Environmental Science eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Avoiding Fields on Fire: Information Dissemination Policies for Environmentally Safe Crop-Residue Management","authors":"M. H. Farahani, Milind Dawande, G. Janakiraman, Shouqiang Wang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3905970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3905970","url":null,"abstract":"Agricultural open burning, i.e., the practice of burning crop residue in harvested fields to prepare land for sowing a new crop, is well-recognized as a significant contributor to CO2 and black-carbon emissions, and long-term climate change. Low-soil-tillage practices using a specific agricultural machine called Happy Seeder, which can sow the new seed without removing the previous crop residue, have emerged as the most effective and profitable alternative to open burning. However, given the limited number of Happy Seeders that the government can supply, and the fact that farmers incur a significant yield loss if they delay sowing the new crop, farmers are often unwilling to wait to be processed by the Happy Seeder and, instead, decide to burn their crop residue. We study how the government can use effective information-disclosure policies in the operation of Happy Seeders to minimize agricultural open burning. A Happy Seeder is assigned to process a group of farms in an arbitrary order. The government knows, but does not necessarily disclose, the schedule for the Happy Seeder at the start of the sowing season. Farmers incur a disutility per unit of time while waiting for the Happy Seeder due to the yield loss as a result of late sowing of the new crop. If the Happy Seeder processes a farm, then the farmer gains a positive utility. At the beginning of each period, each farmer decides whether to burn her crop residue or to wait, given the information provided by the government about the Happy Seeder's schedule. We propose a class of information-disclosure policies, which we refer to as dilatory policies, that provide no information to the farmers about the schedule until a pre-specified period and then reveal the entire schedule. By obtaining the unique symmetric Markov perfect equilibrium under any dilatory policy, we show that the use of an optimal dilatory policy can significantly lower the number of farms burnt compared to that under the full-disclosure and the no-disclosure policies. Using data from the rice-wheat crop system in northwestern India -- an area of the world with the highest prevalence of open burning -- we conduct a comprehensive case study and demonstrate that the optimal dilatory policy can reduce CO2 and black-carbon emissions by at least 14%.","PeriodicalId":383214,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Science eJournal","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122955640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Development of Air Quality Monitoring and Notification System Using Nordic Thingy IoT Kit","authors":"Shivam Dutta, D. Sivaraj, Venkata Sai Joga Rao, H. Kumar, Kasturi Kalita","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3516624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3516624","url":null,"abstract":"Air pollution occurs in places when there is lot of chemicals and dust particles and gases mixed together in the atmosphere and it has adverse effects on human health, ecosystems and the climate. Therefore, in today’s time it is very important for every individual to check the air quality of the surroundings. It leads to the need of an air quality monitoring system. This work proposes a portable Smart phone accessible Air quality monitoring and notification system, which notifies the user when the CO2 level and Total Volatile Organic Compound (TVOC) exceeds the maximum safety level. The concentration of carbon dioxide CO2 in the surrounding spans from 300-500 parts per million(ppm), whereas the global average holds 400 ppm of CO2. The quality of the air concerning carbon dioxide and TVOC value can be examined and notified using a small portable IoT sensor kit when the quality of air crosses the maximum safety levels.","PeriodicalId":383214,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Science eJournal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126444628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Low-Cost Air Pollution Monitoring Device Based on Air Quality Index","authors":"Rishabh Bajaj, Rishav Sen, A. Sengupta, A. Sen, S. Karmakar, Saptarshi Ghosh, Vivek Kumar, Nilava Debabhuti, Prolay Sharma, B. Tudu, R. Bandyopadhyay","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3515043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3515043","url":null,"abstract":"With air pollution growing at an alarming rate, it is becoming necessary to quantify correctly the level of toxicity in the air. The novelty in our system relies on a cheap, affordable and quick measuring index for the air quality around us. It uses a portable battery powered hub based on an 8-bit microcontroller, equipped with several Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) based gas sensors and Particulate matter (PM) sensors. The developed system acquires the sensor responses in real-time for accurate monitoring. A mobile application has been developed that converts the obtained sensor values to the standard Air Quality Index (AQI) and displays the final result. This ensures the user-friendliness of our project, keeping a constant check on the air quality around us.","PeriodicalId":383214,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Science eJournal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122947359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}