Institut Veolia Environnement

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Reports

The Institut Veolia Environnement has a policy of publishing the work done by its academic partners. Each study, carried out in complete independance, is published. According to the subject treated and the duration of the partnership, these publications take the form of a report, an article or an interview. The idea is both to make the research available to the general public and to open a discussion among the scientific and academic communities.

Reports published by the Institut Veolia Environnement

Report n° 6: « The contribution of public transportation to urban sustainable development »

Francis Beaucire, Professor of geography, Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France

So as to take into account not only energy consumption and air pollution aspects but also the wider dimension of urban centre revitalisation or the cohesion between the various social territories that make up urban mosaics, it was considered useful for the purpose of this study to analyse urban travel as a whole. This approach implies recalling some fundamental data but also defining a methodology in order to better measure the different parameters of mobility.

Report n°5 : "Water: symbolism and culture"

Mohamed Larbi Bouguerra, former Professor at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, Research officer at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and former Associate Director of Research, CNRS, Paris, France.

Water, its symbolics, its various representations and uses are at the heart of, and allow us to commune with, nature. Most religions, beliefs, philosophies and visions of the world value water. This heritage, thousands of years old, is still dictating people's attitudes and even their reverence of and veneration for the resource. It is this forceful weight of history in the modern world that needs to be defined and highlighted in order to achieve mutual understanding and avoid dissension and conflicts.

Report n°4: "How Much to Spend for the Protection of Health and Environment: A Framework for the Evaluation of Choices."

Ari Rabl, Senior Scientist, (Energy Center of the Ecole des Mines de Paris, France).

The aim is to understand the methods that allow to quantify the benefits of different environmentally friendly actions and to assess their relevance for sustainable development.
The method under examination is cost-benefit analysis (CBA).
The method provides a rational explanation of the advantages of applying more or less stringent environmental standards. The explanation is intended for consumers, law-makers, regulatory authorities and civil society. The different players need to understand why regulations or standards are required, even though they are binding and imposed by national governments or, increasingly, European authorities.

Report n°3: Financial protection of critical infrastructure - uncertainty, insurability and terrorism risk, June 2005

Erwann Michel-Kerjan, author of this study, is Faculty Researcher at the Wharton School's Center for Risk Management and Decision Processes (Philadelphia, USA), and also Research associate at the Ecole Polytechnique (Laboratoire d'Econométrie, Paris, France).

This report analyzes the issue of catastrophic risk financial coverage in a situation of uncertainty, and how such risks inhibit the development of insurance and reinsurance markets. The analysis focuses on the risk of terrorism which is now known to be an patent threat, compounded by the difficulty of assessing the probability of occurrence which drastically limits the use of traditional insurance models.

Report n°2: "An integrated approach to economic and social contestability in business: the problems facing a scrap metal recycling firm", October 2004

Olivier Godard (Director of Research at CNRS and professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France) and Ignace Adant (Researcher associated with the Laboratoire d'Econométrie, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France) draw some conclusions from this new issue.

Firms are frequently exposed to protest movements that deny their social licence to operate because of impacts of their products or technology on the environment and public safety or because patterns of economic relationships with various stakeholders (consumers, local communities, farmers) are perceived to be quite inequitable. But there are few economic analyses of these processes of contestation that would look at how firms can tackle them by developing an integrated, proactive approach of possible threats.

Report n°1: The new constraints of urban development, March 2004

Rémi Prud'homme (Emeritus professor at Université Paris XII, France), Gabriel Dupuy (Professor of urban plannig at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, France) and Daphné Boret (Graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France) bring a reflection on urban development.

The analysis of Rémi Prud'homme (Emeritus professor at Université Paris XII, France), Gabriel Dupuy (Professor of urban plannig at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, France) put an emphasis on the margin for action between innovation and financial constraints in order to structure urban development. Daphné Boret ( Graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France) studied how environmental services can bring solutions when faced to news contraints due to the expansion of cities.