Tag Archives: EPA

Take 5: Top Books on Environmental Science

Got scientists and engineers on your holiday shopping list? Take five and check out our top gift ideas. NAP books and merchandise make thoughtful gifts for thinking people.

Sustainability and the U.S. EPA

Sustainability and the U.S. EPA

Sustainability is based on a simple and long-recognized factual premise: Everything that humans require for their survival and well-being depends, directly or indirectly, on the natural environment. The environment provides the air we breathe, the water we…
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Science and Decisions

Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment

Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other…
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Improving Health in the United States

Improving Health in the United States: The Role of Health Impact Assessment

Factoring health and related costs into decision making is essential to confronting the nation’s health problems and enhancing public well-being. Some policies and programs historically not recognized as relating to health are believed or known to have…
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Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century

Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century

In the last 20 years, there has been a remarkable emergence of innovations and technological advances that are generating promising changes and opportunities for sustainable agriculture, yet at the same time the agricultural sector worldwide faces numerous…
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Pathways to Urban Sustainability

Pathways to Urban Sustainability: Research and Development on Urban Systems

More than half of the world’s people now live in cities. In the United States, the figure is 80 percent. It is worthwhile to consider how this trend of increased urbanization, if inevitable, could be made more sustainable. One fundamental shortcoming of urban…
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New Books: Health, Water Management, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and more

It’s Monday, so we’re doing our usual roundup of the publications that were new to the nap.edu catalog in the last week. As with many of our publications, all of the new publications this week have PDFs available to download for free.

Featured Publication

Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements (prepublication)


The world’s nations are moving toward agreements that will bind us together in an effort to limit future greenhouse gas emissions. With such agreements will come the need for all nations to make accurate estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and to monitor changes over time. In this context, the present book focuses on the greenhouse gases that result from human activities, have long lifetimes in the atmosphere and thus will change global climate for decades to millennia or more, and are currently included in international agreements. The book devotes considerably more space to CO2 than to the other gases because CO2 is the largest single contributor to global climate change and is thus the focus of many mitigation efforts. Only data in the public domain were considered because public access and transparency are necessary to build trust in a climate treaty.

The book concludes that each country could estimate fossil-fuel CO2 emissions accurately enough to support monitoring of a climate treaty. However, current methods are not sufficiently accurate to check these self-reported estimates against independent data or to estimate other greenhouse gas emissions. Strategic investments would, within 5 years, improve reporting of emissions by countries and yield a useful capability for independent verification of greenhouse gas emissions reported by countries.

All New Publications This Week

Informing the Future: Critical Issues in Health, Fifth Edition (final)

A Scientific Assessment of Alternatives for Reducing Water Management Effects on Threatened and Endangered Fishes in California’s Bay Delta (prepublication)

Acute Exposure Guideline Levels for Selected Airborne Chemicals: Volume 8 (final)

Medical Surge Capacity: Workshop Summary (final)

Ecosystem Concepts for Sustainable Bivalve Mariculture (final)

The Rise of Games and High Performance Computing for Modeling and Simulation (final)

Understanding Climate’s Influence on Human Evolution (final)

Review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Draft IRIS Assessment of Tetrachloroethylene (final)