International Journal of Environmental Problems

4-12

Authors: Evgenia Gordeeva

This article focuses on the question of how the effectiveness of environmental preservation policy can be increased in order to turn to a more sustainable way of human development. The answer was found to lie in the three-fold approach covering normative, economic and political measures. The normative measure is the provision of a proper environmental education, which should help creating a global public concern with the intactness of the natural environment. The economic measure refers to the linkage between the goals of environmental preservation and the goals of the economy as to remove the contradiction between the two domains of human activity. The political measure is the regionalization of environmental policy with a gradual transfer of environmental political functions from the national towards the supranational level of a civilizational bloc. This measure would allow to combine the effective implementation of the state-level with the advantage to cover a greater territory and to reduce the number of global environmental actors.

25-35

Authors: O.P. Daramola, O.A. Olowoporoku

Background. This study assessed the effects of slaughterhouse activities on the health of surrounding residents in Osogbo Nigeria. This was with a view to suggesting policy response capable of enhancing healthy environment in the city and others with similar background. Materials and Methods. A total of thirty three slaughterhouses identified in the study area out of which fifteen (45 %) were randomly selected for questionnaire administration. This is followed by stratification of 500metre radial distance from the respective residences surrounding them into 1-250 metres and 251-500 metres. In the strata, questionnaires were administered on 98 residents comprising 44 and 54 in the first and second strata respectively. Data analysis was done using cross tabulation and Chi-square tests. Results. Findings revealed that slaughterhouse activities pollute the environment and this inevitably had negative impacts on the health of the surrounding residents. From the findings, 80 % of the slaughterhouses were located near water bodies. The study also found that most of the surrounding residences were infested by flies and mosquitoes with varying degrees as distance increases from the slaughterhouses. This study established that the quality of the environment varied with distance from the slaughterhouses. Similarly, the proportion of residents that treated malaria and diarrhoea continually in the study areas was 69.4 % and 70.4 % respectively. Conclusion: These findings have implications for policy making towards planning effective and sustainable intervention strategies for slaughterhouse activities in Osogbo and other cities with similar background.

47-53

Authors: Le Hung Trinh, Danh Tuyen Vu, Thi Trinh Le, Thi Thu Nga Nguyen

Monitoring of suspended sediment is important to maintain water quality and geomorphologic balance. Traditional methods based on field surveys only solve the problem on a small scale. This article presents the results of mapping suspended sediment concentrations in surface water of the Day River, northern Vietnam using GIS technique. The inverse distance weighting (IDW) interpolation method was applied to map suspended sediment concentration using data obtained from 11 sampling stations. The results which are obtained in this study can be used to evaluate surface water quality.