or irresponsible.

The authors anticipate that companies will come under increasing pressure to provide detailed disclosure of water-related risks to investors, including potential changes in supply or treatment costs, regulations, and costs arising from supply chain disruptions.

This report represents an initial effort to outline these risks and to understand how they may affect various companies and industries in the coming years.

A World of Water Scarcity
The world has plenty of water, but 97.5% of it is saltwater. Mankind depends on the remaining 2.5%—of which only a fraction is accessible surface or groundwater — to serve a variety of functions: sustaining life, growing food, supporting various economic processes, and transporting and assimilating waste. Globally, there are increasing pressures on water supply. In many regions demand for water now outstrips renewable supplies. It is likely this gap will widen.

Moreover, water pollution is getting worse in many developing economies, which exacerbates the challenge of delivering sufficient water of the required quality.
...

Table of Contents
About This Report ........................................3
Introduction .............................................5
A World of Water Scarcity ................................6
Water Risks in the Value Chain............................9
Sectoral Impacts.........................................12
Assessing Corporate Risks................................16
Water Risks: Six Case Studies............................20
Power Generation: Asia Plans for Water Shortage .........20
Manufacturing: Groundwater Risks in Taiwan...............26
Insurance: Shortage Means Opportunity ...................33
Semiconductors: Water Is Material........................37
Leisure: The Las Vegas Gamble ...........................39
Food Processing: Big Risks, Little Disclosure ...........43

by Marc Levinson, (212) 622-5552, marc.levinson@jpmorgan.com
J.P Morgan Chase www.jpmorgan.com
Economic Research Global Equity Research; Environmental, Social, and Governance Research
April, 2008
http://www.jpmorgan.com/cm/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobwhere=1158484353549&ssbinary=true&blobheadername1=Content-disposition&blobheadervalue1=attachment;filename=Watching_Water:_A_guide_to_evaluating_corporate_risks_in_a_thirsty_world.pdf

Abstract: Utilization of renewable energy resources such as wind energy for electric power generation has assumed great significance in recent years. Wind power is a source of clean energy and is able to spur the reductions of both consumption of depleting fuel reserves and emissions of pollutants. However, since the availability of wind power is highly dependent on the weather conditions, the penetration of wind power into traditional utility grids may incur certain security implications. Therefore, in economic power dispatch including wind power penetration, a reasonable tradeoff between system risk and operational cost is desired. In this paper, a bi-objective economic dispatch problem considering wind penetration is formulated, which treats operational costs and security impacts as conflicting objectives. Different fuzzy membership functions are used to reflect the dispatcher’s attitude toward the wind power penetration. A modified multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm is adopted to develop a power dispatch scheme which is able to achieve compromise between economic and security requirements. Numerical simulations including sensitivity analysis are reported based on a typical IEEE test power system to show the validity and applicability of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Particle swarm optimization; Fuzzy sets; Risk and cost tradeoff; Multi-objective optimization; Economic dispatch; Wind power

Electric Power Systems Research via Elsevier Science Direct www.ScienceDirect.com
Volume 78, Issue 8; August, 2008; Pages 1361-1368
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsr.2007.12.005

An EPA independent advisory committee, National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology (NACEPT), today released a new report identifying actions that EPA and the investment community can take and partnerships they can create to achieve the goal of greater long-term private sector investment in the commercialization of environmental technologies.

The report, EPA and the Venture Capital Community: Building Bridges to Commercialize Technology, April 2008, is the third in a series of reports by the NACEPT Environmental Technology Subcommittee. The Subcommittee's other two earlier reports on environmental technology are: EPA Technology Programs: Engaging the Marketplace, and EPA Technology Programs and Intra-Agency Coordination.

NACEPT, a balanced panel of representatives from academia, business and industry, nongovernmental organizations, and state, local and tribal governments, advises the EPA Administrator on a broad range of environmental policy, technology and management issues.

To view all three reports, go to: epa.gov/ocem/nacept/reports/index.html or to: epa.gov/etop

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) www.EPA.gov
http://epa.gov/ocem/nacept/reports/index.html