The development of policy approaches for reducing nitrogen pollution to coastal waters of the USA

Two-thirds of the coastal rivers and bays in the United States are degraded from nutrient pollution, and nitrogen inputs these waters continue to increase. The nitrogen comes from a variety of sources, including runoff from agricultural fields, concentrated animal feeding operations, atmospheric deposition from fossil fuel combustion, and sewage and septic wastes.Technical solutions for nitrogen pollution exist at reasonable cost. That most of these solutions have not yet been implemented to any significant extent across the United States suggests that new policy approaches are necessary. The best solution may involve a combination of voluntary and mandatory approaches, applying different approaches to different sources of nitrogen poilution. A watershed-based approach that relies heavily on voluntary mechanisms (such as crop-yield insurance to reduce over-fertilization) is likely to be the most effective for some sources of nitrogen (such as runoff from agricultural fields), while a uniform national regulatory approach may be better for others (such as NOx emissions from fossil fuel combustion). Implementation of management strategies should be carefully coupled to monitoring programs to assess the effectiveness of these strategies. While both nitrogen and phosphorus are important to control, the focus should be on nitrogen management, in part because nitrogen is more generally the causal agent of coastal eutrophication. Also, while nitrogen-control practices tend to also reduce phosphorus pollution, phosphorus-control practices often have little effect on nitrogen.Although current scientific and technical knowledge is sufficient to begin to make substantial progress toward solving coastal nitrogen pollution, progress will be made more quickly and more cost effectively with increased investment in appropriate scientific research.

作 者： Robert W. Howarth   作者單位： Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, NY 14853, USA  刊 名： 中國(guó)科學(xué)C輯（英文版）  SCI 英文刊名： SCIENCE IN CHINA SERIES C (LIFE SCIENCES)  年，卷(期)： 2005 48(z2)  分類號(hào)： P5  關(guān)鍵詞： development of policy approaches   reducing nitrogen pollution   coastal water of the USA  

【The development of policy approaches】相關(guān)文章：

The Function and Development of Soybean Peptides04-26

Development of Hydropower Resources in Southwest China04-26

Global Space Development Summit Held In Beijing04-26

The Development of World Data Center for Seismology, Beijing04-27

Scenario analysis of low carbon development in Tianjin, China04-26

Development Of Chinas New Generation Of Launch Vehicles Proceeds Well04-26

Experimental approaches and analytical technique for determining heavy metals in fallen dust at ferrosilicon production04-25

A comparative study of organic agriculture development between China and South Korea04-26

Development of resource-conserving society:from the perspective of circular economy04-26

Characterization and Genetic Analysis of a Novel Mutant mst of Rice Defective in Flower Development04-26