Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the roles government can take on that exist outside the traditional regulatory powers of government. Two such nonregulatory roles include the rights of government as the property owner of submerged lands, and the rights/ obligations of government as trustee of the public trust under the public trust doctrine that exists at common law and also statutorily in many coastal states. The reasons these nonregulatory roles are important considerations is because of the reasonable argument that a government that is not acting in a regulatory capacity cannot be said to be …

As climate change impacts are realized at the governance level, states and local governments are moving towards adaptation strategies that include increasing restrictions on how land is used in coastal zones. The purpose of this article is to review state regulatory strategies that are attempting to adapt to climate change in light of limits placed on those strategies by the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution: the prohibition against the taking of private property by government action without a public purpose and just compensation. This article highlights the importance in identifying the roles governments can take beyond the role …

In response to over-exploitation and ecosystem degradation, United States federal fisheries policy is shifting from species-based to ecosystem-based management. In addition, the reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006 identifies the following goals to be achieved by 2011: end over-fishing, create market-based incentives, strengthen enforcement mechanisms, and improve cooperative conservation efforts. We refer to these goals (including the “status quo”) as front-ended policy objectives. Left unresolved are what we term back-ended policy and legal issues, specifically including issues involving the legal limitations that inhibit full consideration of ecosystem-based management principles through the adopting of scientific information. In …

This paper reviews the current management scheme used by Massachusetts to protect vernal pools, which represent small-scale ecosystems, and analyzes its relative strengths and weaknesses from an overall sustainability standpoint by looking at the frameworks developed for management. The frameworks are analyzed to determine if the objectives of vernal pool protection are being met. The initial impression is the outcomes are not meeting the objective of overall vernal pool protection, because there are failures in the drivers (mainly the certification requirement), which limits the number of verbal pools actually protected. An expansion of the current Massachusetts program is suggested to …

There is a traditional view suggesting forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (Pregitzer & Euskirchen, 2004), but they cease to serve as a carbon sink as they fully mature (Odum, 1969). Recent modeling of old-growth forest carbon sequestration indicate they continue to serve as a “net sink” of carbon even after maturity (Carey, Sala, Keane, & Callaway, 2001; Zhou et al., 2006) - sequestering an average of 2.4 +/- 0.8 tC ha-1 yr-1 (tC = metric tons of carbon; ha = hectare; yr =year), and yielding a ratio of heterotrophic respiration (Rh) to net primary production (NPP) of approximately …