Lessons from the New York Waterfront: Addressing the Risks of Drinking Water Contamination from Unregulated Contaminants

Perflourinated compounds, or PFCs, have been widely used in our industrialized society. Notably, they are used in the manufacture of non-stick coated bakeware and in firefighting foams designed to fight high heat fires. These unregulated chemicals have gotten into surface and groundwater sources of drinking water in locations around the United States and likely the world. Data shows widespread release, particularly near airports and air bases and near industrial production sites.

PFCs cause many health related impacts. Human exposure pathways include perinatal transfer, consuming contaminated water, and consuming contaminated fish. Clean Water Act permitting programs can address their release into waterways. Contaminated site clean-up laws can also be used to remove the source contamination. Granular activated carbon technology can remove most forms of the chemicals from drinking water. The case study of drinking water contamination in Newburgh, New York illustrates the PFC challenge, public reaction, and government response.     

Conducting Veteran Dependency and Indemnity Compensation Exams: Establishing a Nexus Between Mental Health and Death

Forms of financial compensation have been paid to the beneficiaries of deceased service members since the Revolutionary War. In its current version, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) is a tax-free monetary benefit paid to eligible survivors of veterans whose death resulted from a service-related disability. Mental health professionals are called upon to provide medico-legal opinions in DIC claims involving questions of whether a veteran’s service-connected mental illness contributed substantially to their death. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) does not currently employ training programs, competency standards, or best practice recommendations for these specialized evaluations. This article seeks to fill this gap and provide a resource for mental health professionals providing medical opinions in DIC claims.     

Visualization of latent fingermark corrosion of brass, climatic influence in a comparison between the U.K. and Iraq

Through a comparison of fingermark sweat corrosion of α phase brass in both the U.K. and Iraq, we show how samples from Iraq have improved fingermark corrosion over U.K. samples that require no additional enhancement prior to visualization. Over 50% of Iraqi samples produced fingermark corrosion with full ridge detail compared with 0% from the U.K. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis of the fingermark corrosion products showed that Iraqi samples exhibit more dezincification with the Zn:Cu ratio averaging 1:1.82 compared with 1:3.07 for U.K. samples. Auger spectroscopy showed the presence of both zinc oxide and copper (I) oxide. No copper (II) was observed on the surface of the corroded brass. Opportunities to exploit the optical properties of these thin film oxides to enhance the visualization of fingermark corrosion are considered, and the potential to use fingermark corrosion of metal as a means of visualizing fingerprints in war zones is discussed.     

Application of the Absolute Pollution Exclusion to “Nontraditional” Pollution

A nationwide split exists with respect to whether the so-called “total” or “absolute” pollution exclusion precludes coverage for “nontraditional” pollution. Does the exclusion encompass only industrial waste that contaminates the environment, or does it also include a much broader range of damage, such as exposure to indoor fumes, chemicals, or mercury? A review of judicial opinions reveals that the split results from different approaches to policy interpretation. This article surveys recent opinions grappling with the “traditional” versus “nontraditional” pollution issue.     

Pursuits of adaptiveness in the shared rivers of Monsoon Asia

How water should be managed in Monsoon Asia is emerging as one of the core earth system governance challenges. In this article, we explore the politics around pursuits of adaptiveness in water management, emphasizing the major transboundary river basins draining the south and eastern Himalayas. We look at two main functions: storing, diverting and sharing water for periods of scarcity; protecting people and places from destructive floods. We find that the pursuit of adaptiveness will take place partly outside the range of human experience in a context of large differences in exposure and vulnerabilities, disparate interests and unequal power. Anticipatory policies and actions to adapt and improve adaptive capacity to the transboundary impacts of changes in water-use, land-use and climate on water resources and services are still in their infancy; but several problem-framing discourses are emerging that have longer-term implications for water governance. It is not yet clear how these competing policy-frames will evolve in Asia. Much will depend on how systems of water governance develop. Public scrutiny of how governments in Asia plan to adapt to climate change in the water sector—on how risks of not enough and too much water are dealt with—will need to continue to help sort out those projects and strategies which are driven primarily by political benefits from those which actually contribute to building adaptive capacities and maintaining social-ecological resilience.     

Earth system governance: a research framework

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient—they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.     

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