This document is intended to assist Federal agencies with analyzing cumulative effects during the NEPA process. It outlines general principles, common cumulative effects assessment methodologies, and resources for additional information and background data.

This report provides a detailed perspective on how the National Environmental Policy Act has affected federal agency decision making. The report summarizes how the Act has been implemented, how federal agency performance aligns with the intent of NEPA's framers, reactions from the public, NEPA stakeholders, and federal decision makers, and future challenges with ensuring the Act's continued effectiveness.

This report outlines general concepts that underlie biological diversity analysis and management, and discusses methods for considering biodiversity in current and future NEPA analyses.

This treaty takes action to control the introduction and spread of pests of plants and plant products. The treaty protects natural as well as cultivated plants, so it has implications for agriculture as well as biodiversity. While the IPPC's primary focus is on plants and plant products moving in international trade, the convention also covers research materials, biological control organisms, and anything else that can act as a vector for the spread of plant pests including containers, soil, vehicles, and machinery.

This treaty is an amendment between the United States and Canada to the statute making it unlawful to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill or sell certain birds. The statute does not discriminate between live or dead birds and also grants full protection to any bird parts including feathers, eggs and nests.

This treaty between the United States and Mexico deals with hunting ducks and collecting duck eggs by indigenous people in North America. This treaty amends the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds in Canada and the United States.

The South Pacific Regional Environment Programme is to promote cooperation in the South Pacific islands region and to provide assistance in order to protect and improve the environment and to ensure sustainable development.

This treaty provides the legal framework for member countries in the Americas and the Caribbean to take actions for the benefit of sea turtles

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate event that originates in the Pacific Ocean but has wide-ranging consequences for weather around the world, and is especially associated with droughts and floods. The irregular occurrence of El Niño and La Niña events has implications for public health. On a global scale, the human effect of natural disasters increases during El Niño. The effect of ENSO on cholera risk in Bangladesh, and malaria epidemics in parts of South Asia and South America has been well established. The strongest evidence for an association between ENSO and disease is provided by time-series analysis with data series that include more than one event. Evidence for ENSO's effect on other mosquito-borne and rodent-borne diseases is weaker than that for malaria and cholera. Health planners are used to dealing with spatial risk concepts but have little experience with temporal risk management. ENSO and seasonal climate forecasts might offer the opportunity to target scarce resources for epidemic control and disaster preparedness.

This report assesses how the set of national actions presented in America’s Global Warming Solutions would affect Florida’s energy systems, carbon emissions and economy. This study finds that by 2010, the set of national actions to reduce global warming would decrease Florida’s primary energy use by 26 percent and its carbon emissions by 36 percent. They would also provide increasing annual savings reaching about $300 per-capita in 2010 and averaging about $110 per-capita per year between now and 2010. Thus, the State would cumulatively save about $17 billion over that period. The set of national actions would also create approximately 39,000 net additional jobs in Florida by 2010. They would reduce emissions of other pollutants and begin to shift the basis of the State’s economy towards more advanced, energy-efficient technologies and cleaner resources. The table below summarizes these results.

This report contains the collective view of an international group of experts and does not necessarily represent the decisions or the stated policy of the World Health Organization.

An Act making an appropriation for the state land disposal bank program; making an appropriation from the constitutional budget reserve fund under art. IX, sec. 17(c), Constitution of the State of Alaska; and providing for an effective date.

This is a study of projected near-term health benefits associated with greenhouse (GHG) reductions resulting from changes in energy efficiency and structure of energy use in the power and household sectors of China. The work was commissioned by the former Office of Global and Integrated Environmental Health at WHO, in order to explore the scope for modelling in the assessment of such short-term health benefits. China was selected as an appropiate case study for this work, as it fulfilled most of the criteria required, including the fact that it is a large country, with data sets available on air pollution and health, and with information on projected trends in the consumption of fossil fuels

A change in the composition of the stratosphere becomes relevant to society only if it has noticeable effects. This places the assessment of effects in a pivotal role in the problem of ozone depletion. Decreases in the quantity of total-column ozone, as now observed in many places, tend to cause increased penetration of solar UV-B radiation (290-315 nm) to the Earth's surface. UV-B radiation is the most energetic component of sunlight reaching the surface. It has profound effects on human health, animals, plants, microorganisms, materials and on air quality. Thus any perturbation which leads to an increase in UV-B radiation demands careful consideration of the possible consequences. This is the topic of the present assessment made by the Panel on Environmental Effects of Ozone Depletion.

This new report argues that rising temperatures have impacted the world's oceans to a far greater extent than previously acknowledged. Addressing topics such as sea-level rise, ocean circulation, coral reefs, sea birds and invertebrates, as well as the increasing threats to Salmon, the report predicts a dangerous chain reaction in marine ecosystems if global warming continues unabated. On the positive side, it also argues that decisive actions now to reduce pollution can slow the warming and preserve the world's oceans.

The U.S. GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH PROGRAM (USGCRP) supports activities that provide information and policy-relevant understanding about the coupling of human activities and the environment across a broad range of issues, perspectives, and interactions. Global change research focuses on providing scientific insight into critical global change issues and policy choices facing the nation and the world community. Global change research to address these issues is organized into a flexible multidisciplinary framework for coordinating science activities. Each global change issue is addressed through a process which strives to document, understand, predict, and assess the science in a way that yields results that are relevant to the needs of decision makers. The USGCRP is founded on the premise that international cooperation and coordination is fundamental to addressing global environmental issues. USGCRP programs significantly contribute to worldwide global change research efforts

This law, passed by the Republic of China (Taiwan) establishes the role National Institute of Environmental Analysis.

This law was passed by the Republic of China (Taiwan) to protect public health and the environment by preventing soil and groundwater pollution, and by promoting the sustainable use of soil and groundwater.

This law was passed by the Republic of China (Taiwan) in order to support the training of government officials in certain areas of environmental regulation, assessment, inspection, arbitration, and enforcement.

The Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990 streamlined and strengthened EPA's ability to prevent and respond to catastrophic oil spills. A trust fund financed by a tax on oil is available to clean up spills when the responsible party is incapable or unwilling to do so. The OPA requires oil storage facilities and vessels to submit to the Federal government plans detailing how they will respond to large discharges. EPA has published regulations for above ground storage facilities; the Coast Guard has done so for oil tankers. The OPA also requires the development of Area Contingency Plans to prepare and plan for oil spill response on a regional scale.

Human population and associated industrial activities continue to increase rapidly, and have reached levels that put the environment under stress in many areas of the world. In addition natural fluctuations of the Earth's physical and biological systems, often occur in time frames that are not readily evident to man. Such fluctuations cause additional stress on the environment, and can result in changes that impact society in terms of diminished availability of clean water, unspoiled land and natural vegetation, minerals, fish stocks, and clean air. Human societies are making a rapidly increasing number of policy and management decisions that attempt to allow both for natural fluctuations and to limit or modify human impact. Such decisions are often ineffective, as a result of economic, political and social constraints, and inadequate understanding of the interactions between human activities and natural responses. Improved understanding of such issues is important in its own right, and will contribute to ameliorating economic, political and social constraints. Developing improved understanding of environmental change is within the realm of the natural sciences and is being addressed by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and other programmes concerned with describing and understanding the Earth System. Natural variability, occurring over a variety …

The IGBP Wetlands workshop (Santa Barbara, CA, USA,16-20 May 1996) was held for the purpose of identifying data and research needs for characterizing wetlands in terms of their role in biogeochemical and hydrologic cycles. Wetlands cover only about 1% of the Earth's surface, yet are responsible for a much greater proportion of biogeochemical fluxes between the land surface, the atmosphere and hydrologic systems. They play a particularly important function in processing methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulphur as well as in sequestering carbon. Considerable progress has been made in the past 10 years regarding wetlands and methane: a global digital dataset of wetlands (Matthews and Fung 1987) was produced and global observations of methane have been combined with global three-dimensional atmospheric modelling (Fung et al. 1991) to constrain modelled fluxes of methane from high-latitude wetlands. Furthermore, significant advances have been made in understanding the biogeochemical processes that control fluxes of methane and other trace gases. The progress has made clear that present wetland classification schemes do not accurately reflect their roles in these processes because they have been based on wetland attributes such as dominant plant types which do not reflect differences in the functions of wetlands regarding biogeochemical cycles. …

This document describes plans for the implementation of the Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) programme element of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). This Implementation Plan is an international response to the need to understand how global change, in the broadest sense, will affect the abundance, diversity and productivity of marine populations comprising a major component of oceanic ecosystems. The Plan describes the consensus view, developed under the auspices of the GLOBEC Scientific Steering Committee (SSC), on the research required to fulfill the scientific goals laid out in the GLOBEC Science Plan (IGBP Report No. 40). The Implementation Plan expands on the Science Plan, drawing on the results and recommendations of workshops, meetings, and reports thereof, that have been sponsored under the auspices of GLOBEC. The GLOBEC research programme has four major components which, are described in detail in this Implementation Plan; the research Foci, Framework Activities, Regional Programmes, and Integrating Activity. These are summarized in the Table of Contents, and in schematic diagrams within the text. They are the elements that have been planned by, and will be implemented under the auspices of, the GLOBEC SSC. National GLOBEC programmes may select those aspects of this international framework which are relevant …

The Implementation Strategy of the Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) project specifies in greater detail the activities and projects that will fulfil the mandate outlined in the LUCC Science/Research Plan published in 1995. The project, a joint initiative of IGBP and IHDP, is addressing important global change questions on the local, regional and global scale. The planned and ongoing activities involve a wide community of natural and social scientists. The new understanding of land-use and land-cover change dynamics following from the work carried out under the LUCC Implementation Strategy will be of crucial importance to the global environmental change research community as well as to decision-makers at the local, regional and global levels.