environmental rehabilitation essay

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• Published: 06 April 2020

Environmental rehabilitation of damaged land

• Mike Mentis 1  

Forest Ecosystems volume  7 , Article number:  19 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Much land is subject to damage by construction, development and exploitation with consequent loss of environmental function and services. How might the loss be recovered?

This article develops principles of environmental rehabilitation. Key issues include the following. Rehabilitation means restoring the previous condition. Whether or not to restore is not a technical but a value judgement. It is subject to adopting the sustainability ethic. If the ethic is followed under rule of law then rehabilitation must be done always to ‘the high standard’ which means handing down unimpaired environmental function and no extra land management. The elements of the former condition that it is intended to restore must be specified. Restoring these in any given case is the purpose of that rehabilitation project. The specified restoration elements must be easily measurable with a few simple powerful metrics. Some land damage is not fixable so restraint must be exercised in what construction, development and exploitation are permitted. If sustainability is adopted then cost benefit analysis is not a valid form of project appraisal because trading off present benefits against future losses relies on subjectively decided discount rates, and because natural capital is hard to price, indispensable, irreplaceable and non-substitutable. Elements often to be restored include agricultural land capability, landscape form and environmental function. Land capability is a widely used convention and, with landscape form, encapsulate many key land factors, and are easily measurable. Restoring soil and thereby environmental function provides the necessary base for an ecological pyramid.

Conclusions

The need for rehabilitation is not to be justified by cost-benefit or scientific and technological proof, but rests on a value judgement to sustain natural capital for present and future generations. Decision on what activities and projects to permit should be based on what is physically and financially fixable on current knowledge. Business and government must be proactive, develop rehabilitation standards, work out how to meet the standards, design simple powerful metrics to measure performance against the standards, embark on continuous improvement, and report.

Introduction

This article addresses key issues in environmental rehabilitation of land damaged by construction, development and exploitation, based on experience in a developing country, South Africa.

Most of the earth’s land surface has been subject to anthropogenic impact with consequent loss of environmental function and services. Damage can happen at the local, landscape or regional scales by any of many activities including cultivation of dryland or irrigated annual or perennial crops, industrialization, mining, pastoralism, recreation, other resource exploitation, and urbanization. There can be various effects including biodiversity loss, biocide or heavy metal or radionuclide contamination, damage to soil (acidification, compaction, puddling, salinization and sodification), disruption of environmental processes and services such as nutrient cycling and hydrological regime, erosion, eutrophication, land capability loss, landscape destabilization, nutrient impoverishment, overgrazing, and soil organic carbon loss. Environmental rehabilitation means to restore the former condition, and it seeks to reverse the kinds of ill-effects mentioned above. Rehabilitation and restoration are synonymous, and in the environmental management hierarchy of avoid, mitigate, offset, transfer, insure, accept and prepare (Mentis 2015 ) they correspond closest with mitigate. Mentis ( 2015 ) discussed the pros and cons of the elements of the hierarchy. In the context of this article, if the mitigation cannot be done to a high standard then the activity should be avoided. As mentioned below, in cases the damage is already done and more or less irreparable. Where damage is irreparable, offset (investment in protecting or restoring other resources of equivalent type or ecosystem function or value) is a much-vaunted option. The reality though is a risk that project proponents use the offset option as an escape to permit doing irreparable damage. Offset needs economies of scale and can be costly and even non-feasible where replacement resources are in many isolated small patches under different ownership (Mentis 2015 ).

This article addresses big questions. Should rehabilitation be undertaken in the first place? If so, to what standard? On what should rehabilitation focus? Though this author’s primary experience is not in forest per se, but in steppe and savanna a large proportion of which has a climatic climax potential of forest or scrub, the nature of the questions transcends bioclimatic region.

The approach here is in the form of ‘lessons learnt’. For a lesson to be learnt it is not enough that a goal was achieved. In such event, what was learnt? That the method was correct? This is not necessarily so. Success can arise by chance, and it is possible to be ‘fooled by randomness’ (Taleb 2001 ). Usually it takes failure to prompt questions. Typically we set out in Kahneman’s ( 2011 ) automatic thinking mode without much insight, and it is only if and when things go awry that we switch to the deep-thinking, deliberate and effortful mode. Why did the technique disappoint or fail? What were the underlying assumptions with which we started? What was flawed about the assumptions? What new assumptions have we now adopted that, so far, have avoided failure? Even though the revised assumptions and technique now work, it does not necessarily follow that our understanding is correct. In the mindset of Drucker ( 1967 ), a ‘decision’ works until it meets challenges outside of which it was designed. No lesson, let alone starting point, is uncorrectable. Lessons learnt are transient knowledge.

It was in terms of this paradigm of evolving knowledge that the lessons of this article to understand rehabilitation were conceived. On a range of rehabilitation issues the naif’s initial viewpoints are stated below. A naif is an inexperienced person, having a naïve view of things. Here naif is the author. Mostly he set out without interrogating the assumptions of his starting positions, or even being aware of them, and it was only after challenges, disappointment and failure that he asked ‘why am I doing it this way?’ The lessons – the initial viewpoints, their shortcomings, and the revised positions – were not learnt in sequence. Rather, the learning was sporadic across all the lessons. But lessons were interrelated and advance on one did promote learning on others. This took place during 50 years working on conservation, mining, pipeline, powerline, rangeland, road and water storage and supply projects in southern Africa. Naif set out with unquestioned convention or ignorance, the rare insightful publications (Bell 2002 , 2013 ; Macdonald et al. 2015 ) were belated, and learning was experiential. To be sure, rehabilitation know-how has been compiled (e.g. Tanner and Möhr-Swart 2007 ; De Klerk and Claasen 2015 ; Hatting et al. 2019 ), and South African law now requires projects in the mining industry to make financial provision for rehabilitation. However, the compilations are collections of techniques rather than syntheses into integrated ‘ecosystems’ with interactive and interdependent parts. The compilations do not provide a handful of easy-to-measure simple powerful metrics the application of which might index the standard of rehabilitation. Similarly, the law is short on rehabilitation standards on which financial provisioning might be estimated, and on which the adequacy of rehabilitation can be decided. These shortcomings are long-standing and widespread, and recognition of them motivated this author, his decades of work on developing measurable standards, his recent book (Mentis 2019 ), and this article.

Lesson 1 – cost benefit analysis

Should rehabilitation be undertaken? Naif’s first position was to answer the question by cost-benefit analysis (CBA), on the rationale of maximizing return on investment. If the rehabilitation cost was more than the benefits that accrued from doing it, then rehabilitation was not justified, and the funds should be invested in other opportunities that yielded a higher return. This was conceived in a static view of fixed technology, products, processes and consumer demands with ever stricter regulation (Porter and van der Linde 1998 ). Over time the static view gave way to a dynamic one involving innovation (Lesson 9). However, before that fundamental problems emerged with CBA in the context of rehabilitation projects. First, long time spans are involved. Rehabilitation is ‘forever’, which means discounting supposedly should be applied. Yet there is no definitive answer to what discount rate to use. If a high discount is applied then guarantee on the wellbeing of future generations is foreclosed. Even at a low discount rate, long-term survival is in question. If discounting were the only problem, CBA might nevertheless be useful. However, a second serious flaw relates to the nature of the assets involved. In conventional use of CBA things like labour and machinery are interchangeable. If it is cheap and plentiful, use manual labour to build the bridge, otherwise use machinery. By comparison, there are no substitutes for environmental processes such as nutrient cycling, photosynthesis, succession and the weather. Natural capital is indispensable and irreplaceable. This means that even a slow rate of environmental loss cannot be tolerated for long without impairing biospheric function whatever the worth of the immediate benefits and costs of avoiding and remedying any ill-effects. Third, natural capital does not change hands between willing buyer and willing seller. There is no explicit market value for the assets. Prices must be imputed. Discussion of discounting, pricing and sustainability in environmental contexts can be found in, for example, (Pearce et al. 1989 ), Farber and Hemmersbaugh ( 1993 ) and Martinez-Paz et al. ( 2016 ). It may be that project planning can be informed by CBA despite its shortcomings, but plainly CBA can be adjusted to support preconceptions.

Lesson 1 therefore is that CBA cannot be relied on for an objective answer to whether or not to rehabilitate. An alternative and hopefully more definitive decision criterion than cost-benefit is needed.

Lesson 2 – value neutrality of science and technology

To a naïve environmentalist the answer to whether or not to rehabilitate is ‘obviously yes’. He observes that Nature’s self-healing powers are insufficient to quickly remedy the degradation caused by many projects, and unless environmental damage is avoided in the first instance, rehabilitation is necessary if environmental services are to be preserved. Though details might be debated, the technicalities and truth of this are beyond dispute. Yet technical statements, sound as they might be, are silent on the desirability of, say, short-term employment and economic development at the cost of, say, loss of topsoil and curtailed future land productivity. In general, normative arguments (how the world should be) are not derivable from positive statements (how the world is) (attributed to Scottish philosopher David Hume 1711–1776).

Implicit in the naïve environmentalist’s ‘obviously yes’ answer is adoption of the sustainability or similar ethic. Adopting such an ethic is not a technical but a value judgement. The ethic is not in conflict with our technical understanding of the biosphere, but it is not a necessary consequence of that understanding unless or until value is attached to the wellbeing of present and future generations. If the ethic is not adopted nationally, and not enforced, then organizations that disregard detrimental environmental externalities must, at least, erode natural capital or, more likely, average out competitively superior and come to dominate in the market place, with consequent run-down of environmental function. If the ethic is to take effect then an ultimate frame of reference is needed to guide law and action so as to prevent environmentally degrading effects of activities being externalized.

An example of the kind of ultimate frame of reference needed is given in Table  1 in which relevant extracts from the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa are presented. In this article repeated resort to the South African situation is made, not with any pretence that it is the model case, or that it is not paralleled at least to an extent elsewhere (Bell 2002 and 2013 ; Macdonald et al. 2015 ), but because it helps illustrate the issues involved.

In South Africa any activity causing ecological degradation, if not prevented in the first instance, requires rehabilitation. This is so in terms of the Constitution (Table 1 ). Sections of enabling law support it. For example both the National Environmental Management Act and the National Water Act contain clauses on duty of care holding anyone who causes, has caused, or will cause pollution or environmental damage accountable. There is now precedent for enforcement of this in case law (Harmony Gold Company Ltd. vs Regional Director: Department of Water Affairs 2013 ZASCA). A miner sold his mine. The buyer ‘disappeared’. The original mine owner was judged responsible for the unrehabilitated mine works. Further, it is also often a condition of environmental authorization of a project to rehabilitate. The answer therefore to any question in South Africa about ‘should I rehabilitate?’ is unambiguously ‘yes’. This answer is not a necessary consequence of positive knowledge (how the world is) but rests on a normative frame of reference (in South Africa this is the Constitution and supporting laws).

In other situations and countries there might not be an effective Constitution or equivalent ultimate frame of reference. In these cases there is a variety of options to choose from: e.g. Agenda 21 (output from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, the standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States, the procedures of the environmental directives of the European Union, World Bank protocols, the environmental and social performance standards of the International Finance Corporation, the Equator Principles, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) or some combination of these. In South Africa such other documents could only be additive for if they conflict with the Constitution they are invalid. In the absence of an obvious frame of reference, the stakeholders should agree on a frame of their own before embarking on projects and their rehabilitation. A merit of a suitably worded Constitution and supportive regulation is that rehabilitation then has the force of law behind it. This law is necessary to discipline the reluctant rehabilitator. The progressive business will use the law and other documents to devise its appetite for risk in a policy that commits the organization to relevant societal values (Mentis 2019 ).

Lesson 2 therefore was that ‘The guidance we seek for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve, but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind’ (Schumacher 1973 ).

Lesson 3 – rehabilitation standard

The naïve position was that the standard to which rehabilitation should be done depended on such factors as the nature of the degradation, the future intended land-use, and the affordability of the rehabilitation exercise.

Contrary to naif’s original position, a variable standard for rehabilitation is not realistic, and rather rehabilitation must always be to one and the same high standard, for the following interrelated reasons. First, rehabilitation is mandatory (in South Africa), as already explained. Second, it is easier to apply a law or principle always rather than only sometimes, e.g. 100% rather than 98% of the time. If exceptions to applying the rule are allowed, further rules are required to define when exceptions are allowed. Then possibly exceptions to the exceptions will be required, and so on. This raises a third reason, namely the Constitutional provisions (in South Africa) for equality before the law and the right to lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair administration (Table 1 ). If an exception to effective rehabilitation is allowed in one instance, why not in another, even for different reasons? And how are exceptions administered lawfully, reasonably and fairly? Plainly any exception risks flouting the Constitution and running down natural capital. A fourth reason is that if partial rather than full rehabilitation occurs on whatever lawful or unlawful basis, even only on occasions, then cumulative loss of environmental structure and function is inevitable.

Turning to the future land use, several different shortcomings and oversights can arise. There can be an inclination to downscale the post-rehabilitation required land capability from, say, a pre-mining arable potential to grazing land capability because of the difficulty of reinstating arable land. Often in opencast mining the top 1.5 to 2 m of soil is stripped off and all regarded, and stockpiled, as topsoil. Proper topsoil is usually only about 0.3 m deep, so that when the 1.5 to 2 m of scrambled topsoil and subsoil is emplaced on the new landscape the proper topsoil is so diluted that ‘topsoiling’ is done with subsoil comprising, for example, stone, saprolite, pedocrete and acid materials which are low in soil organic carbon and high in manganese and iron concretions that have a propensity to fix phosphate so it is not available to plants. Arable land capability criteria are then not met. Reinstating to arable land is indeed challenging, but tractor-drawn pull-scrapers can be used to enable stripping of topsoil to be done more clinically than is current common practice. The per capita availability of high potential land is so scarce in some parts of the world, like South Africa, that no loss of arable land is affordable, and applicants for projects on arable land should be required to reinstate to arable, or project authorization refused. In terms of sustainability, pre-project arable or other high-quality land should be restored post-project to arable or similar high-quality land irrespective that the immediate or foreseeable intended future land use does not demand high land capability. The future is uncertain and a principle of sustainability is that unimpaired environmental potential be handed on not least because it is not known how land will need to be used in the future. In effect, it is not the intended, and uncertain, future land use that is of focal concern, but the pre-existing land capability which must be restored – a standard that can be hard to meet but is capable of consistent application. This position conflicts which much of the literature (Bell 2002 and 2013 ; Tanner and Möhr-Swart 2007 ; de Klerk and Claasen 2015 ; Hatting et al. 2019 ) where the intended land use looms large.

There are other cases, analogous to high potential land, of scarce, rare and endangered or valuable resources put at risk by projects and difficult to reinstate. Examples include wetlands, biodiversity and even common, but prized, native pasture grasses such as red grass ( Themeda triandra ).

Seemingly simple activities, such as construction of buried fuel, gas and water pipelines, can have surprising effects. A pipeline down a hillside can destroy a hillslope seep wetland, because an impermeable layer is punctured, or because the back-filled trench is insufficiently compacted, is more permeable than the adjoining undisturbed soil, and acts as a conduit draining the wetland. On land with low relief, and sandy topsoil over clayey subsoil, pipeline construction can transform upslope land from arable or forest capability to wetland where cropping or afforestation are no longer possible. With the pipeline laid at the bottom of the trench, using the sandy topsoil as bedding material, and back-filling with the clayey subsoil, the whole acts as an underground dam impeding subsurface water flow. Understanding the structure, and in particular the hydrological functioning, of the landscape helps to design the project and to guide reinstatement so the original condition is restored and land degradation avoided.

Former biodiversity can be challenging to restore. Typically after disturbance a bare, hostile site exists, with no or few species present. By process of secondary succession conditions ameliorate, colonization by species from near and far occurs, there is gradual accretion in species richness, and ecosystem structure and function develop. Secondary succession can span decades or centuries. This is expected with forests, though in cases the projected restoration of climax species richness and composition can be less than 70 years (Mentis and Ellery 1998 ). Of course, projections can fail, for example because species with limited propagule dispersal might take a long time to colonize. ‘Islands’ of native vegetation left undisturbed in a ‘sea’ of disturbed area can facilitate recovery of species richness and composition (Macdonald et al. 2015 ). These principles would be expected to apply not just to forests but to all vegetation types. Secondary succession in savanna and steppe might be expected to be quicker than for forest. However, in the humid and semi-arid grasslands of southern Africa recovery can also span decades. After 50 years the routes of buried fuel and water pipelines are easily detectable from space by satellite imagery and at close quarters from soil texture, low soil organic carbon and phosphate, and sparse and weedy or seral composition of the herb layer (Mentis 2006 , 2019 ). Climax grass species, such as red grass, are notorious for their tardiness to return after they have been lost by overgrazing or ploughing or other land disturbance.

On the one hand it might be expected that there are limits to speeding up natural process, such as succession. Research on old field succession found that succession was accelerated by application of fertilizer (Davidson 1964 ; Roux 1969 ). My own observations are that with infertile soil, especially scarcity of soil phosphate, only a few pioneer species survive, plants remain small and sparse, and there is no increase in soil organic carbon for 20 years and more. This contrasts with the fertile situation with vigorous plants, dense cover and increasing soil organic carbon and species richness. Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) pointed to a variety of site conditions in forest rehabilitation after surface mining that can impede colonization, including soil fertility, soil texture, substrate layering, soil moisture, and types of soil organic matter. Bell ( 2013 ) described a range of soil conditions that can constrain plant establishment, performance and survival.

Many attempts have been made to restore red grass, with inconsistent results (Snyman et al. 2013 ). On some pipeline projects red grass grown in nurseries was planted out, but mostly the red grass died out. On Transnet’s New Multi Products Pipeline from Durban to Gauteng, natural recovery of red grass after 6 years was a function of soil base status (percentage red grass = − 4.71 + 1.43 cations in cmol·kg − 1 , n  = 61, R 2  = 0.33, P  < 0.0001)(Fig.  1 ). Since red grass does not always recover quickly on base-rich soils, but always recovers slowly on base-poor soils, it is inferred that high base status is a necessary but insufficient condition for fast red grass recovery. Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) explained that the species composition of the establishment biota in forest areas subjected to surface mining is affected by site conditions including topography, drainage and surface roughness in addition to the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph. To promote forest biodiversity Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) advised that a variable rather than uniform terrain be constructed during landscaping the surface mining disturbance.

Recovery of red grass (percentage of sward composition) as a function of soil base status (cations in cmol·kg −1 )

On the other hand, but still in the context of natural process taking time, attempted restoration of biodiversity and climax species can be premature, for example if soil function has not been re-established. As already mentioned, in severely dystrophic situations soil organic carbon does not increase and species do not accrete. Soil organic carbon is generally regarded as an indicator of soil function, and can be an important factor in nutrient supply and nutrient cycling, especially in coarse-textured soils (Murphy 2014 ; Macdonald et al. 2015 ). After coal mining on the Eastern Highveld of South Africa, replaced soil has a typical soil organic carbon content of 0.5%, while unmined topland soils have about 2% carbon. The rate of carbon replenishment is slow. In a regression analysis using data from 23 fertilized sites, the percentage of carbon was a significant function ( P  < 0.0001) of management intensity (rated on 5–4–3-2-1 basis with two applications of nitrogen fertilizer and two defoliations per summer scoring 5, and no nitrogen and no defoliation scoring 1, R 2  = 0.1239) and pasture age (years since establishment, R 2  = 0.1718), viz.

Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) reported similarly slow rates of accretion of soil organic matter after surface mining in forest areas.

Regarding affordability, to the reluctant rehabilitator any rehabilitation is unaffordable. But if unaffordability is truly the case then the project should be redesigned and if rehabilitation is still unaffordable then project authorization withheld. There might still be cases, for example old projects for which rehabilitation was not contemplated at the outset, where the land users do not have the means to undertake the necessary rehabilitation. Other common instances are where miners have gone insolvent or disappeared leaving unrehabilitated mine works. Outside intervention would then be warranted, probably at taxpayer’s or donor’s expense. Affordability per se should not affect the standard to which rehabilitation should be done, only how it is supported.

Naif’s Lesson 3 then is that the standard to which rehabilitation should be done is better not conditional to this or that, but always be to the same standard which, if it is to be consistent, is to restore it as it was, i.e. to ‘the high standard’ (see below). Any leniency risks flouting equality before the law, and is on a slippery slope to biospheric ruin. In the case of new projects, it is either rehabilitate to the high standard or the project is not authorized. For existing and completed projects where affordability is in question, the high standard of rehabilitation should not be relaxed, and the party responsible held accountable, otherwise there is a legal loophole for reluctant rehabilitators. Application of rehabilitation to the high standard must be tempered with the fact that natural processes (e.g. succession, restoration of soil function) can be hurried along only within limits. However, the state of process can be monitored, e.g. the replenishment of soil organic carbon, as an index of soil function, can be measured.

Lesson 4 – sustainability

Rehabilitation is supposedly ‘forever’, or a permanent fix that is ‘sustainable’. What might sustainable rehabilitation mean? Naif always had a problem with early definitions of sustainability, such as that of the Brundtland Commission. This defined sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987 ). There are several difficulties. First, there are two objective functions – meeting present needs and not compromising the future. These objectives are liable to conflict. Just about any environmental controls, to protect the future, might be interpreted to mean less immediate profit and therefore not meet present needs. Any attempted trade-off here faces the problems already raised on CBA. Second, the needs and the wants of future generations are uncertain. Third, operational guidance is not offered on how to proceed. Since the Brundtland Commission, ‘sustainable’ has become a clichéd word often invoking dubious trading off, discounting, pricing, substitution, maximization and optimization, or it is used without its meaning defined.

Lesson 4 was therefore not to rely on clichéd ‘sustainability’, but to define the necessary foreverness of rehabilitation in operational terms. For example, rehabilitation to ‘the high standard’ means restoring the environment so that it looks and functions as it previously did, without passing on to posterity any maintenance or land management more than is needed for adjoining similar but undisturbed land. ‘Sustainability’ is defined in operational terms by Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) as ‘ … reclaimed forest is productive and self-sustaining and if it fulfills ecological, economic and social objectives’.

Lesson 5 – rehabilitation criteria

In the context of Lesson 4 the question arises as to whether it is possible to restore it the same as it was. It is improbable that any two spots on earth, or any spot at different times, are exactly the same. There is nearly an infinity of parameters, the earth and the universe are ‘evolving’ irreversibly, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle imposes limits to measuring and knowing. To ‘put it back the same as it was’ requires the key criteria of ‘the same’ to be specified. These key criteria are not everything, not all conceivable parameters, but a select few variables relevant to the particular application and measurable within the resource constraints of budget, expertise and time.

Lesson 5 was to identify a select few rehabilitation variables and work out how to measure and report them efficiently. At the outset it was unclear what constituted good rehabilitation and how it might be distinguished from poor rehabilitation. Naif had to observe, try out ideas, collect data, analyze and develop a perspective (Mentis 1999 , 2006 , 2019 ), and he now proposes to his clients that rehabilitation might be approached as follows.

The objective is to minimize the cost of putting it back like it was subject to boundary conditions, for example as follows.

Land capability not less than p

Landscape form exceeds q

Soil loss does not exceed r

Soil fertility exceeds s

Species composition exceeds t

Vegetation structure exceeds u

Vegetation vigour exceeds v

where p , q , r , s , t , u and v are specifications defined by an exact computer algorithm. For example, if the land capability to be restored is ‘arable’, then the computer algorithm specifies the conditions of soil depth, land slope, etc. that must be met for the rehabilitation to be within the boundary conditions of ‘arable land capability’. Enter the site data into the computer and the algorithm consistently outputs an objective result – this meets, or does not meet, the land capability requirement.

The merits of this kind of approach include the following.

There is only one objective function. Maximizing, minimizing or optimizing two or more objective functions simultaneously is improbable, and potential complexity and conflict are avoided.

Minimizing the cost is an objective to which clients and project managers are favourably disposed. It aligns with the business purpose to maximize the wealth of the business owners. Of course such maximization is subject to health, safety, environmental and other constraints. The specifications of getting the rehabilitation done to the high standard are among these constraints on doing business, and they are spelled out exactly. The specifications bound or define what is the acceptable rehabilitation product. This is not a CBA problem involving questionable discounting and pricing of natural capital, but a matter of containing the cost to restore the environment to meet specifications.

Meeting specifications can be of the pass or fail type, or graded to index degree of conformance. This aids in identifying where failures or weaknesses lie, and is a key step in knowing what to fix and then working out how to fix it.

The specifications are partly a knowledge-base. They are accumulated experience. They are amenable to on-going research, revision, improvement and, important, adaptation to varying circumstances. The approach can be tailored to fit many of a variety of applications. The specifications are also partly a function of appetite for risk, a notion indexing how accepting or averse an organization is to attaining a particular performance level. The approach of Bell ( 2013 ) is analogous in that it identifies limiting factors or constraints on rehabilitation that would vary according to circumstances but that might be developed into the specifications suggested above. The same applies in the case of Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) who described landscape, site (soil) characteristics and management as determinants of rehabilitation outcomes such as productivity, biodiversity and meeting ecological, economic and social requirements.

The objective function and its boundary conditions do not cover everything about the environment. It is not possible to measure, let alone restore, ‘everything’. The resources of budget, manpower and time are finite, so if the objective function and constraints are made ‘comprehensive’ it is likely that the project will be complicated, demanding on resources, therefore costly to implement, and liable not to be continued or even put into effect at all. Partial knowledge is better than no knowledge. Partial knowledge, focused on key performance indicators, is better still. There is a need for simple powerful metrics (Lesson 6).

Lesson 5, learning about rehabilitation criteria, turned out, after resolving the issue of ultimate frame of reference, central to the rehabilitation paradigm. A few key indicators are needed. It is not possible to consider ‘everything’. The selected indicators must be easy to measure and tell a lot. Not only must they individually home in on the fundamental features of landscapes and ecosystems, but their framework must be generic, flexible and scalable. Projects vary in scope and context, and it is useful to have an approach that can be scaled up for rehabilitating massive disturbance such as opencast mining, or scaled down to address simple projects such as buried pipelines that stretch for hundreds of kilometers, and across different bioclimatic regions and scores of properties. The suite of appropriate rehabilitation criteria might also need to change over project lifetime. Initially on rehabilitating opencast mines, focus is on restoring land capability, landscape and environmental function. Ten or 20 years later other indicators – such as biodiversity, certain valued species such as red grass, or crop production – might be more relevant. The indicators must be capable of consistent measurement or rating, so performance against standards can be assessed, shortcomings identified and progress determined. Simple quantification permits development of a relational knowledge so that, for example, if a minimum soil fertility is not met, revegetation will fail to meet a specified standard, or soil organic carbon will not accrete, or if a threshold vegetation structure is not met within 2 years then establishment has failed and must be repeated, and so on.

Lesson 6 – measurement

Naif’s starting position on measurement was that of conventional science. The facts must be obtained by repeatable methods. However, in parallel with developing rehabilitation criteria, the metrics became more than just measurement in environmental and social sciences. They were necessary tools for project management. The business adage applied: if you don’t measure you can’t manage and improve. Measured and reported often, metrics informed stakeholders on whether the rehabilitation standards were met, what variances there were, where corrections were necessary, and for what satisfactorily completed work a contractor was to be compensated.

A further naïve view was scientific description and measurement were whatever it took. However, the more complex and costly a technique is the less likely it will be continued over time. Decision-makers are reluctant to fund exercises that are difficult to execute, people do not understand and the utility of which is not obvious. To paraphrase Schumacher ( 1973 ), any idiot can design a complex technique but it takes thought and application to make it into Einstein’s ‘ … simple, but not too simple’.

Adopting an objective function and boundary conditions, and resorting to simple metrics, enables construction of industry performance and a basis for benchmarking. For example, for naif’s coal mining clients, rehabilitation performance on the seven criteria (boundary conditions) is rated on a 5–4–3-2-1 scale. There are of course limitations to manipulating ordinal data, such as these ratings. To try to make scales on the seven criteria comparable the following were applied across all criteria: 5 means ‘best’ (beyond criticism), 4 is ‘good’ (not perfect), 3 is ‘fair’ (bordering on non-sustainable), 2 is ‘unsatisfactory’ (not sustainable – passes on costs or diminished environmental services to posterity) and 1 means ‘very unsatisfactory’ (little or no effective effort to ameliorate). To illustrate, for rating soil loss let the rate of soil genesis be to the order of 1 t·ha − 1 ·a − 1 , so in assessments modelled rate of soil loss < 2 t·ha − 1 ·a − 1 rates 5 (best), 2–4 t·ha − 1 ·a − 1 rates 4 (good), 4–8 t·ha − 1 ·a − 1 rates 3 (fair), 8–12 t·ha − 1 ·a − 1 rates unsatisfactory (2), and > 12 t·ha − 1 ·a − 1 rates 1 (very unsatisfactory).

Rehabilitation performance at a colliery can then be determined by assessing all seven criteria at several to many sample sites, and by calculating a mean score over all criteria for each colliery at each assessment. Figure  2 shows the frequency distribution of colliery mean scores for 215 assessments undertaken since 2000. Taking this kind of approach, it is possible to make comparisons within times between collieries, and between times within collieries. An individual colliery can be tracked over time, and so can the industry as a whole. Possibly the data are not representative and it is only the most go-ahead companies that subject themselves to outside scrutiny. It might be expected then that the true industry average performance is worse than Fig.  2 shows. There can be other factors that affect performance assessment. First is subjectivity in collecting and using data. One way to limit this problem is to use unambiguously definable parameters for each criterion. For example, land capability uses the methods of agricultural land capability assessment that operate on the basis of constraints involving factors such as soil depth and land slope. The field data sheet must require categorical or numerical data that are easy to determine accurately and repeatably. The data interpretation (scoring against the standards) is best done by an exact computer algorithm, for example using if-then-else logic. This takes the tedium out of scoring, helps with consistency, and preserves mental energy for addressing exceptions. Inevitably a computer algorithm is built on common circumstances, and it is necessary to have an experienced user to check the output and apply his expertise to the unusual situations.

Colliery rehabilitation performance since 2000 ( n  = 215, mean = 3.42)

Another factor affecting rehabilitation performance assessment is the evolution of the method over time. As mentioned earlier, the boundary conditions that go along with the rehabilitation objective are, and must be, subject to change, updating and improvement. In the case of data for Fig. 2 , scoring of performance has become more objective with formalization into a computer algorithm. Also, the scoring has become stricter. A future improvement is to shift from scoring colliery performance using the average over all sample sites and all criteria to using the average minimum criterion score for all the sites. In the spirit of rehabilitation to the high standard, a site should perform well on all criteria. By analogy, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. For example, it is poor rehabilitation to perform well on land capability and landscape form, yet be defective on environmental function.

Lesson 6 was therefore about the power of simple metrics. There is a nest of interrelated requirements – simple, understandable, informative, workable, objective, consistent, reliable, economic, credible to the stakeholders, formalized into exact algorithms, and enable benchmarking. If-then-else logic, available for example in Microsoft’s Excel, handles quantitative and qualitative logic. It encodes knowledge in exact and testable, thereby improvable, form. If a decision turns out wrong, there is a decision trail. Is there a failure in understanding? Is there a computer programming error? Was there a mistake in data entry? Knowledge workers believe that exact algorithms, while with shortcomings, perform better than experts (Kahneman et al. 2016 ). The expert, or the algorithm, alone are useful, but a good model with seasoned expertise is a powerful combination.

Lesson 7 – rehabilitation design

At the outset, naif’s approach was to apply CBA and follow agricultural and soil conservation design with berms on steep slopes, delivering to waterways, and using drop weirs, gabions and reno mattresses and other structures to accommodate the new steep landscapes that were ‘too expensive’ to flatten to moderate gradients. Revegetation was driven by a vision to restore native biodiversity. Presently shortcomings arose. CBA was unworkable (Lesson 1). Structures on the new landscape often suffered from ill-design, they required maintenance (even when well designed), they frequently failed causing more soil erosion than they prevented, and they became long-term liabilities. Trying to install directly the native vegetation usually led to sparse weedy situations prone to soil erosion and alien invader plant colonization. The turning point in this dismal rehabilitation approach was to return to the ultimate purpose. Rehabilitation was not primarily to stop soil erosion and establish a native vegetation. At best, these were necessary but insufficient goals. The key issues were to reinstate land capability, a stable landscape and a functioning environment that delivered the same ecosystem opportunities and services as prior to disturbance, and that did not need any management or maintenance beyond that required for adjoining undisturbed equivalent land. This led to several key design criteria, as follows.

Begin with the end in mind. What must this project look like upon completion?

Design the new landscape as part of project planning.

Avoid a new landscape that requires conservation structures (berms, diversions, gabions, etc.), but if structures are needed design to be low-maintenance or maintenance-free.

Mimic the form of the pre-existing landscape in terms of slope and drainage density.

Reinstate the pre-existing runoff pattern, and design to avoid concentrating runoff and to disperse concentrated runoff.

Design for big events since rehabilitation is ostensibly ‘forever’, viz. bear in mind climate change and design for the 100-, 200- or 500-year rather than for the 10-year event.

Reinstate environmental function, using whatever are appropriate means, as a priority and as preparation for later native biodiversity restoration or crop species selection.

Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ), in their review of rehabilitation of surface mining in forest areas, presented a systematic design to rehabilitation on the basis that the new landscape, its profile across spatial scales and its substrate layering, strongly influence outcomes. Also, post-mining landscaping is now being aided by software modelling based on geomorphic principles to create natural looking and natural functioning landforms (Hancock et al. 2019 ). An example at La Plata mine in New Mexico can be viewed in Google Earth at N 36 o 59.5′ and W 108 o 8.2′.

CBA is a stumbling block in rehabilitation design. Not all environmental damage is fixable, or capable of rehabilitation at affordable cost. What then? Should long term environmental functionality be traded off against immediate profits, jobs and economic development? The inclination of business owners and politicians to do this is well known. However, CBA is not a valid means of deciding this, partly for reasons already considered, but also because of the requirement in South African law to make financial provision for future liabilities and then the difficulties of reliably estimating the liabilities. To explain this, suppose an opencast miner elects not to reduce his spoil piles to low gradients so that, while saving on immediate costs and increasing short-term profits, creates liabilities concerning the long-term integrity of the rehabilitation. Probably the lower the standard of the rehabilitation the bigger the liabilities and the greater the uncertainty in estimating them. The practical challenges of maintenance in the long-term are formidable. Who is going to do it? Who is going to check it is done properly? By Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson 1958 ), whatever the financial provision, it will likely not be sufficient. The reputation of the miner will be at risk, as might be assurance of renewal of his mining licence, approval of new mining licences, and good standing with banks and potential shareholders to fund present and possible future operations. A company could face potentially ruinous claims against it for pollution, damage to the environment, and losses to health and wellbeing. The way ahead is to limit uncertainties and liabilities by rehabilitating to the high standard.

Examples of ‘unfixable’ environmental degradation are the ‘big holes’ scattered across southern Africa (e.g. copper mine at Phalaborwa, diamond-mine big holes at Kimberley and elsewhere, and opencast coal mine final voids). Whether the big holes and adjoining spoil stockpiles are truly unfixable or simply costly to rehabilitate to the high standard, there is evidently no intention to restore the former landscape and its environmental structure and function. Possibly the agricultural land capability is low and the losses to environmental function and services are small in the case of some of these big holes. Yet a critical issue is the precedent created. If something short of rehabilitation to the high standard is to be permitted in one case, why not in others?

Since natural capital is indispensable and non-substitutable, there is no objectively determinable equivalence in number of jobs or amount of economic development. The upshot is that if a proposed project risks costly, unavoidable and unfixable environmental degradation then, on the sustainability ethic, the project should not be granted authorization. One objection to this strict stance is that, at the outset, the rehabilitation design to fix the damage might be unknown, yet given trial-and-error, and adaptive management, solutions might be developed. On these grounds, limited pilot trials might be justifiable. In principle though, if the degradation from a project cannot be avoided or fixed, then, if sustainability is accepted, authorization of the project must be withheld.

Initially naif was indifferent to land capability and the landscape form in the belief that they were not critical to arresting soil erosion and restoring native biodiversity or even just a vegetation cover. The erosion-protection methods of the ‘donga doctors’ and the green fingers of the revegetation experts were at hand. However, it turned out that neither soil protection nor vegetation establishment and maintenance could be assured without designing the new land within narrow bounds.

Starting with the landscape, it is convenient to view at three scales. At the macro scale the runoff pattern should mimic the pre-existing situation, the land should drain to the exterior, and hillslopes must have an even gradient or be concave, not convex, at the lower slope. For projects with limited impact on the landscape, e.g. buried pipelines, it is simple at most locations to restore the original landscape profile and thereby preserve the natural runoff pattern. However, for big-impact projects like opencast mining the new landscape is challenging to design. There is a bulking factor so the new landscape will be higher than the original. If the gradient to which the land is restored exceeds about 1 in 7 a tufted grass cover is insufficient to prevent soil erosion quickly destroying the new landscape. Plainly, factors such as soil erodibility and rainfall erosivity can affect the permissible steepness. It can also be difficult to vegetate steep slopes because erosion strips off topsoil, fertilizer and propagules before protective plant establishment occurs. The new landscape can also be put back with too little slope so that, with differential subsidence of back-filled spoils, there are soon hollows and internal drainage in the landscape, with ingress of rainwater into the old mine pit that can then fill and spill acid mine drainage to the surrounds. Big areas of new landscape also need to be designed with drainage lines. Without deliberate design, drainages will in any case appear and, given the fragmented nature of the back-fill, incise and initiate gully erosion in the new landscape. Erosion resistant barriers should therefore be installed in the designed drainages to provide a hard base to which landscape erosion works.

At the medium scale are conservation structures and terrain unevenness such as humps and hollows. As already explained, the problem with conservation structures is the entropy law. Structures will deteriorate and will require maintenance if they are to remain effective. The maintenance amounts to passing on costs to posterity which conflicts with the sustainability precept. Therefore, designing the new landscape must avoid the need for conservation structures, except for the hard barriers to protect the drainages discussed above. Humps and hollows that might arise because of insufficient landscaping, or because of differential subsidence of back-filled spoils, are undesirable. The humps drain quickly and soil in the hollows can remain saturated for extended periods, lowering land capability. There are various means of countering the humps and hollows. Back-fill can be compacted as it is emplaced. The new landscape can be left to settle for a few years before final smoothing and covering with topsoil. The new landscape should have sufficient slope on it so that even if differential subsidence occurs, surface drainage will nevertheless occur and ponding avoided.

At the fine scale there is surface roughness concerning stone on and in the soil, and other micro-relief factors such as rills, ruts and incomplete surface smoothing at landscaping and topsoiling. In the interests of most post-rehabilitation land-uses, smoothness at the fine scale is desirable. Most future land-users will want easy access across the rehabilitated landscape. Surface roughness reduces land capability, increases wear and tear on machinery, can be unsafe and injure livestock, and either raises the cost, or limits the benefits, of future land use. However, if the pre-disturbance landscape surface was rough then it is appropriate to restore it like that.

Restoring the landscape and land capability overlap but they are not synonymous. Landscaping deals with land form whereas land capability concerns the capacity of the land to support use without resource degradation. Landscaping specifications can be met yet land capability requirements not. For example, the land might drain externally, the lower hill slope might be concave, the slope might be modest so no conservation structures are needed, and the land might be smooth, yet the soil too shallow to qualify for the required, say, arable land capability. Similarly, the required land capability of, say, grazing might be met, yet landscaping standards not satisfied, for example because of internal drainage or convex footslope.

Agricultural land capability is an extensively researched convention. Land capability is determined by constraining factors such as land slope, soil depth, wetness and extremes of soil texture. The more the constraints the lower the land capability. The most constraining factor is operative so, for example, even though land might have low slope, if the soil is shallow the land capability will be low. Land that has no constraints (low slope, deep soil, well-drained, intermediate soil texture) has high capability (i.e. arable). As the constraints increase so the land capability reduces to pasture, grazing, forestry and wilderness capability. The categories may vary depending on the land capability classification system adopted. The logic of land capability rests on the conservation principle that land must never be used beyond its capability. For example, arable land may legitimately be used for grazing, but land of only grazing land capability should not be cropped if the resource base is to be preserved.

Irrespective of future land use, adoption of sustainability requires that the landscape and land capability be restored. Even though the immediate intended land use might be, say, grazing, sustainability requires the original land capability, say arable, to be restored so that an unimpaired environment is bequeathed to posterity. Restoring to arable land capability is challenging, and, so far, is rarely done.

Lesson 7 is that rehabilitation must be designed not on CBA but on producing a durable rehabilitation product that limits liabilities, i.e. rehabilitation to the high standard. Naif learnt that land capability and landscape form were not immaterial. They needed to be designed within narrow limits if sustainability was to be met. They also needed to be ‘got right first time’ because of the difficulty and cost to fix botched land capability and landscape form, and some failures were irreparable, e.g. scrambled top and sub soil. Both land capability and landscape form can be determined by a few quick field observations. They encapsulate critical land characteristics. They exemplify simple powerful metrics for rehabilitation.

Lesson 8 – environmental function

In the context of vegetating the rehabilitation, naif’s first inclination was to rely on secondary succession to establish the native climax species to restore natural biodiversity. This was adopted on many projects, and still is by project managers wanting to contain costs. While protagonists of this approach claim it works, the rehabilitation products do not withstand scrutiny. Relying solely on Nature yields disappointing results, and almost invariably some intervention is required, ranging from a ‘kick-start’ to years and even decades of aftercare just to establish and maintain a plant cover let alone restore environmental function and reinstate an ecological pyramid. Many buried pipeline projects have not recovered in 50 years (Mentis 2006 , Lesson 3). Scars are still evident along the animal-drawn transport routes used when diamonds and gold were discovered on the South African highveld in the late 1800s. Possibly some of the gullied pediments of eastern South Africa date back to the order of 1000 years when the land was first cultivated.

On opencast coal mines the early rehabilitators did not rely on succession nor use native climax grasses, but instead sowed a mixture of pasture grasses, sometimes with legumes. Their rationale was that seed for the climax grasses was not available in quantity, and that in any case these climax grasses were more difficult to establish than commercially available grasses. They hoped legumes would fix nitrogen, reduce the need for expensive fertilizers, and aid revegetation. The logic for the seed mix was apparently a belief that if a spectrum was sowed, hopefully one or other species might prove suitable, germinate and establish. Naif did not, at the outset, have any better ideas, but presently a perspective emerged.

Sowing the seed mix of pasture grasses failed in the poor soils of most rehabilitation areas in the absence of liming and fertilizing (Mentis 1999 , 2006 , 2019 , Lesson 3). If adequate lime and fertilizer were applied, then, in the humid steppe region, three sowed tall-growing grasses ( Chloris gayana , Eragrostis curvula and Digitaria eriantha ) prevailed to the virtual exclusion of all else, including Cynodon dactylon , the legume lucerne ( Medicago sativa ), annual non-grass herbs (weeds) and declared alien invader plants (Mentis 1999 , 2006 , 2019 ). The short-growing C. dactylon was possibly shaded out by the dense tall grasses, and the legume, weeds and invader plants competitively excluded. In the plant world, possession is indeed nine tenths of the law. While lucerne did fix nitrogen, when cows ate lucerne they suffered bloat. Perhaps other legumes, such as poor man’s lucerne ( Sericea lespedeza ), might be better, but they have not been tried sufficiently.

In the early guidelines of the erstwhile Chamber of Mines in South Africa, the late Professor John de Villiers advised that a goal of rehabilitation should be to restore soil function by replenishing soil organic carbon under grass. Around this was founded a so-called revegetation paradigm that establishes a pasture with fertilizer-responsive grasses, maintains this high production system for at least a few years, after which reversion to native grassland can be achieved by withholding fertilizers yet continuing with defoliation management (Mentis 1999 , 2006 , 2019 ).

This revegetation paradigm was corroborated with several data bases involving hundreds of sample sites and showing association of perennial grass establishment and soil organic carbon with soil phosphate, potassium and zinc (Table  2 ). In regression analyses, available soil phosphate was the main independent variable to predict pasture structure, a proxy for revegetation success. That does not prove the paradigm correct, but the balance of evidence is to effect that resort to conventional perennial pasture establishment and maintenance for a few years is an effective method for restoring soil function, and providing a base for an ecological pyramid. On big projects clients want assurance that there is high chance of the revegetation method working. It is not simply a matter of the contractor having to repeat the revegetation at his cost if it fails. Failed revegetation often exposes the unprotected land to erosive storms resulting in irreversible loss of topsoil and long-term impairment to the quality of the rehabilitation. There are indeed other revegetation methods available, and they may be appropriate, depending on circumstances (Mentis 2019 ). However, practitioners of conventional pasture establishment are far down the experience curve, the principles of Henderson’s and Moore’s laws apply (with every doubling of unit good production or service delivery the cost reduces by a constant fraction), and in common circumstances the technique is reliable and cost-effective.

The initial idea of protecting soil with a vegetation cover comprised of native plants has been subordinated by the need to restore environmental function that does not negate the initial intention but in the long term promotes it. Key ingredients of the revegetation paradigm are earthy material that can be developed into soil, fertilizer and adequate soil fertility, fertilizer-responsive grasses, and iterated ‘fertilize, grow grass and defoliate (mow, graze or burn)’ to produce ideally two grass crops per growing season. In this context there is little direct evidence on the role, and the benefits, of the herbivore, especially cattle. However, given that 80%–90% of nutrients ingested by the cow are returned to the pasture in dung and urine, the suspected benefits include the following. Nutrient cycling is set up (compare with cut and bale where nutrients are exported in the hay). This benefits the grasses and, by appropriate grazing and resting schedules, stimulates vegetative reproduction in the grasses that then leads to grazing lawns that are protective of the soil and are productive. Instead of the nutrients being locked up in soil and plants, the nutrients are cycled and become available to an array of wildlife including grasshoppers, butterflies, birds and dung beetles which themselves aid in the nutrient cycling.

It is expected that the nature of the soil strongly affects the plants that grow in it. Bell ( 2013 ), Macdonald et al. ( 2015 ) and Mentis ( 2019 ) gave extensive treatment to soil factors as constraints or limiting factors on revegetation in forest and other areas disturbed by mining and other agents. The constraints are liable to vary according to locality. They need to be identified to guide soil amelioration, plants species selection, propagation and aftercare. The merits of alternative approaches can usefully be compared (Parotta and Knowles 1999 ).

In Lesson 8 naif learnt that the needs of revegetation transcended establishing just an immediate natural vegetation or just any vegetation cover. Revegetation can and should be a primary means of restoring soil and thereby environmental function, and achieving this might have to precede attempts to reinstate a natural vegetation and native biodiversity, or selection of a crop to cultivate.

Lesson 9 – innovation

Naif’s starting position was that of the classic conflict between environmental regulation and company profitability or competitiveness. According to this perception, tightening regulation, such as raising rehabilitation standards, increases costs and erodes company competitiveness, so there is opposition to regulation.

This classic view, intuitively arrived at in Kahneman’s mode 1 thinking, sees the world as static. This view is unrealistic, though, and it misleads government and business into moderating regulation ‘for the sake of the economy’. The reality is that technology, products, processes and consumer needs are not fixed but dynamic (Porter and van der Linde 1998 ). Innovation permits the costs of meeting regulations to be run down. In an era of inevitably ever-increasing environmental regulation, the company that can develop cost-effective regulatory compliance (e.g. rehabilitate to the high standard cheaply and effectively) stands to improve its bottom line, and thereby its competitiveness.

When naif sets out 25 years ago on the initiative of rehabilitation standards the level of practice, and even expectations of it, fell short of what they are today. The lessons explained in this article are testimony to innovation and dynamism in environmental rehabilitation. For example, the progressive mining companies are landscaping to low profiles that do not need berms and other conservation structures, and while only 5 years ago they were saying it was impossible to strip top and sub soil separately they are now modifying their procedures and procuring machinery that could cut the cost of restoring soil and environmental function and produce a better rehabilitation product.

Lesson 9 was therefore a breakaway from rehabilitation being constrained by cost. In the immediate term, the budget does indeed limit what is done, but when project planning begins with the end in mind, new ideas are tested, and improvements adopted, then better rehabilitation costs less.

Lesson 10 – leadership

Naif’s starting position was archetypically reactive – rehabilitation is usually not the core business, so adopt good practice and comply with the law. In effect, this meant following not leading, with several unfavourable consequences that soon became apparent.

The reactive approach is vulnerable to outside intervention. For example, recently in South Africa the Centre for Environmental Rights took the coal mining industry, Department of Water and Sanitation and Department of Mineral Resources to task for non-compliance with the conditions of water use licences (CER 2019 ). The unsatisfactory state of affairs is illustrated by one mining client showing naif the conditions of her water use licence. There were 1000 conditions. It is not feasible to comply with, audit and enforce such complexity. This reflects badly on both business and government. The problem is not that South Africa is an under-resourced developing nation. During the time of the Mandela and Mbeki governments the South African Revenue Services developed superb efficiency. The central issue is the lack of political will in both business and government. Limited resources are no excuse, but rather cogent reason why they should be deployed efficiently.

Along with being reactive is failure to relentlessly pursue efficiency – the ever-better mouse-trap. The reluctant rehabilitator complains that rehabilitation is just a cost, yet he does nothing to limit that cost.

The take-home message of Lesson 10 is for business to be proactive by taking leadership, developing standards, working out how to meet the standards, designing a few simple powerful metrics to measure performance against the standards, embarking on continuous improvement, and reporting. The benefits of being the best are better rehabilitation at less cost, and the deployment of rehabilitation expertise as an offensive weapon against industry competitors and a defensive weapon against would-be outside intervention by activists and government. Peter Drucker, the founder of modern business management, is reputed to have said ‘The best way to predict the future is to make it.’

The lessons presented in this article are summarized in Table  3 . Warranting discussion are issues concerning what constrains achieving high-standard rehabilitation and other environmental management.

The first issue concerns the need and justification for environmental regulation, including rehabilitation. Why do some business and government leaders not support, implement and enforce conservation, environmental management and rehabilitation? There are several possibilities.

The function of business is interpreted strictly to increase business owner wealth with fiduciary responsibility to ensure funds are not expended on non-revenue earning activities like environmental care? But plainly the unbridled pursuit of wealth can hurt people and damage the environment, and law may exist to constrain business and other activity (e.g. the South African Constitution).

Business and government leaders consider that spending on non-revenue activities raises costs, reduces company profitability, and damages the national economy. This static view is surely invalid (Lesson 9) though that of course does not stop people believing it.

The influential leaders are waiting for science and technology to prove that environmental management and rehabilitation are necessary, in disregard or ignorance of value neutral science and technology being incapable of doing that (Lesson 2).

Perhaps the leaders are not ignorant but are populists who believe stakeholders and voters are ignorant and hold the static view of regulation vs costs, and await final proof from science and technology.

Possibly the leaders are smarter than the professionals who write ‘clever’ articles, or perhaps the leaders are not capable of grasping the issues even when explained.

Different leaders likely behave the way they do for different reasons, but in any given case it helps to know the nature of the obstructing or unsupportive mindset.

A second issue is that values, beliefs and actions of leaders are at least as fundamental to effective rehabilitation as the technical knowledge on how to put it back like it was. The human mind is among the most potent of causative agents. Among the other lessons naif learnt is that technical knowledge is a necessary but insufficient means to achievement. Without business owner and top management commitment, high standard rehabilitation will not be achieved regardless of technical know-how, but given owner and management commitment just about any technical obstacle can be overcome. Previously a figure of speech about the impossible was ‘fly to the moon’. Yet United States former President JF Kennedy committed to land a man on the moon, and it happened.

Just how might leadership drive environmental management, including rehabilitation? It needs to make policy commitment and to iterate plan-do-review-revise. Clients vary in their adoption of this. Those who make fastest progress are clients whose top management is committed and requires, after plan-do, a rehabilitation assessment report and a face-to-face discussion addressing such questions as: What are we trying to do? How well are we doing? What should we do now? The same report and in vivo discussion, but without the top managers, results in slower progress, if any. Submitting a report without the review discussion correlates with declining performance. Hence, if business owners want rehabilitation done to a high standard they must appoint top managers who are culturally attuned to design and implement the strategies to see the rehabilitation done (Groysberg et al. 2018 ).

A third constraint is that the requirement to get rehabilitation done is not uniformly applied, at least in South Africa. Mines are targeted. They are indeed among the big damagers to environmental function and services. However, land withdrawn from crop and tree cultivation, decommissioning of road and other linear projects and contaminated industrial land largely escape attention. Even within the mining industry the law is not applied uniformly. This of course is in conflict with the principle of equality before the law. Any leniency predicated on such grounds as affirmative action are short-sighted, for that does not promote national competitiveness and ultimately it is the taxpayer who will suffer, either in footing the bill for the rehabilitation to be undertaken later or in bearing the costs of future impaired environmental function and services.

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Abbreviations

• Cost benefit analysis

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Adriaan Oosthuizen for drawing attention to geomorphic landscape design.

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The author has formal qualifications in agriculture, business and science (BSc, BSc (honours), MSc, PhD and MBA). He is a Principal Environmental Auditor and Full Member of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment of the United Kingdom, a Chartered Environmentalist with the Society for the Environment of the United Kingdom, a Professional Scientist registered with the South African Council for Scientific Professions, an Honorary Member of the Land Rehabilitation Society of Southern Africa, and a member of editorial board for Forest Ecosystems . The author is self-employed and has consulted on business and environmental issues for 30 years.

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Mentis, M. Environmental rehabilitation of damaged land. For. Ecosyst. 7 , 19 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40663-020-00233-4

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• Environmental function
• Land capability
• Landscape form
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Environmental Factors in the Rehabilitation Framework: Role of the One Health Approach to Improve the Complex Management of Disability

Lorenzo lippi.

1 Physical and Rehabilitative Medicine, Department of Health Sciences, University of Eastern Piedmont “A. Avogadro”, 28100 Novara, Italy

2 Dipartimento Attività Integrate Ricerca e Innovazione (DAIRI), Translational Medicine, Azienda Ospedaliera SS. Antonio e Biagio e Cesare Arrigo, 15121 Alessandria, Italy

Alessandro de Sire

3 Physical and Rehabilitative Medicine Unit, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Catanzaro “Magna Graecia”, Viale Europa, 88100 Catanzaro, Italy

Arianna Folli

Alessio turco, stefano moalli, antonio ammendolia, antonio maconi.

4 SC Infrastruttura Ricerca Formazione Innovazione, Dipartimento Attività Integrate Ricerca Innovazione, Azienda Ospedaliera SS. Antonio e Biagio e Cesare Arrigo, 15121 Alessandria, Italy

Marco Invernizzi

Associated data.

Not applicable.

Environment factors play a crucial implication in human health, with strong evidence suggesting that several biological, chemical, physical and social factors could be possible targets to implement effective strategies for human health promotion. On the other hand, a large gap of knowledge still exists about the implications of environmental factors in terms of functional impairment and disability, while the integration of an environmental-based approach in the therapeutic care of patients affected by disabilities remains still challenging. In this scenario, the One Health approach has been recently introduced in clinical care and aims to optimize health outcomes by recognizing the interconnection between people and the environment. Concurrently, the “Rehabilitation 2030 Initiative” proposed in 2017 by the WHO emphasized the need to integrate environmental-based strategies to promote rehabilitation across different health systems and different nations. However, no previous study underlined the potential implications of the One Health approach in the rehabilitation setting, nor the role of a comprehensive rehabilitation approach focused on environmental factors. Therefore, the aim of this narrative review was to present a comprehensive overview of the data currently available assessing the close relationship between rehabilitation and the environment to provide a different perspective on the comprehensive care of patients affected by disability.

1. Introduction

Disability is a global burden rapidly increasing worldwide with the age of the population, as reported by the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 [ 1 ]. Concurrently, health expenditure related to disability is rising, emphasizing the need to develop sustainable strategies and policies to prevent and reduce the incidence of functional impairment [ 1 ]. In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that approximately 12.6 million deaths might be directly connected to environmental causes, consisting of 23% (95% CI: 13–34%) of the global causes of death worldwide [ 2 ]. On the other hand, it has been estimated that 22% (95% CI: 13–32%) of all disability-adjusted life years (DALY) were related to environmental factors [ 2 ]. Altogether, these data emphasized that environmental factors play a key role in global health, with crucial consequences in terms of social and sanitary costs [ 2 ]. In this scenario, environmental health research defined the environment as a set of biological, chemical, and physical factors coupled with social aspects that together constitute hazards or risks to human health [ 3 ]. Moreover, it should be noted that sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and geographical location could be considered the main social determinants of health and strongly influence access to health services [ 4 ]. In this context, recent research has proposed a novel approach defined as One Health, a collaborative, multi-sectoral, and transdisciplinary approach that takes into account the interconnectedness between humans, animals, plants, and the environment. It is aimed at achieving optimal health outcomes by taking into consideration the interaction between humans and the environment [ 5 ]. Environmental factors might represent one of the most important barriers for patients with disability [ 6 ]; there is still a gap of knowledge in the current literature about the integration of the One Health approach in the therapeutic management of patients affected by disabilities.

Physical and rehabilitation medicine is a branch of medicine focusing on functional improvement and enhancing the quality of life of patients affected by disability through specific rehabilitation programs and interventions [ 7 ]. However, an individualized rehabilitation plan should take into account several environmental factors affecting physical function, independence of activity of daily living, social participation, psychological well-being and crucially affecting the functional recovery of patients with disability [ 8 ]. Despite these considerations, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study underlined the importance of sustainable strategies targeting environmental factors in the rehabilitative treatment framework of disability.

Therefore, the objective of this narrative review was to characterize the strict linking between environment and disability in order to provide a different point of view about the comprehensive rehabilitation management of environmental disorders and integrate the One Health approach in the tailored management of patients with disability.

2. Research Methodology

This narrative review has been realized following the SANRA quality criteria [ 9 ]. Scientific literature research has been performed on PubMed/Medline, Web of Science (WoS), and Scopus using the following Mesh terms: “Environmental risk factors”, “Environment”, “Environmental Medicine”, “Disability”, “Function”, “Impairment”, and “Rehabilitation”. Table 1 summarizes the SPIDER tool search strategy [ 10 ].

Spider tool search strategy.

The literature research was performed between June 2022 and September 2022 by two independent reviewers (L.L. and A.d.S.). Subsequently, two reviewers (L.L. and A.d.S.) independently screened the studies for eligibility. If a consensus was not reached, a third reviewer was asked (M.I.).

We considered eligible all the articles answering the research question: “does the environment affect the risk of disability?”.

More in detail, inclusion criteria were: (i) studies addressing human subjects; (ii) studies addressing environmental disorders or environmental factors affecting human health; (iii) studies assessing disability, physical function, and Health-related Quality of Life (HR-QoL). Exclusion criteria were: (i) all studies in languages other than English; (ii) studies without full text available; (iii) studies involving animals; (iv) conference abstracts, masters, or doctorate theses.

A qualitative method has been used for data extraction and data synthesis. More in detail, environmental disease characteristics, the World Health Organization’s position, environment-related disability, and the One Health approach were extracted and synthesized in the manuscript. Both the data extraction and the data synthesis have been independently performed by two reviewers (L.L. and A.d.S). In case of disagreement, a third reviewer was asked (M.I.). Due to the heterogeneity of the studies considered and in accordance with the narrative review design, a qualitative synthesis has been performed and all outcome data were reported in a narrative way.

3. Environmental Diseases

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines environmental health by referring to the chemical, physical and biological factors external to a person, their choices and behaviors [ 11 ]. Several environmental agents have crucial implications for human health [ 12 ]. For instance, pollution of water, air, chemical or biological agents might play a pivotal role in the pathological pathways involved in environmental disease development [ 13 ]. Moreover, UV rays and ionizing radiation, noise, electromagnetic fields, and occupational risks might be considered environmental factors significantly affecting human health. Interestingly, behaviors connected to environmental factors (e.g., availability of safe water to be able to wash hands or physical activity promoted by urban planning aimed at contrasting the sedentary lifestyle) are considered factors significantly involved in environmental diseases development [ 14 ]. On the contrary, the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and substances of abuse, are not considered related to environmental disorders, given that environmental modifications do not affect the risk of disease [ 11 ]. Some examples are: (a) The pathologies due to passive smoke are related to the environment, but not pathologies in active smokers; (b) malnutrition in less developed countries is considered an environmental pathology, on the contrary obesity due to bad eating habits is not considered a result of environment interaction; (c) trauma due to road accidents (pathologies due to mechanical energy transmission) are generally considered environmental pathologies, as the intervention in the environment (roads that are intact and better structured for traffic) leads to their reduction [ 2 ].

In general, environmental pathologies are multifactorial diseases that develop as the result of interactions with multiple risk factors, both environmental and non-environmental related [ 13 ]. Furthermore, the risk associated with specific environmental factors is probabilistic (exposure has not been associated with certain diseases) and increases with the intensity and duration of exposure [ 2 ]. In particular, in the pediatric age, there is a significant environmental contribution to the development of several infectious diseases, neonatal and nutritional pathologies and traumas [ 15 ]. On the other hand, in the elderly, chronic pathologies related to environmental factors show a higher prevalence, while traumatic injuries still remain important factors affected by the environment [ 16 ].

In this scenario, preventive strategies aimed at creating healthier environments might have a crucial role in most disease control strategies [ 17 ]. For instance, about 20% of cancer cases are globally associated with modifiable environmental factors and the current preventive strategies mainly focus on atmospheric pollution radiation reduction, the protection of exposed workers and the correct management of chemical agents [ 11 ].

Concurrently, approximately 35% of lower respiratory tract infections might be related to modifiable environmental factors [ 11 ]. Therefore, home environment, atmospheric pollution, and passive smoking are potential targets for preventive strategies aiming at reducing the occurrence of the disease [ 2 ].

In this context, it is not surprising that there is growing attention on international policies on environmental diseases [ 2 ]. In particular, the WHO is currently supporting several initiatives aimed at creating healthier environments and healthier populations, including: (1) to promote good governance in the areas of health and environment while guiding significant transformations in other areas such as transportation and energy; (2) to implement research focusing on monitoring changes in health hazards in order to improve solutions and information and promote evidence-based standards and effective remedies; (3) assisting nations with methods for expanding their actions and capacity building; (4) to enhance emergency planning and response capabilities in the event of environmental events and offer pertinent advice on environmental health services and workplace health and safety [ 18 ]. Moreover, in the Compendium of WHO and other UN guidance on health and environment, some countermeasures were proposed for both people and organizations to reduce environmental diseases worldwide [ 11 ]. In this context, these countermeasures deal with clean air, a constant climate, enough water, sanitation and hygiene, safe chemical usage, radiation protection, healthy and safe workplaces, sound agricultural practices, health-supportive towns and built environments and protected nature [ 2 ].

Altogether, these data emphasized that environmental diseases are a crucial issue in the current literature, with growing attention to the international policies targeting environmental modification to improve global health [ 2 ]. In this scenario, several environmental factors might be associated with human health and might be effectively targeted by precise environmental strategies [ 19 ]. However, environmental modifications might have a crucial impact not only on global health but also on functional impairment. Interestingly, recent research proposed that environmental modification might be considered in the rehabilitation research setting in order to improve the physical function of patients affected by disability [ 20 , 21 ].

4. Functional Impairment and Environment

4.1. does the environment affect the risk of disability.

The environment plays a crucial role in the development of disabling conditions, with growing research underlining that a comprehensive rehabilitation approach should include environmental factors to optimize the functional recovery and social integration of patients with disability [ 22 ]. In addition, it has been previously demonstrated how the environment could positively or negatively affect psycho-physical well-being. In recent years, attention has been paid not only to the psycho-physical sphere but also to the social sphere, with a growing interest in a patient-centered approach to improve not only physical health but also social participation and HR-QoL [ 23 ].

In this scenario, a holistic approach to managing disability should take into account several environmental factors that might promote disability. Table 2 better characterized the evidence supporting the effects of environmental factors on the risk of disability.

The effects of environmental factors on risk of disability.

4.2. Environment and Healthy Aging, Frailty and Disability

In the past decade, growing attention has been raised to healthy aging due to the progressive aging of the population worldwide [ 48 ]. In this context, the WHO, Member States and Partners for Sustainable Development Goals proposed a Global Strategy and Action Plan for Ageing and Health for 2016–2020 and the WHO program The Decade of Healthy Ageing 2020–2030 [ 48 ].

In older adults, environmental factors play a crucial role in maintaining or promoting a healthy lifestyle with significant implications for functional capacity and the risk of disability [ 49 , 50 ]. On the other hand, several risk factors related to the environment might promote frailty, functional disability, cognitive impairment, hospitalization and mortality in older adults [ 51 ]. However, in the current literature, there is still a large gap of knowledge about the possible link between environmental risk factors and disability, with most studies on this topic focusing on the relation between a specific exposure and a particular disease, without focusing on a direct link between functional impairment and environmental factors. Interestingly, the recent study by Yu et al. [ 52 ] assessed the role of environmental factors and physical frailty, reporting that living in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of green space directly reduces the risk of frailty. Similarly, Lee et al. [ 53 ] subsequently underlined that PM exposure might be significantly associated with prefrail and frailty status in elderly subjects. On the other hand, a significant association between psychological distress and a poor social network has been reported as an important risk factor for frailty syndrome in elderly subjects [ 54 ].

Altogether, these studies underlined that environmental factors should be considered together with lifestyle and psychosocial factors to develop effective strategies aimed at reducing the risk of frailty in older adults. However, a comprehensive approach to frailty syndrome should include a tailored approach to functional impairment frequently characterizing this condition. In this context, the recent study by Momosaki et al. [ 55 ] underlined that malnutrition and nutritional opportunities play a crucial role in modulating physical function, in line with the “rehabilitation nutrition approach” to a disability, and a comprehensive synergistic intervention including nutritional support and physical exercise.

In addition, Chen et al. [ 56 ] showed that long-term exposure to NO 2 is associated with an accelerated decline in static lung volume, and diffusion capacity. These modifications could be a risk factor for restrictive lung disorders in the elderly, with significant implications for physical performance. Concurrently, the study by Cassou et al. [ 57 ] highlighted a close relationship between exposure during working life to specific occupational risk factors (such as noise, heat, dust, carrying heavy loads, and awkward postures on the one hand) and physical disability after retirement.

While occupational risk factors might affect functional performance, climatic changes might significantly interact with physical activity levels with crucial implications for physical performance in the elderly [ 58 ]. In addition, the study by Zanobetti et al. [ 59 ] underlined a greater risk of cardiovascular dysfunction at lower and higher temperatures in older men, with an increased risk of ventricular arrhythmias. Although physical function plays a pivotal role in activity of daily living (ADL) independence and the need for assistance in older adults, cognitive function impairment is a common condition in these patients and represents a global burden for both sanitary and assistance costs. In this context, several risk factors have been identified to have a role in cognitive impairment development in older adults. More in detail, Dardiotis et al. [ 60 ] suggested that people living in areas near sprayed fields (exposed to pesticides) had poorer neuropsychological performance in language, executive and visual-spatial functioning than those who had never lived in these areas. Moreover, Wueve et al. [ 61 ] showed that an increment of 10 A-weighted decibels in noise corresponds to 36% and 29% higher odds of prevalent Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease. Similarly, in 2022 Gao et al. [ 62 ] demonstrated that long-term ozone exposure increases the risk of cognitive impairment with a linear trend. Therefore, several environmental exposures might significantly affect cognitive function and should be considered in a tailored approach aimed at maximizing functional independence in older adults.

4.3. Sanitary Costs, Opportunities, and Barriers to Independence

As previously reported, environmental factors might have detrimental consequences on public health, with a significant impact in terms of sanitary, social and assistance costs [ 11 ].

Therefore, environmental factors have been considered a potential target to reduce health care expenditure in the future years, with growing interest in organizational campaigns and social strategies aimed at reducing the negative environmental implications on global health [ 63 ]. For instance, the study by Lightwood et al. [ 64 ] reported that passive smoking elimination would immediately prevent $1.5 to $2.3 billion in costs annually for coronary heart disease treatment over the next 30 years.

The prevalence of smoking has decreased significantly since 1990 with significant positive effects on rates of heart, stroke and cancer-related deaths, and crucial implications in sanitary expenditure and DALY related to environmental factors [ 65 ].

In this scenario, close surveillance, research, multilevel interventions, environmental modifications and strong health policies represent effective therapeutic options to improve global health and significantly reduce sanitary and assistance costs related to the disabling consequences of environmental diseases [ 66 ]. However, evidence-based practices and interventions are needed for an ecologically comprehensive approach to changing environmental determinants and capitalizing on the concept of reciprocal determinism [ 67 ]. Therefore, the environmental modifications might be integrated into several settings, including rehabilitation. Attention should be paid not only to the prevention of disabling conditions but also to the barriers limiting patients’ engagement in rehabilitation programs and barriers limiting the social participation of patients with disabilities that might need environmental adaptation to optimize their ADL independence.

5. One Health Approach

The One Health approach has been defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—aiming at achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment” [ 5 ]. Despite the One Health approach having been developed as early as the XIX century, it has been rediscovered in the past few years as highlighted by growing literature focusing on this cutting-edge approach [ 5 ]. Interestingly, One Health emphasizes the concept that health is a fundamental right that must be shared between humankind, the environment, and animals. Moreover, it is suggested that human health is closely linked to the health of the fauna and environment. Thus, these three macro-areas share several influencing factors, and their dynamics and interactions are constantly evolving: the growing human population, the evolution of housing habits, climate change, the extensive and often reckless use of the land, the ease of movement of living beings from one part of the globe to another. Taken together all these factors have drastically affected human diseases [ 68 ].

From a comprehensive point of view, the One Health approach perfectly overlaps with the aim of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), targeting peace and prosperity for Earth’s inhabitants and their environment [ 69 ]. One Health aims at controlling and limiting zoonoses (which according to some estimates represent over 60% of known human pathogens and 75% of emerging pathogens [ 69 ]), antibiotic resistance, food safety, environmental contamination and, in general, the health-related risks shared by people, animals, and the environment. Furthermore, the One Health approach promotes its multidisciplinary method in the comprehensive management of chronic diseases, non-communicable diseases, mental health, work accidents and occupational health [ 5 ].

In this scenario, the recent study by Sterckx et al. [ 70 ] has proposed a One Health-based protocol for the holistic management of burnout syndrome. Interestingly, the authors emphasized the strict relationship between mind, body, and emotions within the individuals, integrating the patient in a broader context, including both social and environmental factors.

In this scenario, growing efforts have been recently paid to digital innovation and data sharing; realizing shared biobanks aimed at reorienting not only the target to human health but also to animals and the environment. Remarkably, the data present in these biobanks could have a role in promoting interconnections between different areas and assessing the multilevel interactions among the potential environmental factors in human pathologies [ 71 ]. This novelty approach might have a role in developing future prospective translational studies, enhancing the clinical application of laboratory data into the clinical setting and from the clinical settings in organizational models, in order to optimize sustainable strategies to manage human health with a One Health approach [ 72 ].

In this context, a strict connection might associate the One Health approach with rehabilitation. More in detail, rehabilitation is historically characterized by multidisciplinary and interdisciplinarity features aimed at optimizing the functional recovery of people with disability, enhancing the interaction with the environment and developing effective strategies and environmental modifications to promote independence in ADL, psychological well-being and/or efficient social-work-familiar integration.

In conclusion, the One Health approach could be effectively integrated into the complex framework of disability management paving the way to a broader concept of human health. Therefore, One Health is a novel comprehensive rehabilitation approach that takes into account not only the patient’s individuality but also the environmental factors.

6. One Health Approach and Disability

Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (PRM) is a branch of medicine that aims at promoting functional recovery in patients affected by disability [ 73 , 74 ]. Due to its intrinsic characteristics, PRM should not focus on a single apparatus but should contemplate a holistic view of the functional integrity of the whole patient [ 75 ].

Despite disability onset being strongly associated with environmental pathologies, several environmental factors might have a crucial role in the comprehensive treatment of disability in both post-acute and chronic settings [ 76 , 77 ]. More in detail, environmental factors that should be considered for a comprehensive rehabilitation plan include the socio-residential context on the one hand and, on the other, the territory in which the patient lives as well as the accessibility to rehabilitation care in both outpatient and community settings [ 76 , 77 ].

The social environment crucially affects patient opportunities to perform rehabilitation programs, due to the heterogeneity in the rehabilitation settings and the scarce healthcare worker knowledge about optimal rehabilitation interventions [ 78 ]. Furthermore, home environment and caregiver engagement play a key role in rehabilitation programs, influencing the home care management of patients with disability and improving the translation of functional improvement from the rehabilitation setting to the activity of daily living [ 79 ]. Interestingly, technological advances and digital innovation have been raised to promote access to healthcare services and rehabilitation and have grown in attention in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these approaches spread in clinical contexts as a result of the modifications of environmental factors requiring reduced contact between patients and healthcare professionals [ 80 ]. In this scenario, telemedicine and telerehabilitation could provide healthcare to patients affected by different diseases even from remote areas [ 81 , 82 , 83 ].

Lastly, the work environment might be important to support the return to work after a rehabilitation program, and the literature suggests that a supportive, adapted and protected work environment allows for psychological well-being and economical independence in patients undergoing a rehabilitation program [ 84 ].

Altogether, these data emphasize that environment might have a crucial impact on rehabilitation adherence, rehabilitation results, and rehabilitation translation in the activity of daily living, with significant implications for patient quality of life. Figure 1 summarizes the One Health approach to disability.

One health approach integrated into the modifiable environmental factors affecting disability.

Lastly, the One Health approach in the rehabilitation field is in line with the “Rehabilitation 2030 Initiative” [ 85 ], proposed in 2017 by WHO. Interestingly, this document identified ten areas of priority work to strengthen rehabilitation across health systems and across nations [ 85 ]. More in detail, the environment is a key target in one of these areas, since “Building comprehensive rehabilitation service delivery models to progressively achieve equitable access to quality services, including assistive products, for all the population, including those in rural and remote areas” [ 85 ].

In conclusion, there are several suggestions on how the One Health approach might be integrated into the complex rehabilitation framework to treat patients affected by disability. This could pave the way to implement interdisciplinary teamwork that might overcome barriers to rehabilitation accessibility and cover patients’ needs for rehabilitation. Therefore, future research might focus on the integration of the One Health concept in rehabilitation settings to implement the effectiveness of the complex management of disability.

7. Conclusions

Environmental factors have been considered determinants of several pathological conditions and might also affect the risk of disability. However, to date, there is still a large gap in knowledge regarding the specific interaction between environmental factors and disability. In this context, the integration of environmental modifications in the complex rehabilitation framework might be considered to improve independence in ADL and reduce assistance costs, especially considering the progressive aging of the population and the increase in age-related disorders.

In this scenario, the One Health approach might be considered a suitable option to integrate environmental factors into the comprehensive management of chronic disabling diseases. This could help to overcome barriers to patients’ engagement and enhance access to rehabilitation services, and implement the rehabilitation framework to create more effective and sustainable strategies to counter disability.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alberto Abate and Emanuele Mones for its support to this work.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, L.L. and M.I.; methodology, L.L., A.d.S. and M.I.; formal analysis, L.L., A.d.S. and M.I.; data curation, L.L., A.d.S. and M.I.; writing—original draft preparation, L.L., A.F. and A.T.; writing—review and editing, A.d.S. and M.I.; visualization, S.M., A.A. and A.M.; supervision, A.M. and M.I. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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News from the Columbia Climate School

Land Restoration Can Profoundly Benefit People and the Environment

Dale Willman

In these days, with environmental collapse seemingly lurking around every corner, there is a story of hope to be told by journalists across the world.

The science is clear: Many of the planet’s systems are in decline . The Earth is warming at unprecedented rates. Our aquifers are drying up. The world’s biodiversity is being lost at an alarming pace. And yet, scientists are finding that restoration of large tracts of land can perhaps help with many of these issues, because restoration can have multiple effects for the regional environment, and can even improve the lives of those living in the once-degraded land markedly better. Journalist and ecologist John D. Liu discussed some of these transformative effects during a recent webinar hosted by the Resilience Media Project at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Liu was a journalist in China back in 1994 when he first visited the Loess Plateau . This was the birthplace of agriculture in China, where centuries of deforestation and unsustainable animal management led to erosion, silt overwhelming the Yellow River, and widespread degradation. By the time Liu arrived, he found the region had become a moonscape — hillsides denuded of vegetation, dust clouds blowing across the landscape, and a people hungry and desperate for change.

In the mid-1990s, the Chinese government launched a major restoration project in the Loess Plateau, hoping to return the land to its once-productive state. Lui documented the project for the World Bank, a major funder of the work. “It took them about four and a half years to design the project,” says Liu, because the scale of what they hoped to do was so large. And then the actual on the groundwork began. “After ten years, the results were transformational.” Those results included a return of vegetation. Once-barren hillsides were now green and lush. Dust clouds no longer plagued the region’s residents. Native plants and wildlife were once again in abundance. The soil health was being restored, with a healthy mix of soil microbes. And carbon was once again being taken out of the air and stored underground.

One of the most important changes, says Liu, was to the region’s hydrology. Before restoration, many of the region’s waterways had disappeared. The denuded landscape did not easily allow rainwater to percolate into the ground. Without plants to hold moisture, much of the rain that did fall on the ground quickly evaporated. But after restoration, that changed. “The rivers are running again, along with streams and springs.” The trees found in the area now take up some of that water, and through the process of transpiration, the plants help to cool the land. That has made the area more habitable for mammals, including humans.

Liu says all those changes then helped to transform the lives of the region’s residents. “They created functional agriculture. They created small businesses.” And this, he says, began to create community wealth. “It’s empowering for people. It raises them from desperate poverty and it gives them agency. Because they were involved in the restoration, it allowed them to see they are the method which changed their situation.”

With the success of the Loess Plateau project, scientists have begun similar work across the world — from Egypt to Portugal and Chile, and even in the United States, where a number of projects are now underway. In Burkina Faso, workers are planting trees as part of the Great Green Wall project, a massive effort to green the entire middle of the African continent. So far, more than 50,000 hectares have been planted across 10 countries on that continent.

When done properly, ecosystem restoration can offer many benefits that in turn address several urgent environmental issues at the same time. For instance, reconstructing mangrove forests along ocean shorelines can fight erosion by stabilizing the land. And the roots of the trees also provide habitat for many ocean species. But mangroves can also slow a tsunami, protecting people living near the coast. Their growth also captures carbon from the air, which in enough quantity could help reduce continued global warming.

Restoring and protecting natural systems, in other words, can offer a wide range of positive effects, and can help to repair the systems upon which we rely for our survival.

Restoration projects are powerful stories for journalists to tell, says Judith D. Schwartz . Schwartz is the author of the book, The Reindeer Chronicles . “Journalists can really offer a service in telling stories of how people are able to heal the landscapes of their communities.” And those stories are broad-based, she says. “They are economic and business stories. For instance, how a farm or winery committed to regenerative principles brings investment and energy into the community. They are science stories. You can do a story about why happy cattle means happy birds. They are local community stories — how farmers, gardeners and activists band together to support native pollinators.”

Restoration can also lead to stories about community and personal health. “Improved soil means less flooding and erosion and healthier food and people.” The scale of such projects can be daunting, so it’s important to remember that not every restoration project needs to be similar in scope to what happened on the Loess Plateau. Restoration can and does happen on much smaller scales. In urban areas, the use of permeable sidewalks can help to control runoff and flooding. Green roofs can help to retain water that otherwise would wash quickly down storm drains, and they also help to reduce the heat island effect that keeps cities as much as 10 degrees warmer in the summer than neighboring suburbs. And former brown fields in cities can be reclaimed and turned into sustainable housing, or in some cases urban gardens that feed people in the surrounding area. In smaller areas, degraded farmland can be turned into a nature preserve that restores the land while offering outdoor recreation for residents. In other words, ideas for restoration projects can be found everywhere – you just have to know how to look for them.

While restoration cannot by itself solve all the problems the natural world faces right now, it is quickly becoming a major tool for ecologists, farmers, ranchers, investors, and citizen activists. But before these stories of redemption can be told, communities need to understand what restoration projects might be able to accomplish for marginal lands in their area. And that, says Schwartz, is an important first step for journalists — to tell their communities about what might happen if a project is undertaken. “If people don’t know what’s possible, how can we begin to envision it?”

For journalists, be sure to watch our video, and check out the resources below. We also include potential story ideas you can use to jump-start your own restoration coverage.

One of the priorities of the Earth Institute’s new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability is improving the interface between journalists, scientific expertise and vulnerable communities. This is the latest webinar in a series I’m developing on covering factors that either boost or impede community and ecological resilience in the face of the landscape of hazards in this era of rapid change. More videos can be found on the Resilience Media Project page.

The United Nations will launch the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration next year. Their site is a great resource for information on restoration

Lots of resources are also available from IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management

Looking for additional experts to speak with? Try the Society for Ecological Restoration 

The Ecological Landscape Alliance has a speaker’s bureau

Chelsea Green Publishing (publisher of Judith’s book) has a number of books about restoration, among them Rewilding: Restoration by Letting Go

Ecological Restoration is a publication of the University of Wisconsin press

Restoring the Pacific Northwest: The Art and Science of Ecological restoration in Cascadia

Indigenous communities and local people and their role in restoration

Importance of Indigenous Peoples’ lands for the conservation of intact forest landscapes

Collective property rights reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Phosphorus is essential for agriculture, yet this important plant nutrient is increasingly being lost from soils around the world. The primary cause is soil erosion , reports an international research team led by the University of Basel. The study in the journal  Nature Communications  shows which continents and regions are most strongly affected.

Kiss the Ground , a documentary now streaming on Netflix. A great source for information, as well as potential story ideas involving your community

From the Public Broadcasting System:   The Age of Nature

CommonLand works to revitalize communities and regenerate landscapes.

Much of John D. Liu’s work can be found on this site . He is also on Twitter and Instagram . Also, a Recent presentation to the Trillion Trees Coalition.

Film: Green Gold – Regreening the Desert

Film: Lessons of the Loess Plateau

Film: Hope in a Changing Climate 

Restoration titles from publisher Chelsea Green:

Call of the Reed Warbler : A New Agriculture, A New Earth

Dirt to Soil : One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture

Bringing Back the Beaver : The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways

Story Ideas

One way to find a great story on restoration is to begin right where you are. For example, you can check with your town/city planning board to see if they have any projects that could be reported through the frame restoration.

You could also begin with national/international resources, and then zero in on local implications. For instance, you can use EPA databases to find any Superfund locations nearby, and find out what plans are in place to reclaim those lands. If there are none, ask experts for ideas on how the property might be reclaimed. Find those knowledgeable who can estimate the ecological benefits of such restoration

Now, some notes on how to find and pursue stories on ecosystem restoration, compiled with our gratitude by Judith D. Schwartz:

Conservation organizations can lead you to local stories. Example: A quick search on the website of Trout Unlimited leads me to a project happening right in my back yard .

Audubon is another resource, since the number and diversity of birds is a key indicator of land health. I could pursue a local story: encouraging native plants around solar arrays to support bird life. Use the National Audubon Society’s Plants for Birds database to see some of the birds native in your area. Talk to a local Audubon representative about what species have disappeared over the years, and why. Ask them about degraded landscapes in the area, and what projects are being considered or are underway to repair them.

The Nature Conservancy has state/regional chapters . They are a good source for story ideas.

The same approach goes for a respected company that focuses on ecological repair.

Their list of projects brings me to a story in my region .

Look for local environmental organizations and see what they are doing. Here is one focused on my watershed.

If you’re doing a global, thematic article piece, or seek to connect local and global, there are numerous campaigns you might looks at. The UN has declared 2021-2030 the UN Decade On Ecosystem Restoration .

EverGreening the Earth is another project for restoration.

A great site for background on a broad array of science issues is The Conversation . They regularly do articles on restoration .

Podcasts, such as Earth Repair Radio , can be good sources of knowledge and inspiration. Investing in Regenerative Agriculture takes a business perspective.

Using the calendar is a great way to find ‘news pegs’ for a story. The international calendar is full of days devoted to aspects of ecological health. For example: World Habitat Day 10/5; World Migratory Bird Day 5/8; World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (6/17).

Ecosystem Restoration Camps is a non-profit with more than 20 projects underway around the world. Their site is a good place to start if they have work underway in your area. They also have an active Facebook page . And here is a Media Fact Sheet from the group

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This was the first I’ve heard of the Great Green Wall project. I recently learned about how the efficacy of projects funded by international aid becomes less predictable as the size of aid increases. Dr. Alain de Janvry suggests de-aggregation of aid might help us learn what is determinant of effective applications of aid, and then scale up. However, projects like the Great Green Wall seem a great target for large amounts of aid because their metrics are easily trackable and their interference in human life minimal if planned carefully. In comparison to food aid, poverty alleviation, and crisis response and recovery, such a homogeneous project might be the easiest way to avoid the hazards attached to a lot of international aid.

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• Published: 16 September 2021

The effects of ecological rehabilitation projects on the resilience of an extremely drought-prone desert riparian forest ecosystem in the Tarim River Basin, Xinjiang, China

• Aihong Fu 1 ,
• Weihong Li 1 ,
• Yaning Chen 1 ,
• Yi Wang 2 ,
• Haichao Hao 1 ,
• Yupeng Li 1 ,
• Fan Sun 1 ,
• Honghua Zhou 1 ,
• Chenggang Zhu 1 &
• Xingming Hao 1 , 3  

Scientific Reports volume  11 , Article number:  18485 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Restoration ecology

The Tarim River Basin in Xinjiang, China, has a typical desert riparian forest ecosystem. Analysis of the resilience of this type of ecosystem under extreme drought conditions and ecological rehabilitation projects could provide a theoretical basis for understanding ecosystem stability and resistance, and provide new ecological rehabilitation measures to improve ecosystem resilience. We employed a quantitative framework to assess net primary productivity (NPP) resilience, emphasizing four aspects of NPP dynamics: NPP, NPP stability, NPP resistance, and maximum NPP potential. We compared ecosystem resilience across four time periods: before the implementation of ecological rehabilitation projects (1990–2000), during construction and partial implementation of ecological rehabilitation projects (2001–2012), during the initial project stage of ecological rehabilitation (2013–2015), and during the late project stage of ecological rehabilitation (2016–2018). There are three main finding of this research. (1) Mean NPP was increased significantly from 2013 and was decreased from 2016, especially in the main stream of the Tarim River and in the basins of eight of its nine tributary rivers. (2) Ecosystem resilience in 2013–2018 was greater than in 1990–2012, with the greatest NPP stability, mean NPP and NPP resistance, especially in part one of the river basin (the Aksu River, the Weigan-Kuche River, the Dina River, the Kaidu-Konqi River, and the main stream of the Tarim River). Ecosystem resilience in 2001–2012 was lowest when compared to 1990–2000 and 2013–2018, with lowest mean NPP, NPP stability, NPP resistance and maximum NPP potential, particularly in part two of the river basin (the Kashigr River, the Yarkand River and the Hotan River basins). Therefore, part one was most affected by ecological restoration projects. When 2013–2018 was divided into two distinct stages, 2013–2015 and 2016–2018, resilience in the latter stage was the lowest, with lowest mean NPP, NPP resistance and maximum NPP potential, especially in the main stream of the Tarim River. This may be due to unreasonable water conveyance in 2014–2015. (3) Ecological resilience has increased significantly in 2013–2015 after the implementation of ecological water transfer projects, river regulation, and natural vegetation enclosure projects. Ecosystem resilience could continue to increase even more in the future with the continued implementation of reasonable ecological water transfer projects.

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Introduction.

Climate change and the intensification of human activities have led to serious external disturbances to ecosystems, including drought 1 , 2 , short-term climate anomalies 3 , 4 , 5 , lack of resources 6 , 7 , species invasion 7 , and fire 8 . Ecosystem resilience theory may help us to understand how ecosystems deal with these threats 9 , 10 , 11 , as both scientists and the general public have become deeply concerned about the ongoing resilience of ecosystems to external disturbances 12 , 13 .

Resilience research has, for the most part, focused on wetland, river, mountain, city, farmland, forest, and cold desert shrub land ecosystems 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 6 , 7 , while there has been little exploration of the resilience of desert riparian forest ecosystems. Desert riparian forests, consisting primarily of Populus euphratica (desert Poplar), are found along rivers that run through deserts. The world’s three major Populus euphratica forests are located in China: in the Tarim River Basin and Yiwu County, both in Xinjiang Province, and in Ejina Banner in Inner Mongolia, with 90% of Populus euphratica forest located in the Tarim River Basin. Desert riparian forests are a valuable natural forest resource that 14 plays an important role in preventing wind and sand erosion, controlling desertification, maintaining regional economic development and ecological security, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring oasis agricultural and animal husbandry production 15 , 16 . In recent years, driven by regional population growth and economic development, the large-scale exploitation of water and land resources has led to the year-round cessation of the course of the Tarim River, ultimately causing Lake Titema to dry up, the groundwater level to drop significantly, the desert riparian forest ecosystem to degenerate, and the vegetation to decline 17 . To restore this severely damaged ecosystem, the local governments have invested and implemented various ecological rehabilitation engineering measures with remarkable ecological restoration benefits 18 . Among these benefits has been an increase in the height of the water table near the course of the river 19 , and a certain level of vegetation restoration in some areas 20 . However, full restoration and the natural regeneration of vegetation have not yet been achieved. Therefore, new control measures are required, and understanding the resilience of the desert riparian forest ecosystem to external disturbance is a scientific problem that needs to be urgently solved.

Scholars have used a variety of methods to assess the resilience of different ecosystems. These include quantifying the factors affecting forest ecosystem resilience 21 , comprehensive analysis of soil and water conservancy characteristics, the analysis of land use and climate factors in the ecosystem community 22 , monitoring of soil water content and soil temperature 23 , the response of surface vegetation to precipitation, changes in water use efficiency 24 , and calculating ecosystem resilience using linear regression modeling of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), drought index (SPEI), and air temperature 3 . These methods incorporate many factors, including climate, hydrology, vegetation, and soil. There is some research that uses in-depth analysis of the effects of vegetation factors on ecosystem stability and resistance 2 . For example, Frazier et al. 25 analyzed total primary productivity (TPP), Ponce Campos et al. 24 analyzed the sensitivity of the above-ground net primary production (NPP) of terrestrial ecosystems to altered hydroclimatic conditions to reflect ecosystem resilience, Kahiluoto et al. 26 and Li et al. 2 used crop yield data to study the resilience of crops to climatic disturbances, and Li et al. 27 analyzed gymnosperm resilience using tree ring data. The resilience indices of terrestrial ecosystems used in each of these studies was related to the productivity of surface vegetation 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 . Based on this earlier scholarship, this paper considers the productivity of desert riparian forests. Tree ring data is only suitable for trees, and not for shrubs and herbs. Given that desert riparian forests are composed of trees, shrubs, and herbs, tree ring data cannot fully reflect the productivity of desert riparian forests. Primary production (PP) is defined as the quantity of products that an autotroph produces through photosynthesis or chemosynthesis 12 , 28 . Net primary productivity (NPP) is TPP minus consumption by autotrophs for photosynthesis or chemosynthesis 12 , 28 , and includes consumption by autotrophs 29 . NPP, therefore, reflects the productivity of the plant community under natural environmental conditions 29 . Thus, in this research, vegetation NPP was selected to assess ecosystem stability and resistance to reflect desert riparian forest ecosystem resilience. In other words, NPP is a measure of the productivity and eco-environmental quality of vegetation under natural conditions 28 , climate warming can directly affect the NPP of terrestrial ecosystems through photosynthesis, as well as indirectly through soil absorption 30 . Therefore, the impact of vegetation on ecosystem resilience is generally expressed according to vegetation NPP 30 .

To understand external environmental stress, scholars have focused on climate change stress 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 and species invasion stress 7 , while there has been little focus on the integrated impact of climate change and human activities.

In recent decades, the Tarim River Basin has both suffered from extreme drought and benefited from ecological management 31 , 32 . Ecological management has changed water demand and supply in the desert riparian forest 32 , affecting vegetation growth 18 . Understanding how ecosystem resilience changes under these two environmental stresses is a key issue in the restoration of the damaged ecosystem. To help understand this change, we propose a framework to compare the impacts of ecological management on NPP resilience by referring to the research of Li et al. 2 , which explored agro-ecosystem resilience by analyzing yield stability and resistance according to yield change. In the case of this current research, agricultural yield was replaced with NPP. There are four parts to the framework: (1) statistical analysis of NPP and NPP trends, (2) NPP stability, (3) NPP resistance, and (4) maximum NPP potential. Statistical analysis of NPP and trends over time can reveal warning signals of change in the state of the system resulting from climate change and management-induced changes to ecosystem processes that might impair or improve long-term resilience. NPP stability measures the ability of the desert riparian forest ecosystem to maintain consistent NPP over time within normal environmental variation, such as temperature and water resources fluctuations. NPP resistance reflects the ability of desert riparian forest ecosystems to mitigate the risk of NPP decline due to extreme drought, while maximum NPP potential measures the ability of systems to produce high NPP under optimum conditions. Based on the research of Li et al. 2 , the larger the mean NPP, NPP stability, NPP resistance and maximum NPP potential, the greater the ecosystem resilience. This approach provides a strong foundation for future analysis of resilience across different ecological management types and provides insights into the design of sustainable ecological management measures that go beyond NPP maximization to consider resilience.

Study area and method

Site description.

The desert riparian forest of the Tarim River Basin (Fig.  1 (ArcGIS 10.2.2 software, URL: https://www.esri.com ) ) is located in southern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, and has an area of 11.4 × 10 4 km 2 . The Tarim River Basin is composed of the basins of the Aksu River, the Yarkand River, the Hotan River, the Kaidu-Konqi River, the Weigan-Kuche River, the Kashigr River, the Dina River, the Keliy River, the Cheercheng River, and the main stream of the Tarim River (Fig.  1 ). Due to differences in topography and geomorphology, the desert riparian forest is mostly distributed in the middle and lower reaches of each river basin and along the entire main stream of the Tarim River 33 . According to existing literature, there is no evident desert riparian forest boundary between the upper, middle, and lower reaches of these tributaries, so a comparative analysis of ecosystem resilience between the upper, middle, and lower reaches of each river basin was not conducted. However, spatial variability for desert riparian forest as a whole was explored. Land use data were derived from the Global Land Cover Characterization from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) ( http://nsidc.org/data/ease/ancillary.html#igbp_classes ) in 2018. From these data, a routine integrated classification of land use/cover change (LUCC) characteristics was obtained based on feature fusion processes. The landscape is composed of 45% barren land, 35% grassland and 16% farmland, urban land, and water. Although only 4% of the land is forested, forest is very important to the maintenance of ecosystem service functions. Among the dominant constructive species are Populus euphratica, Tamarix ramosissima and Alhagi chinensis . Between 1990 and 2018, the area of desert riparian forest reduced by a significant 1.78 × 10 4 km 2 due to a combination of drought and economic development 34 .

Distribution map of the Tarim River Basin desert riparian forest, Xinjiang, China.

The Tarim River Basin has a temperate continental climate characterized by little rain and strong evaporation. In the early Tertiary Period, around 22 million years ago, the collision of India with the Eurasian Plate and the subsequent uplift of the Tibetan Plateau changed atmospheric circulation and geographic patterns in Asia, forming the basic topography of the Tarim River Basin 35 . The current desert environment in southern Xinjiang was formed during the last glacial maximum (20,000–14,000 years ago) 35 . Average annual precipitation is 17.4–42.8 mm, the evaporation capacity is 1800–2900 mm, with a maximum wind speed of 40 m/s, the annual average temperature is 10.7 °C, with a maximum temperature of 39–42 °C, and 2550–3500 of sunshine hours.

The primary water resources in the Tarim River are glacial and snow meltwater from the alpine area to the west. This water flows through the oasis and the desert riparian forest before finally disappearing into the desert or terminal lakes. Water resources, therefore, are incredibly scarce. With an increase in population from 8.26 million in 1998 to over 10.61 million in 2018, and attendant socio-economic development, water from the ecosystem is increasingly used in production and urban living. Climatic conditions have caused the river course to be truncated, and there has been significant decline in the natural vegetation in the lower reaches of the basin. In 2001, the local government implemented conservation and restoration projects for desert riparian forests along the Tarim River Basin to alleviate the serious and on-going degradation of natural vegetation. These projects include ecological water conveyance, river regulation, and natural vegetation enclosure projects 20 , 32 . River regulation has reduced water loss due to leakage 20 , 32 , 36 , while the loss of vegetation due to human and animal impacts has been reduced, and the natural restoration of vegetation has been promoted through natural vegetation enclosure projects 37 . From 2001 to 2018, an ecological emergency water transfer project was implemented in the lower reaches of the main stream of the Tarim River 38 , with a cumulative discharge of 7700 million m 3 . The largest average discharge of 759 million m 3 occurred in 2011–2012. The quantity of ecological water to promote the restoration of the desert riparian forest has been increased 39 , and the groundwater level has risen 40 through ecological water conveyance in the lower reaches of the main stream of the Tarim River. The construction of these projects was completed by the end of 2012 18 . Therefore, 2001–2012 was a period during which some projects were constructed and others were implemented. From 2013, all projects were formally implemented, resulting in 7471 km of canal seepage control, 824.60 km of water conveyance dams to harness the main stream, 37 km 2 of farmland closed to cultivation and 3590 km 2 of protected forest and grasslands 18 . Previous research has found remarkable ecological restoration benefits following the implementation of part of these ecological rehabilitation projects 18 . However, the concept of NPP has not yet been applied to an analysis of ecosystem restoration efforts.

Date and methods

The desert riparian forest of the Tarim River Basin has suffered both negative stress (extreme drought) and positive stress (the implementation of ecological rehabilitation projects). We took 1990–2000, 2001–2012, and 2013–2018 as before intervention, during the construction period, and after the implementation of ecological rehabilitation projects, respectively, to explore the change, stability, and resistance of NPP as a reflection of ecosystem resilience.

Data collection

The Light Utilization Ratio Model was used to calculate NPP from 1990 to 2018 (see 41 for the specific calculation method). Climate data, including air temperature, sun light intensity, and sunshine hours, were derived from the Chinese Meteorological Science data-sharing service network ( https://data.cma.cn/ ). Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data for the relevant counties from 1990 to 2018 were retrieved from the Climatic Research Unit ( http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/web/cru/ ). Groundwater depth data in the middle and lower reaches of the main stream of the Tarim River in 2000–2010 were obtained from long-term field monitoring by our research team. The location map of the monitoring wells is shown in Supplementary Figure  S1 . Groundwater depth monitoring wells distributed in the lower reaches of the basins of the Aksu River, the Hotan River, the Yarkand River, the Kaidu-Konqi River, the Weigan-Kuche River, the Kashigr River, and the Dina River were set up in 2018. At the time of writing, there are only three years of continuous monitoring data, so these cannot be used to explain the effect of groundwater depth on ecosystem resilience. Groundwater depth change in the middle and lower reaches of the main stream of the Tarim River (see the box area in Supplementary Figure  S1 ) was analyzed to reflect the impact of groundwater depth on ecosystem resilience.

Mean NPP and trends

All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS Statistics 12.0, SigmaPlot 12.0 and Microsoft Excel 10.0. Long term mean NPP for the three periods were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects model with NPP as the fixed effect and year as the random effect. Post-hoc Tukey multiple comparisons of means were applied to compare mean NPP across the three periods with confidence intervals adjusted using the Sidak method 2 . The three periods were allowed to have different within-group variances in the model to account for the non-homogeneity of variance. The assumption of normal distribution of residues was verified with the Shapiro–Wilk normality test 2 .

NPP stability

Four NPP stability metrics per period were calculated and compared: (1) NPP range, (2) coefficient of variation (CV), (3) NPP variance, and (4) Finlay-Wilkinson (FW) regression slope 2 . NPP range represents the range between the highest and lowest NPP of each period. The other three stability metrics were obtained based on de-trended NPP data (i.e., residuals from regressing NPP against year with period-specific intercepts and slopes) to remove potential biases from NPP increases associated with the implementation of ecological rehabilitation projects 2 . The CV was calculated by dividing the temporal standard deviation by the mean NPP. NPP variance represents temporal variance over the three periods. FW regression slopes were obtained by regressing the de-trended NPP of each period to the environmental index (EI) 2 . EI is expressed as the average of annual de-trended NPP over the three periods and is used as an indication for the overall NPP ability at the respective environmental condition 2 . Periods with smaller NPP range, CV, NPP variance, and FW slopes indicate higher NPP stability 2 . The overall NPP stability of each period was ranked based on the mean stability rank for the four stability metrics 2 .

NPP resistance

NPP resistance is a key property of resilience and represents the ability of systems to avoid NPP failure under stressful conditions 2 . NPP resistance was calculated using two metrics: (1) probability of NPP failure based on frequency distributions, and (2) predictions of minimum NPP according to EI 2 .

Probabilities of low NPP were performed by estimating the probability densities of NPP in each period. The probabilities of the three periods to achieve low NPP (< 10th percentile of the pooled NPP distribution estimate) were extracted 2 . The significance of the probabilities of low NPP was determined by comparing each period to the probabilities of low NPP from 1553 randomized NPP sets. The pseudo-p for low NPP probability represents the percentage of times that each period would have NPP lower than the distribution of randomized NPP using a left-tail test 2 . The second method compared the predictions of minimum NPP in the three periods under unfavorable growing conditions (lowest EI) based on a linear mixed-effects model with EI and system as fixed effects and block as the random effect 2 . To indicate actual NPP ranges, de-trended NPP was re-centered to the mean NPP of each period (i.e., adding mean NPP to de-trended data).

Maximum NPP potential

Using the same method as NPP resistance, we estimated the probabilities to obtain high NPP (> 90th percentile of the pooled NPP distribution estimate) in the three periods, and the maximum NPP potential under favorable conditions (highest EI) 2 . This measurement helped to indicate management-induced differences in the potential of NPP to capitalize on favorable growing conditions.

There was no significant difference in mean NPP between 1990–2000, 2001–2012, and 2013–2018 (F 2, 4659  = 0.13, Sig. = 0.27), but there was a significant difference between 2013–2015 and 2016–2018 (F 1,3103  = 12.24, Sig. = 0). There were also significant differences for 1990–2000, 2001–2012, 2013–2018 compared to 2013–2015 and 2016–2018 (F 1,3103  = 3.51, Sig. = 0) (Fig.  2 ). This indicates that NPP varied from 2013 onward. NPP was largest in 2013–2015 and smallest in 2016–2018, exhibiting an increasing trend in 1996–1999, 2002–2007, and 2013–2015, and a decreasing trend in the other time intervals (Fig.  3 ). NPP was decreased in 2007–2013 due to a dry year in 2007–2009, when there was almost no water supply to the ecosystem from the Tarim River. Runoff increased from 2010, but NPP did not recover until 2013 42 . After 2013, NPP was increased rapidly, but fluctuated between 2016 and 2018. Because NPP was increased significantly in 2013–2015, and then was decreased in 2016–2018, we used two separate phases (2013–2015 and 2016–2018) to analyze ecosystem resilience.

Mean NPP at three time intervals. Letters represent significant differences in mean NPP at the 0.05 significance level.

Trend of NPP in ( a ) 1990–2000, ( b ) 2001–2012, and ( c ) 2013–2018.

Spatial variations of NPP in 1990–2018 were analyzed (Fig.  4 ). According to the geographical location and distribution of each river basin in the Tarim River Basin system (Fig.  1 ), we artificially divided the desert riparian forest into five parts. Part one consisted of the basins of the Aksu River, the Weigan-Kuche River, the Dina River, the Kaidu-Konqi River, and the main stream of the Tarim River. Part two consisted of the basins of the Kashigr River and the Yarkand River. Part three consisted of the Hotan River basin. Part four consisted of the Keliy River basin. Part five consisted of the Cheercheng River basin. NPP was significantly different between most of the river basins (F 1169  = 2.61, Sig. = 0). No significant difference (F 1169  = 2.61, Sig. = 0.14) was found between parts two and three, so these were regrouped into part two. Finally, the desert riparian forests of the Tarim River Basin were divided into four parts.

The spatial variation of NPP in the different time intervals.

Further analysis was conducted on variations in NPP in the desert riparian forest in each part during the different time intervals (Fig.  4 ).

In part one, NPP exceeded 57 gC/m 2 and was increased significantly in 2013–2018 compared to 1990–2012. NPP was increased at a rate of 29.27% (F 677  = 2.94, Sig. = 0) in 2013–2015 compared to 1990–2012, and was decreased after 2015 at a rate of 38.69% (F 677  = 2.94, Sig. = 0) compared to 1990–2012.

In part two, NPP in 2013–2015 was increased by 12.88% (F 539  = 0.71, Sig. = 0) compared to 1990–2012, and was decreased after 2015 with the bigger decrease rate of 25.32% (F 539  = 0.71, Sig. = 0) compared to 1990–2012.

In part three, NPP in 2013–2018 was increased significantly (F 238  = 0.69, Sig. = 0.02) compared to 2001–2012. In 2013–2015, NPP was increased significantly at a rate of 24.08% (F 238  = 0.69, Sig. = 0.01) compared to 1990–2012, but was decreased in 2016–2018 at a rate of 14.29% (F 238  = 0.69, Sig. = 0.05) compared to 1990–2000.

In part four, there were no significant differences between the time intervals (F 215  = 0.12, Sig. = 0.31) with an annual average NPP of 26 gC/m 2 and, therefore, no obvious increase or decrease in vegetation productivity level over the 29-year period.

When 2013–2018 is considered as a whole, NPP during this period was the most stable, with the lowest NPP range, CV and FW slope of the three intervals compared to 1990–2000 according to ranking (Table 1 ). The FW slope in 2001–2012 was negative (Fig.  5 , R 2  = 0.89), indicating that NPP in 2001–2012 decreased as EI increased, and vegetation continued to gradually degrade alongside improvements to environmental conditions. When 2013–2018 is considered as two distinct stages, 2013–2015 and 2016–2018, the FW slopes in 2013–2015 and 2016–2018 were positive, but non-significant (Fig.  5 , R 2  = 0.04 and 0.13). According to the ranks in the different time intervals, ecosystem stability was the same in 2013–2015 and 2016–2018 (Table 1 ). The least stable stage was 1990–2000 (Table 1 ).

NPP stability by regressing de–trended NPP in the different time intervals against the environmental index (EI) calculated as the yearly mean de–trended NPP.

When 2013–2018 is considered in two stages, 2013–2015 and 2016–2018, ecological management significantly decreased the risk of low NPP, with the lowest probability of NPP failure (< 10th percentile) at 3.30% and 3.00% in 2013–2015 and 2016–2018, respectively, compared to 5.35% in 1990–2000 (Table 2 ), especially in parts one and three (Table 2 ). The possibility of high NPP increased non-significantly (Table 2 ). When 2013–2018 is considered as a whole, ecological rehabilitation significantly decreased the risk of low NPP (Table 2 ), indicating that the average response of vegetation was favorable in 2013–2018 (i.e., highest EI), compared to 1990–2000.

Over the entire basin, vegetation was more resistant to unfavorable conditions in 2013–2018, as indicated by a higher minimum NPP potential (0.30 gC/m 2 ), than in 2001–2012 (0.10 gC/m 2 ) and 1990–2000 (0.16 gC/m 2 ), under the lowest EI (Table 2 ), especially in parts one, two and four. Minimum and maximum NPP potentials increased briefly and significantly in 2013–2015 compared to 1990–2000, but decreased precipitously in 2016–2018. This suggests that the implementation of ecosystem rehabilitation projects decreased the probability of low NPP, but with the possibility of ongoing fluctuations.

Ecosystem resilience

Ecosystem resilience in 2013–2018 was highest when compared to 1990–2012 (Fig.  6 a), with the highest NPP stability, mean NPP, and NPP resistance, especially in part one (Fig.  6 d), where the average ratio of the four indicators was highest in 2013–2018. When 2013–2018 is considered in two stages, 2013–2015 and 2016–2018, ecosystem resilience in 2016–2018 was lowest when compared to other time intervals (Fig.  6 b), especially in part one (Fig.  6 e). Ecosystem resilience in 2001–2012 was lowest when compared to 1990–2000 and 2013–2018 (Fig.  6 a), with the lowest mean NPP, NPP stability, NPP resistance and maximum NPP potential, especially in part two (Fig.  6 c). Therefore, areas in part one were most affected by ecological restoration projects.

Summaries of NPP resilience in 1990–2000, 2001–2012, 2013–2015, 2016–2018, and 2013–2018, in the different regions. Values represent the ratio of the NPP performance at each time interval to the maximum. NPP stability is the average ratio of four stability metrics (see Table 1 ). NPP resistance is the ratio of minimum NPP potential (see Table 2 ).

Resilience assessment method of desert riparian forest ecosystems

The resilience of desert riparian forest ecosystems under the stresses of extreme drought and ecological engineering has been ignored by scholars. Thus far, no suitable method to assess the resilience of desert riparian forest ecosystems had been proposed. Building on the work of Li et al. 2 , this innovative research applied a comparative analysis of NPP resilience to the desert riparian forest before and after the construction of ecological engineering projects. We proposed and implemented an NPP resilience assessment framework, which quantified four core aspects of long-term NPP dynamics: absolute NPP, NPP stability, NPP resistance, and maximum NPP potential. The framework allowed a better integration of resilience and stability metrics into desert riparian forest ecosystem performance assessments based on long-term NPP dynamics and provided a strong foundation for the long-term comparison of ecological engineering approaches. In this paper, the framework successfully identified NPP-specific resilience responses to the implementation of ecological rehabilitation projects.

The impact of climate change on resilience

An analysis of the correlation between NPP and air temperature, precipitation, sunshine duration, and light intensity was conducted (Table 3 ). The results show that only the correlation between NPP and sunshine duration was significant in the Tarim River Basin, and non-significant with other climatic factors. However, there was no obvious increase or decrease in annual sunshine duration (R 2  = 0.04) and NPP (R 2  = 0.03) in 1990–2015 (Supplementary Figure  S2 ). Therefore, we do not believe that a change in sunshine hours plays a dominant role in NPP and ecosystem resilience.

The impact on resilience of water quantity change used for natural vegetation growth

The vegetation in the Tarim River Basin desert riparian forest is composed of trees dominated by Populus euphratica , shrubs dominated by Tamarix ramosissima and herbaceous plant. The occurrence of young Populus euphratica forests is limited to the flood plain and near the river course 43 , and the number is very small, Most are mature and over-mature Populus euphratica 44 . Therefore, in this paper, the response of the resilience of young Populus euphratica on ecological rehabilitation projects can be neglected.

The vegetation in the Tarim River Basin desert riparian forest has declined considerably under the stress of long-term extreme drought 31 , 32 . To restore this seriously damaged ecosystem, the local government has implemented a series of ecological management projects 18 . Ecological engineering has varied water management and allocation in the basin, which has made the groundwater depth shallower in the lower reaches of the main stream of the Tarim River (Supplementary Figure  S4 ) 41 . The growth of vegetation is mainly influenced by the groundwater 44 . As the groundwater depth became shallower, average NPP and ecological resilience increased significantly in 2013–2018 (Figs.  2 , 6 ), which showed that the groundwater depth significantly affected the ecological resilience. The ecological restoration benefits of these projects are remarkable 45 . Runoff distribution at the point where the Aksu River, the Kashigr River, the Yarkand River, and the Hotan River flow into the Tarim River, and ecological water conveyance in the lower reaches of the Tarim River exhibited increasing trends in 1990–2018 (Supplementary Figure  S3 (a, b)), with the exception of 2014. Water consumption for production and urban living decreased slightly but non-significantly (R 2  = 0.07) in the main stream of the Tarim River in 1990–2016 (Supplementary Figure  S3 (c)), and the amount of water used for ecological protection increased in the same period (Supplementary Figure  S3 (d)), with the exception of 2014. Moreover, as of 2015, no ecological water diversion projects have been implemented in the tributaries of the Tarim River, but such projects have been implemented in the lower reaches of the main stream of the Tarim River 46 . The effects of existing projects reached their peak in 2013–2015, after which the effects weakened, and vegetation began to rapidly degrade. This may be one reason for the decline in NPP in 2016–2018. Moreover, there is a lag in the effect of ecological water delivery on the growth of surface vegetation, and ecological water delivery in 2014–2015 only started in summer and missed the vegetation growing season, which may be another reason for the decline in NPP in 2016–2018. In general, increased environmental flow has fostered the rehabilitation of degraded riparian forests. Since 2016, the Tarim River Basin Authority has also carried out ecological water transfer projects in the middle and lower reaches of the tributaries of the Tarim River. Cumulative water discharge from these projects was 52.7 million m 3 in 2016, 120.8 million m 3 in 2017, 152.4 million m 3 in 2018, and 80 million m 3 in 2019 47 , 48 . We assume that, if ecological water delivery can be continually implemented in conjunction with the vegetation growing season, the restoration of vegetation will continue.

Conclusions

The focus of desert riparian forest ecosystem resilience studies must move away from the effects of a variety of comprehensive restoration projects to the prominent influence of single projects within the context of comprehensive projects, such as ecological water conveyance. Our proposed framework of integrating NPP, NPP temporal stability, NPP resistance to unfavorable conditions, and NPP potential to maximize NPP to optimal conditions provides insights for comparing the NPP resilience of different forms of ecological water delivery. Mean NPP, NPP resistance, NPP stability, and maximum NPP potential were greatest in 2013–2018, and especially in 2013–2015. The decline in NPP in 2016–2018 may be due to a lag in the effect of ecological water delivery on the growth of surface vegetation, as ecological water delivery in 2014–2015 started in summer and missed the vegetation growing season. Therefore, the continuing implementation of reasonable water transfer is likely to further promote ecological recovery.

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Acknowledgements

This study was financially supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA20100303), Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region "Tianshan Mountain Cedar Project" Technology Innovation Leadership Programme (No. 2020XS11), the Guangdong Foundation for Program of Science and Technology Research (2020B1111530001), the Special Foundation for National Science and Technology Basic Research Program of China (2019FY100203), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1903114).

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A.F. wrote the manuscript and substantially revised the text. Y.L. and C.Z. created some of the figures. W.L. drafted the work. Y.C. was involved in the analysis of data. H.H. was involved in the acquisition of data. Y.W. and F.S. contributed to the analysis and interpretation of data. H.Z. collected some of the climate data. X.H. edited the format of the article.

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Fu, A., Li, W., Chen, Y. et al. The effects of ecological rehabilitation projects on the resilience of an extremely drought-prone desert riparian forest ecosystem in the Tarim River Basin, Xinjiang, China. Sci Rep 11 , 18485 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-96742-5

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Enabling America: Assessing the Role of Rehabilitation Science and Engineering (1997)

Chapter: 6 disability and the environment, 6 disability and the environment.

In the past four decades the prevailing wisdom about the cause of disability has undergone profound change. Previous models of absolute determinism that viewed pathology and disability interchangeably and that excluded consideration of the environment have been replaced by models in which disability is seen to result from the interaction between the characteristics of individuals with potentially disabling conditions and the characteristics of their environment.

The 1991 version of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) model of disability did not explicitly identify the environment as a factor in disability. Building upon the model presented in Chapter 3 , this chapter considers in some depth the ways that the environment can be either enabling or disabling for a person with a pathological condition.

The chapter describes in greater detail how cultural norms affect the way that the physical and social environments of the individual are constituted and then focus on a few—but not all—of the elements of the environment to provide examples of how the environment affects the degree of disability. The overall message of this chapter is that the amount of disability is not determined by levels of pathologies, impairments, or functional limitations, but instead is a function of the kind of services provided to people with disabling conditions and the extent to which the physical, built environment is accommodating or not accommodating to the particular disabling condition. Because societies differ in their willingness to provide the available technology and, indeed, their willingness to provide the research funds to improve that technology, disability ulti-

mately must been seen as a function of society, not of a physical or medical process.

As described in Chapter 3 , disability is not inherent in an individual but is, rather, a relational concept—a function of the interaction of the person with the social and physical environments. The amount of disability that a person experiences depends on both the existence of a potentially disabling condition (or limitation) and the environment in which the person lives. For any given limitation (i.e., potential disability), the amount of actual disability experienced by a person will depend on the nature of the environment, that is, whether the environment is positive and enabling (and serves to compensate for the condition, ameliorate the limitation, or facilitate one's functional activities) or negative and disabling (and serves to worsen the condition, enhance the limitation, or restrict one's functional activities).

Human competencies interact with the environment in a dynamic reciprocal relationship that shapes performance. When functional limitations exist, social participation is possible only when environmental support is present. If there is no environmental support, the distance between what the person can do and what the environment affords creates a barrier that limits social participation.

The physical and social environments comprise factors external to the individual, including family, institutions, community, geography, and the political climate. Added to this conceptualization of environment is one's intrapersonal or psychological environment, which includes internal states, beliefs, cognition, expectancies and other mental states. Thus, environmental factors must be seen to include the natural environment, the built environment, culture, the economic system, the political system, and psychological factors. The categories and factors in these tables are not exhaustive and are provided as examples of the very broad and pervasive influence of a person's environment. This chapter illustrates how each of these environmental factors can have an impact on disability.

Impact of the Physical Environment on the Disabling Process

As discussed in Chapter 3 , the environmental mat may be conceived of as having two major parts: the physical environment and the social and psychological environments. The physical environment may be further subdivided conceptually into the natural environment and the built environment. Both affect the extent to which a disabling conditions will be experienced by the person as a disability.

Three types of attributes of the physical environment need to be in place to support human performance (Corcoran and Gitlin, 1997). The

TABLE 6-1 Some Enabling and Disabling Factors in the Physical Environment

first attribute is object availability. Objects must be in a location that is useful, at a level where they can be retrieved, and must be organized to support the performance of the activity. Neither a sink that is too high for a wheelchair user nor a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) that is kept at a hotel reception desk is available. The second attribute is accessibility. Accessibility is related to the ability of people to get to a place or to use a device. Accessibility permits a wheelchair user to ride a bus or a braille user to read a document. The third attribute is the availability of sensory stimulation regarding the environment. Sensory stimulation, which can include visual, tactile, or auditory cues, serves as a signal to promote responses. Examples of such cues could include beeping microwaves, which elicit responses from people without hearing impairments, or bumpy surfaces on subway platforms, which tell users with visual impairments to change their location.

Table 6-1 presents some examples of enabling and disabling factors in the natural environment.

The Natural Environment

The natural environment may have a major impact on whether a limitation is disabling. For example, a person who has severe allergies to ragweed or mold, which can trigger disabling asthma, can be free of that condition in climates where those substances do not grow. The physical conditions still exist, but in one environment they may become disabling and in another environment they might not. Another example might be that a person who has limited walking ability will be less disabled in a flat geographical location such as Chicago than he or she would be in a hilly location such as Pittsburgh, although the person would also be more

disabled in both places during the winter than during the summer. Thus, the natural environment, including topography and climate, affect whether or to what degree a functional limitation will be disabling.

The Built Environment

The physical environment is a complex interaction of built-in objects (Corcoran and Gitlin, 1997). Built objects are created and constructed by humans and vary widely in terms of their complexity, size, and purpose. Built objects are created for utilitarian reasons and also for an outlet for creativity. For instance, built objects such as dishwashers and computers have the potential to enhance human performance or to create barriers.

Assistive Technology

Another aspect of the built environment is assistive technology. The Technology-Related Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1988 (Public Law 100-407), also known as the Tech Act, defines assistive technology devices as "any item, piece of equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially off-the-shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of an individual with a disability." Thus, assistive technology affects the level to which a functional limitation is disabling. As an illustration, a person whose visual impairment can be corrected by corrective lenses does not technically have a disability. There are numerous other examples of how the environment affects the amount of disability associated with any functional limitation through the use of assistive technology. A person with a hearing impairment who has a TDD can make phone calls to other people who also possess such devices. If there is a relay service, in which an operator translates from TDD to voice telephone, the person who owns a TDD can call anyone. In these situations the impairment does not cause a disability. This example, however, illustrates the fact that it is the intersection of technology and social factors that can be more enabling than just the technology itself. Other examples are that a person who has a speech impairment can "speak" using a computer voice synthesizer or that people with low vision or blindness can read office memoranda or correspondence if he or she has the right computer software. These technologies do not always need to be complex: a person who uses a wheelchair and who works in an office could work effectively if the simple technology of an adjustable desk allowed the desk to be raised to allow the wheelchair to fit under the desk.

Through the passage of Public Law 100-407, the federal government affirmed the importance and benefits of assistive technology for the mil-

lions of U.S. citizens with disabilities who need this technology to make their lives more functional and independent. The goals of this law have been operationalized through the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) with an annual budget of $39,065,414 (fiscal year 95 allocations for state technology assistance) for the 50 states and U.S. territories that are participating in this program. However, despite the money spent implementing the Tech Act amendments of 1994, many key issues still remain, according to a 1995 report on Technology and People with Disabilities prepared for the U.S. Congress by the Office of Technology Assessment. The report states that, in spite of states' technology-related assistance programs carried out under the Tech Act, there remains ''a need to support systems change and advocacy activities to assist States to develop and implement consumer-responsive, comprehensive state-wide programs of technology-related assistance for individuals with disabilities of all ages." Even with these limitations, more individuals than ever before are using assistive technology to compensate for their disabling conditions and enhance the environment in which they live and work.

Universal Design

It is frequently the case that the built environment can be modified permanently so that functional limitations become less disabling and personal or temporary assistive technologies are not needed. For example, the presence of ramps increases the ability of wheelchair users to get around and thus decreases the degree to which the condition that led to their use of a wheelchair is disabling. White and colleagues, (1995) found an increased frequency of trips out of the house and into the community for two-thirds of wheelchair users after ramps were installed in their houses. Wider doors, lower bathroom sinks, and grab bars are other examples of modifications to built environments that decrease the degree to which a building itself may be disabling. Lighting patterns and the materials used for walls and ceilings affect the visual ability of all people, even though the largest impact may be on improving the ability of the person who is hard of hearing to hear in a particular room or the ability of a person who is deaf to see an interpreter or other signers.

Universal design is based on the principle that the built environments and instruments used for everyday living can be ergonomically designed so that everyone can use them. Traditionally, architecture and everyday products have been designed for market appeal, with a greater focus on fashion rather than function. However, as the population of older adults and people with disabling conditions increases, there has been a greater trend toward universal design.

Today, with the influence of consumer demand and through thoughtful disability policy, greater emphasis is placed on the development of built materials that are ergonomically friendly to users, regardless of their abilities. Universal design is an enabling factor in the environment that allows the user with a functional limitation to become more independent, yet without an additional cost or stigma attached to the particular product. For example, people who were deaf previously had to purchase an expensive closed-captioning unit to attach to their television sets to view closed-captioned programs. Today, as a result of new federal legislation, all new television sets are manufactured with a closed-captioning microchip that allows any user access to broadcast closed captioning. Thus, it is useful not only for deaf users but also for immigrants wishing to learn English, older individuals who are starting to lose their audio acuity, or a person watching a late-night talk show in the bedroom who does not want to wake his or her partner.

In all of these ways, the environment affects the degree to which a functional limitation is disabling for a person. However, decisions about the use of technology or built environments are social decisions. The next major section considers the effects of the social and psychological environments on the extent to which a particular functional limitation will be disabling or not.

Modifying the Environment

External environmental modifications can take many forms. These can include assistive devices, alterations of a physical structure, object modification, and task modification (Corcoran and Gitlin, 1997). Table 62 gives some examples of these.

The role of environmental modification as a prevention strategy has not been systematically evaluated, and its role in preventing secondary conditions and disability that accompany a poor fit between human abilities and the environment should be studied. Environmental strategies may ease the burden of care experienced by a family member who has the responsibility of providing the day-to-day support for an individual who does not have the capacity for social participation and independent living in the community. These environmental modifications may well be an effort at primary prevention because the equipment may provide a safety net and prevent disabling conditions that can occur through lifting and transfer of individuals who may not be able to do it by themselves.

Rehabilitation must place emphasis on addressing the environmental needs of people with disabling conditions. Environmental strategies can be effective in helping people function independently and not be limited in their social participation, in work, leisure or social interactions as a spouse, parent, friend, or coworker.

TABLE 6-2 Examples of Environmental Modification

Impact of the Social and Psychological Environments on the Enabling-Disabling Process

The social environment is conceptualized to include cultural, political, and economic factors. The psychological environment is the intrapersonal environment. This section examines how both affect the disabling process. Table 6-3 provides an overview of some of the points to be made below.

Culture and the Disabling Process

Culture affects the enabling-disabling process at each stage; it also affects the transition from one stage to another. This section defines culture and then considers the ways in which it affects each stage of the process.

Definition of Culture

Definition of culture includes both material culture (things and the rules for producing them) and nonmaterial culture (norms or rules, values, symbols, language, ideational systems such as science or religion, and arts such as dance, crafts, and humor). Nonmaterial culture is so comprehensive that it includes everything from conceptions of how many days a week has or how one should react to pain (Zborowski, 1952) to when one should seek medical care (Zola, 1966) or whether a hermaphroditic person is an abomination, a saint, or a mistake (Geertz, 1983). Cultures also specify punishments for rule-breaking, exceptions to rules, and occasions when exceptions are permitted. The role of nonmaterial culture for humans has been compared to the role of instincts for animals or to the role of a road map for a traveler. It provides the knowledge that permits people to be able to function in both old and new situations (Geertz, 1973).

Both the material and nonmaterial aspects of cultures and subcultures are relevant to the enabling-disabling process. However, this section focuses primarily on the role of nonmaterial culture in that process.

Cultures have an impact on the types of pathologies that will occur as well as on their recognition as pathologies. The former case is the realm of epidemiological studies and so is not relevant here. (Albrecht [1992] has discussed the relationship between culture, social structure, and the types of disabilities that arise from the types of pathologies most likely to be present in those societies.) However, if a pathology is not recognized by the culture (in medical terms, diagnosed), the person does not begin to progress toward disability (or cure).

TABLE 6-3 Enabling and Disabling Factors in the Social and Psychological Environments

Pathway from Pathology to Impairment to Functional Limitation

Culture can affect the likelihood of the transition from pathology to impairment. A subculture, such as that of well-educated Americans, in which health advice is valued, in which breast cancer screening timetables are followed, and in which early detection is likely, is one in which breast tumors are less likely to move from pathology to impairments. In a subculture in which this is not true, one would likely see more impairments arising from the pathologies.

Cultures can also speed up or slow down the movement from pathology to impairment, either for the whole culture or for subgroups for

whom the pathway is more or less likely to be used. For example, in Bangladesh, where Muslim rules of purdah apply, women are less likely to seek health care because it means a man must be available to escort them in public, which is unlikely if the males are breadwinners and must give up income to escort them, and women are also less likely to seek health care if the provider is male. Thus, their culture lessens the likelihood that their pathology will be cured and therefore increases the likelihood that the pathology will become an impairment.

Culture clearly has an impact on whether a particular impairment will become a functional limitation. Impairments do not become limiting automatically. Rather, cultures affect the perception that the impairment is in fact the cause of the limitation, and they affect the perception that the impairment is in fact limiting.

If a society believes that witchcraft is the reason that a woman cannot have children, medical facts about her body become irrelevant. She may in fact have fibroids, but if that culture sees limitation as coming from the actions of a person, there is no recognition of a linkage between the impairment and the functional limitation. Rather, any enabling-disabling process must go through culturally prescribed processes relating to witches; medically or technologically based enabling-disabling processes will not be acceptable.

If the culture does not recognize that an impairment is limiting, then it is not. For example, hearing losses were not equivalent to functional limitations in Martha's Vineyard, because "everyone there knew sign language" (Groce, 1985). Or, if everyone has a backache, it is not defined by the culture as limiting (Koos, 1954). There are many cross-cultural examples. In a culture in which nose piercing is considered necessary for beauty, possible breathing problems resulting from that pathology and impairment would be unlikely to be recognized as being limiting. Or, in a perhaps more extreme case, female circumcision is an impairment that could lead to functional limitation (inability to experience orgasm), but if the whole point is to prevent female sexual arousal and orgasm, then the functional limitation will not be recognized within that culture but will only be recognized by those who come from other cultures. In all these examples, if the culture does not recognize the impairment, the rehabilitation process is irrelevant—there is no need to rehabilitate a physical impairment if there is no recognized functional limitation associated with it.

Pathway from Functional Limitation to Disability

Perhaps the most important consideration for this chapter is the ways in which the transition from functional limitation to disability is affected by culture. A condition that is limiting must be defined as problematic—by the

person and by the culture—for it to become a disability. Whether a functional limitation is seen as being disabling will depend on the culture. The culture defines the roles to be played and the actions and capacities necessary to satisfy that role. If certain actions are not necessary for a role, then the person who is limited in ability to perform those actions does not have a disability. For example, a professor who has arthritis in her hands but who primarily lectures in the classroom, dictates material for a secretary to type, and manages research assistants may not be disabled in her work role by the arthritis. In this case, the functional limitation would not become a disability. For a secretary who would be unable to type, on the other hand, the functional limitation would become a disability in the work sphere.

A disability can exist without functional limitation, as in the case of a person with a facial disfigurement (Institute of Medicine, 1991, p. 81) living in cultures such as that in the United States, whose standards of beauty cannot encompass such physical anomalies (Hahn, 1988). Culture is thus relevant to the existence of disabilities: it defines what is considered disabling. Additionally, culture determines in which roles a person might be disabled by a particular functional limitation. For example, a farmer in a small village may have no disability in work roles caused by a hearing loss; however, that person may experience disabilities in family or other personal relationships. On the other hand, a profoundly deaf, signing person married to another profoundly deaf, signing person may have no disability in family-related areas, although there may be a disability in work-related areas. Thus, culture affects not just whether there is a disability caused by the functional limitation but also where in the person's life the disability will occur.

Culture is therefore part of the mat; as such, it can protect a person from the disabling process and can slow it down or speed it up. Culture, however, has a second function in the disabling process.

As discussed above, there is a direct path from culture to disability; the following section presents the indirect paths. The indirect function acts by influencing other aspects of personal and social organization in a society. That is, the culture of a society or a subculture influences the types of personality or intrapsychic processes that are acceptable and influences the institutions that make up the social organization of a society. These institutions include the economic system, the family system, the educational system, the health care system, and the political system. In all these areas, culture sets the boundaries for what is debatable or negotiable and what is not. Each of these societal institutions also affects the degree to which functional limitations will be experienced by individuals as disabling.

All of the ways in which intrapsychic processes or societal institutions affect the enabling-disabling process cannot be considered here.

However, the remainder of this section presents some examples of how the enabling-disabling process can be affected by three factors: economic, political, and psychological (see also Table 6-3 ).

Economic Factors and Disability

Chapter 2 described the economic impact of disability and rehabilitation on society. This section summarizes how economic factors affect the disability-rehabilitation process and the expression of disability.

There is clear evidence that people with few economic assets are more likely to acquire pathologies that may be disabling. This is true even in advanced economies and in economies with greater levels of income equality. The impact of absolute or relative economic deprivation on the onset of pathology crosscuts conditions with radically different etiologies, encompassing infectious diseases and most common chronic conditions. Similarly, economic status affects whether a pathology will proceed to impairment. Examples include such phenomena as a complete lack of access to or a delay in presentation for medical care for treatable conditions (e.g., untreated breast cancer is more likely to require radical mastectomy) or inadequate access to state-of-the-art care (e.g., persons with rheumatoid arthritis may experience a worsened range of motion and joint function because disease-modifying drugs are not used by most primary care physicians). In turn, a lack of resources can adversely affect the ability of an individual to function with a disabling condition. For example, someone with an amputated leg who has little money or poor health insurance may not be able to obtain a proper prosthesis, in which case the absence of the limb may then force the individual to withdraw from jobs that require these capacities.

Similarly, economic resources can limit the options and abilities of someone who requires personal assistance services or certain physical accommodations. The individual also may not be able to access the appropriate rehabilitation services to reduce the degree of potential disability either because they cannot afford the services themselves or cannot afford the cost of specialized transportation services.

The economic status of the community may have a more profound impact than the status of the individual on the probability that disability will result from impairment or other disabling conditions. Research on employment among persons with disabilities indicates, for example, that such persons in communities undergoing rapid economic expansion will be much more likely to secure jobs than those in communities with depressed or contracting labor markets. Similarly, wealthy communities are more able to provide environmental supports such as accessible public transportation and public buildings or support payments for personal assistance benefits.

An earlier section of this chapter described how community can be defined in terms of the microsystem (the local area of the person with the disabling conditions), the mesosystem (the area beyond the immediate neighborhood, perhaps encompassing the town), and the macrosystem (a region or nation). Clearly, the economic status of the region or nation as a whole may play a more important role than the immediate microenvironment for certain kinds of disabling conditions. For example, access to employment among people with disabling conditions is determined by a combination of the national and regional labor markets, but the impact of differences across small neighborhoods is unlikely to be very great. In contrast, the economic status of a neighborhood will play a larger role in determining whether there are physical accommodations in the built environment that would facilitate mobility for people with impairments or functional limitations, or both.

Finally, economic factors also can affect disability by creating incentives to define oneself as disabled. For example, disability compensation programs often pay nearly as much as many of the jobs available to people with disabling conditions, especially given that such programs also provide health insurance and many lower-paying jobs do not. Moreover, disability compensation programs often make an attempt to return to work risky, since health insurance is withdrawn soon after earnings begin and procuring a job with good health insurance benefits is often difficult in the presence of disabling conditions. Thus, disability compensation programs are said to significantly reduce the number of people with impairments who work by creating incentives to leave the labor force and also creating disincentives to return to work.

Political Factors and Disability

The political system, through its role in designing public policy, can and does have a profound impact on the extent to which impairments and other potentially disabling conditions will result in disability, as a few examples from recent legislation may indicate. Until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the civil rights legislation for people with disabilities, employers were free to suppose that people with disabling conditions did not have the capacity to take on certain, specific jobs. With the passage of this legislation the onus shifted, so that such people were legally entitled to be treated as any applicant: employers had to assume that an individual applying for a job did have the capacity to do that job's essential features even if that capacity could only be achieved by reasonable accommodations. Before the passage of ADA it was legal to deny individuals access to work because they could not do the auxiliary aspects of a job, even though they had the capacity to do a

job's essential features. Thus, an applicant for a clerical position could be denied the job on the basis of an inability to make coffee, for example, even if he or she could use a computer and type. The ADA also ensures equal access to public services, housing, transportation, and systems of communication, all with the goal of improving the ability of people with disabling conditions to function in all aspects of daily life.

There is much question as to the vigor with which the ADA has been and will be enforced, but there is no question that if it is well enforced it will profoundly improve the prospects of people with disabling conditions for achieving a much fuller participation in society, in effect reducing the font of disability in work and every other domain of human activity.

Other public policies affect the extent to which the goals of the ADA will be achieved. The extent to which the built environment impedes people with disabling conditions is a function of public funds spent to make buildings and transportation systems accessible and public laws requiring the private sector to make these accommodations in nonpublic buildings. The extent to which people with impairments and functional limitations will participate in the labor force is a function of the funds spent in training programs, in the way that health care is financed, and in the ways that job accommodations are mandated and paid for. Similarly, for those with severe disabling conditions, access to personal assistance services may be required for participation in almost all activities, and such access is dependent on the availability of funding for such services through either direct payment or tax credits. A final example—one very germane to this report—of how public policy influences the extent to which people with disabling conditions will be able to function in everyday life is the level of public investment in research of all kinds, from discovering the mechanisms by which disabling pathologies arise through developing assistive technologies and finding out the best way of financing their distribution.

Thus, the potential mechanisms of public policy are diverse, ranging from the direct effects of funds from the public purse, to creating tax incentives so that private parties may finance efforts themselves, to the passage of civil rights legislation and providing adequate enforcement. The sum of the mechanisms used can and does have a profound impact on the functioning of people with disabling conditions.

Psychological Factors and Disability

This section focuses on the impact of psychological factors on how disability and disabling conditions are perceived and experienced. The argument in support of the influence of the psychological environment is

congruent with the key assumption in this chapter that the physical and social environments are fundamentally important to the expression of disability.

Several constructs can be used to describe one's psychological environment, including personal resources, personality traits, and cognition. These constructs affect both the expression of disability and an individual's ability to adapt to and react to it. An exhaustive review of the literature on the impact of psychological factors on disability is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, for illustrative purposes four psychological constructs will be briefly discussed: three cognitive processes (self-efficacy beliefs, psychological control, and coping patterns) and one personality disposition (optimism). Each section provides examples illustrating the influence of these constructs on the experience of disability.

Social Cognitive Processes

Cognition consists of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and ways of viewing the world, others, and ourselves. Three interrelated cognitive processes have been selected to illustrate the direct and interactive effects of cognition on disability. These are self-efficacy beliefs, psychological control, and coping patterns.

Self-Efficacy Beliefs Self-efficacy beliefs are concerned with whether or not a person believes that he or she can accomplish a desired outcome (Bandura, 1977, 1986). Beliefs about one's abilities affect what a person chooses to do, how much effort is put into a task, and how long an individual will endure when there are difficulties. Self-efficacy beliefs also affect the person's affective and emotional responses. Under conditions of high self-efficacy, a person's outlook and mental health status will remain positive even under stressful and aversive situations. Under conditions of low self-efficacy, mental health may suffer even when environmental conditions are favorable. The findings from several studies provide evidence of improved behavioral and functional outcomes under efficacious conditions for individuals with and without disabling conditions (Maddux, 1996).

How do self-efficacy beliefs affect disability? Following a stroke, for example, an individual with high self-efficacy beliefs will be more likely to feel and subsequently exert effort toward reducing the disability that could accompany any stroke-related impairment or functional limitation. The highly self-efficacious individual would work harder at tasks (i.e., in physical or speech therapy), be less likely to give up when there is a relapse (i.e., continue therapy sessions even when there is no immediate

improvement), and in general, feel more confident and optimistic about recovery and rehabilitation. These self-efficacy beliefs will thus mediate the relationship between impairment and disability such that the individual would experience better functional outcomes and less disability.

Psychological Control Psychological control, or control beliefs, are akin to self-efficacy beliefs in that they are thoughts, feelings, and beliefs regarding one's ability to exert control or change a situation. A voluminous amount of literature has been written on the beneficial aspects of control and the need that people have for control over their lives. The research suggests that self-generated feelings of control improve outcomes for diverse groups of individuals with physical disabilities and chronic illnesses (Taylor et al., 1991).

The onset of a disabling condition is often followed by a loss or a potential loss of control. What is most critical for adaptive functioning is how a person responds to this and what efforts the person puts forth to regain control. Perceptions of control will influence whether a disabling condition is seen as stressful and consequently whether it becomes disabling.

Individuals with disabling conditions who perceive that they have control over the management of their health, rehabilitation, and related outcomes will fare better. Under conditions of perceived lack of control, people with disabling conditions are not likely to engage in behaviors (e.g., attend therapy or advocate for civil rights) to reduce disabling conditions and improve functional outcomes. Under these circumstances, the relationship between impairment and disability becomes circular. Once disability increases, so may the level of impairment and functional limitation as a result of not pursuing rehabilitation therapy. Conversely, under conditions of perceived control, a person is likely to engage in behaviors that will subsequently reduce disability. Once disability is reduced, one's level of impairment may subsequently be reduced.

Under conditions of perceived loss of control, the individual may actively cope to restore control through primary control efforts (e.g., engaging in behaviors directed at changing the external environment to fit the needs of the person) and secondary control efforts (e.g., engaging in thoughts and actions directed at changing one's views of self through mechanisms such as setting goals and adjusting expectations). An example of primary control would be a person with decreased mobility moving from a building with no elevators to a building with elevators. An example of secondary control would be when this individual changed his or her beliefs about the importance of mobility. What is relevant in this case is not whether the individual has actual control but whether the person perceives that he or she has control.

Coping Patterns Coping patterns refer to behavioral and cognitive efforts to manage specific internal or external demands that tax or exceed a person's resources to adjust (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Generally, coping has been studied within the context of stress (Young, 1992; Zautra and Manne, 1992). Having a disabling condition may create stress and demand additional efforts because of interpersonal or environmental conditions that are not supportive.

Several coping strategies may be used when a person confronts a stressful situation (Stewart and Knight, 1991; Affleck et al., 1992). These strategies may include the following: seeking information, cognitive restructuring, emotional expression, catastrophizing, wish-fulfilling fantasizing, threat minimization, relaxation, distraction, and self-blame.

The beneficial effects of certain coping efforts on adaptive and functional outcomes among individuals with disabling conditions have been demonstrated in several studies (Revenson and Felton, 1989; Kleinke, 1991; Affleck et al., 1992; Brown et al., 1993; Hanson et al., 1993; Zea et al., in press). In general, among people with disabling conditions, there is evidence that passive, avoidant, emotion-focused cognitive strategies (e.g., catastrophizing and wishful thinking) are associated with poorer outcomes, whereas active, problem-focused attempts to redefine thoughts to become more positive are associated with favorable outcomes (Affleck et al., 1992; Young, 1992; Zautra and Manne, 1992; Brown et al., 1993; Hanson et al., 1993). An adaptive coping pattern would involve the use of primary and secondary control strategies, as discussed earlier. What seems useful is the flexibility to change strategies and to have several strategies available (Stewart and Knight, 1991; Dunkel-Schetter et al., 1992).

In one study, Jarama (1996) investigated the role of active coping on mental health and vocational outcomes among people with diverse disabling conditions. The findings from that study indicated that active coping is a significant predictor of mental health and employment-related outcomes.

Under conditions in which individuals with disabling conditions use active and problem-solving coping strategies to manage their life circumstances, there will be better functional outcomes across several dimensions (e.g., activities of daily living, and employment) than when passive coping strategies are used.

An important component in the coping process is appraisal. Appraisals involve beliefs about one's ability to deal with a situation (Young, 1992; Zautra and Manne, 1992). Take, for example, two people with identical levels of impairment. The appraisal that the impairment is disabling will result in more disability than the appraisal that the impairment is not disabling, regardless of the objective type and level of impairment. Appraisal is related to self-efficacy in the sense that one's thoughts and cog-

nition control how one reacts to a potentially negative situation. When a person feels that he or she can execute a desired outcome (e.g., learn how to use crutches for mobility), the person is more likely to do just that. Similarly, under conditions in which an individual appraises his or her disabling conditions and other life circumstances as manageable, the person will use coping strategies that will lead to a manageable life (i.e., better functional outcomes).

Personality Disposition

Optimism is a personality disposition that is included in this chapter as an example of a personality disposition or trait that can mediate how disabling conditions are experienced. Several other interrelated personality factors could be discussed (e.g., self-esteem, hostility, and Type A personality). Optimism (in contrast to pessimism) is used for illustrative purposes because it relates to many other personality traits. Optimism is the general tendency to view the world, others, and oneself favorably. People with an optimistic orientation rather than a pessimistic orientation fare better across several dimensions. Optimists tend to have better self-esteem and less hostility toward others and tend to use more adaptive coping strategies than pessimists.

In a study of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass surgery, Scheier at al. (1989) found that optimism was a significant predictor of coping efforts and of recovery from surgery. Individuals with optimistic orientations had a faster rate of recovery during hospitalization and a faster rate of return to normal life activities after discharge. There was also a strong relationship between optimism and postsurgical quality of life 6 months later, with optimists doing better than pessimists. Optimism may reduce symptoms and improve adjustment to illness, because it is associated with the use of effective coping strategies. This same analogy can be extended to impairment. Optimistic individuals are more likely to cope with an impairment by using the active adaptive coping strategies discussed earlier. These in turn will lead to reduced disability.

Summary Four constructs of the psychological environment (i.e., self-efficacy beliefs, psychological control, coping patterns, and optimism) were highlighted to illustrate the influence of these factors on disability and the enabling-disabling process. These psychological constructs are interrelated and are influenced to a large extent by the external social and physical environments. The reason for the inclusion of the psychological environment in this report is to assert that just as the physical and social environments can be changed to support people with disabling conditions, so can the psychological environment. In fact, voluminous empirical research sup-

ports the fact that psychological interventions directed at altering cognition lead to improved outcomes (i.e., achievement, interpersonal relationships, work productivity, and health) across diverse populations and dimensions. However, relatively little research has been directed at understanding the process by which the psychological environment can be enhanced for people with disabilities. This research is needed.

The Family and Disability

The family can be either an enabling or a disabling factor for a person with a disabling condition. Although most people have a wide network of friends, the networks of people with disabilities are more likely to be dominated by family members (Norris et al., 1990; Knox and Parmenter, 1993). Even among people with disabilities who maintain a large network of friends, family relationships often are most central and families often provide the main sources of support (Schultz and Decker, 1985; Brillhart, 1988). This support may be instrumental (errand-running), informational (providing advice or referrals), or emotional (giving love and support) (Clark and Rakowski, 1983; Croog et al., 1989; Norris et al., 1990).

Families can be enabling to people with functional limitations by providing such tangible services as housekeeping and transportation and by providing personal assistance in activities of daily living. Families can also provide economic support to help with the purchase of assistive technologies and to pay for personal assistance. Perhaps most importantly, they can provide emotional support. Emotional support is positively related to well-being across a number of conditions. In all of these areas, friends and neighbors can supplement the support provided by the family.

It is important to note, however, that families may also be disabling. Some families promote dependency. Others fatalistically accept functional limitations and conditions that are amenable to change with a supportive environment. In both of these situations, the person with the potentially disabling condition is not allowed to develop to his or her fullest potential. Families may also not provide needed environmental services and resources. For example, families of deaf children frequently do not learn to sign, in the process impeding their children's ability to communicate as effectively as possible. Similarly, some well-meaning families prematurely take over the household chores of people with angina, thereby limiting the opportunity for healthy exercise that can lead to recovery.

Current Research Efforts

As part of its general review and assessment of current rehabilitation-related research (e.g., abstracts from the various federal agencies, surveys

TABLE 6-4 Review of Abstracts Describing ''Disability" for How Environment Is Included in Study Design: Summary of Findings

of consumer groups, and focus groups), the committee made a concerted effort to identify and evaluate activities and areas of interest that focused on the environment as an independent variable, that is, where the focus is on the effects of the environment in causing disability.

Of the original sample of abstracts that were retrieved from Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects and from the other (non-Public Health Service) agencies and that were reviewed by the entire committee (a total of 388), 130 were identified as including some focus on "disability." These abstracts were subsequently reviewed further for their focus on the environment as a causal factor, that is, as an independent variable in a study that evaluated disability in some manner.

It was often difficult to assess the particular relevance of the environment in the individual studies. Those that did in fact seem to address the environment in some clear fashion were very small in number (see Table 6-4 ). The conclusion that can be drawn as a result of this qualitative assessment is that very little research focuses on the environment as an independent variable. Only 34 abstracts seemed to include any aspect of the environment as an independent variable.

Conclusions and Recommendations

This chapter has suggested that the environment and characteristics of the individual conjointly determine disability. This chapter has cited numerous examples of how the natural and built environments, the culture of society and its social and economic structures, and the intrapersonal processes of the individual affect whether disability arises from any particular medical condition. Table 6-5 reviews some of this information. It indicates not only what is known about the contribution each makes to the enabling-disabling process, but also where there are gaps in our knowledge. It shows that much research is needed in order to specify ways in which different aspects of environments contribute to this process. The importance of the environment in increasing or decreasing the font of disability is reflected in such recent legislation as the ADA, which mandates equal opportunity to participate in all dimensions of life and which requires reasonable accommodation in the environment to achieve that goal. The importance of the environment is also reflected in the published guidelines for funding of the two major federal research organizations concerned with disability: the National Institute of Health's NCMRR and the U.S. Department of Education's NIDRR.

Despite the growing recognition of the importance of the environment in determining the prevalence of disability, the committee could find relatively little research that explicitly focuses on the impact of the environment on disability. Even though environmental variables do appear in the research, they are seldom the independent variable. Moreover, in much of the research included in the total number of abstracts, the environmental focus is only a small part of a larger project or center grant. Accordingly, the true magnitude of the effort spent on environmental research is much less than even the relatively small total would indicate.

Table 6-5 presents a summary of what is known and what is unknown and needed in the way of information with respect to cultural, psychological, political, and economic factors that affect disability. In addition, the committee offers the following specific recommendations:

Recommendation 6.1 In accordance with the current understanding of the importance of the environment in causing disability, more research is needed to elucidate and clarify that relationship. Such clarification will facilitate the development of more and improved intervention strategies, both preventive and rehabilitative. More specifically, research is needed to:

TABLE 6-5 Rehabilitation Science and Engineering Needs in Disability

Recommendation 6.2 The composition of study sections at NIH and other agencies that have relevance to disability issues should be broadened to include the expertise and awareness that is reflected in the model of disability that is described in this report.

The most recent high-profile advocate for Americans with disabilities, actor Christopher Reeve, has highlighted for the public the economic and social costs of disability and the importance of rehabilitation. Enabling America is a major analysis of the field of rehabilitation science and engineering. The book explains how to achieve recognition for this evolving field of study, how to set priorities, and how to improve the organization and administration of the numerous federal research programs in this area.

The committee introduces the "enabling-disability process" model, which enhances the concepts of disability and rehabilitation, and reviews what is known and what research priorities are emerging in the areas of:

• Pathology and impairment, including differences between children and adults.
• Functional limitations—in a person's ability to eat or walk, for example.
• Disability as the interaction between a person's pathologies, impairments, and functional limitations and the surrounding physical and social environments.

This landmark volume will be of special interest to anyone involved in rehabilitation science and engineering: federal policymakers, rehabilitation practitioners and administrators, researchers, and advocates for persons with disabilities.

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Center for Environmental Concerns

Boracay rehabilitation: a case of ecological and social justice.

April 26, 2018

A Position Paper of the Center for Environmental Concerns – Philippines on the Rehabilitation and Proposed Closure of the Boracay Island

The island of Boracay has been experiencing two decades of recurring issues on waste water and solid waste management that have caused a decline in tourist arrivals and therefore a loss of income. There had been outbreaks of coliform bacteria as early as 1997 that caused a 60% decline in tourist arrivals during that period.1 In 2004, the coliform crisis continued since not all establishments were connected to the centralized sewage treatment plant according to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The same problem was also encountered in 2009 and 2015, and again in the assessment of DENR in the current year.

In addition to this, the island’s biodiversity has also suffered greatly from unregulated and anarchic sprout of commercial development virtually converting large swathes of foreshore areas into coastal tourism destinations bringing in uncontrolled influx of tourists from all over the world. A study of the Philippine and Japanese governments showed that the coral cover declined 70.5% over a period of only two decades which coincided with the 38.4% increase in tourist arrivals.2 Both the decline of water quality and coral reef deterioration were associated with the direct discharge of untreated water waste near the shore.3 Barangay Yapak, located in the northern side of the island, is the home of endemic and endangered bats such as the flying foxes which has drastically declined in population due to habitat loss and human disturbance.4

The decline in water quality and biodiversity loss have shown that the mechanisms to manage heightened tourism interest in the island are lacking and reflect mismanagement and weak governance. And now, these environmental issues are being used as reasons for the proposed closure which will further cause massive displacement to the lives of the residents reliant on tourism and related activities for their livelihoods, amounting to more than 36,000 workers. This threat raises this issue from a case of ecological justice to a case of social justice.

Rehabilitation should indeed be undertaken but it should not come at the cost of people’s lives and livelihoods. Our right to a healthy ecosystem should go hand in hand with our right to livelihood.

More importantly, environmental rehabilitation should serve primarily the majority of the population especially the small farmers, fisherfolk and indigenous people and not big corporate local and foreign interests.

Instead of a total closure, there should be a moratorium on new and expansion of establishments while environmental laws are strictly implemented. Violators of environmental laws should be held accountable and liable. Livelihood of the workers should be ensured.

The rehabilitation and management of tourism in Boracay should therefore usher in improvements not only to the natural coastal environment but also to the marginalized communities in the vicinities as well. There should be a democratic, comprehensive and scientifically-sound rehabilitation program that involves participation by all stakeholders before any rehabilitation activities are to take place.

The tourism industry in the country is capitalized on rich biodiversities and beautiful sceneries of the archipelago. Many poor farmers, fisherfolk and indigenous people communities are directly benefitting from their services for their survival. Therefore, tourism in the country should promote and develop appreciation, respect and improvement of community life, history and traditions, and the local environment. The industry should be geared towards national development and not cause further violation of people’s rights, economic imbalances and ecological damage.

References:

1 Retrieved from http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/968277/what-went-before-boracays-environmental-issues 2 The study was undertaken as part of the Coastal Ecosystem Conservation and Adaptive Management (CECAM) project funded by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Retrieved from https://businessmirror.com.ph/70-of-boracay-coral-reefs-gone-after-23-years-study/ 3 According to University of the Philippines scientist Miguel Fortes. Retrieved from https://businessmirror.com.ph/70-of-boracay-coral-reefs-gone-after-23-years-study/ 4 According to the conservation group Friends of Flying Foxes retrieved from http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/52107/boracay%E2%80%99s-other-attraction-flying-foxes

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Land use/Cover Change in Russia within the context of global challenges. The paper presents the results of a research project on Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) in Russia in relations with global problems (climate change, environment and biodiversity degradation). The research was carried out at the Faculty of Geography, Moscow State University on the basis of the combination of remote sensing and in-field data of different spatial and temporal resolution. The original methodology of present-day landscape interpretation for land cover change study has been used. In Russia the major driver of land use/land cover change is agriculture. About twenty years ago the reforms of Russian agriculture were started. Agricultural lands in many regions were dramatically impacted by changed management practices, resulted in accelerated erosion and reduced biodiversity. Between the natural factors that shape agriculture in Russia, climate is the most important one. The study of long-term and short-ter...

Annals of The Association of American Geographers

Land use and land cover change is a complex process, driven by both natural and anthropogenic transformations (Fig. 1). In Russia, the major driver of land use / land cover change is agriculture. It has taken centuries of farming to create the existing spatial distribution of agricultural lands. Modernization of Russian agriculture started fifteen years ago. It has brought little change in land cover, except in the regions with marginal agriculture, where many fields were abandoned. However, in some regions, agricultural lands were dramatically impacted by changed management practices, resulting in accelerating erosion and reduced biodiversity. In other regions, federal support and private investments in the agricultural sector, especially those made by major oil and financial companies, has resulted in a certain land recovery. Between the natural factors that shape the agriculture in Russia, climate is the most important one. In the North European and most of the Asian part of the ...

Ekonomika poljoprivrede

Vasilii Erokhin

Journal of Rural Studies

judith pallot

In recent decades, Russia has experienced substantial transformations in agricultural land tenure. Post-Soviet reforms have shaped land distribution patterns but the impacts of these on agricultural use of land remain under-investigated. On a regional scale, there is still a knowledge gap in terms of knowing to what extent the variations in the compositions of agricultural land funds may be explained by changes in the acreage of other land categories. Using a case analysis of 82 of Russia’s territories from 2010 to 2018, the authors attempted to study the structural variations by picturing the compositions of regional land funds and mapping agricultural land distributions based on ranking “land activity”. Correlation analysis of centered log-ratio transformed compositional data revealed that in agriculture-oriented regions, the proportion of cropland was depressed by agriculture-to-urban and agriculture-to-industry land loss. In urbanized territories, the compositions of agricultura...

Open Geosciences

Alexey Naumov

Despite harsh climate, agriculture on the northern margins of Russia still remains the backbone of food security. Historically, in both regions studied in this article – the Republic of Karelia and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) – agricultural activities as dairy farming and even cropping were well adapted to local conditions including traditional activities such as horse breeding typical for Yakutia. Using three different sources of information – official statistics, expert interviews, and field observations – allowed us to draw a conclusion that there are both similarities and differences in agricultural development and land use of these two studied regions. The differences arise from agro-climate conditions, settlement history, specialization, and spatial pattern of economy. In both regions, farming is concentrated within the areas with most suitable natural conditions. Yet, even there, agricultural land use is shrinking, especially in Karelia. Both regions are prone to being af...

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Chapter 10: Conservation, Protection and Rehabilitation of the Environment and Natural Resources

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The successful rehabilitation of Boracay Island in the Philippines leads the way for environmentally conscious tourism

The Philippines | Tourism

One of the Philippines’ most popular holiday destinations, Boracay is an example of how tourism growth can have negative effects if it is not handled correctly. An island covering 10.3 sq km, Boracay hosted one-third of all the country’s visitors in 2017. Unchecked development, insufficient waste water treatment facilities and overpopulation led to an emergency task force finding widespread environmental violations. The majority of sewerage facilities were draining waste into the sea and polluting the water. In order to rehabilitate the island, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered its closure to tourists for six months on April 26, 2018.

The announcement of Boracay’s closure was met by concern from local businesses about the impact on the island and its residents. Immediate action taken within the industry included airlines scaling back flights and the closure of 900 establishments that violated regulations, such as the demolition of establishments within 30 metres of the shoreline. As a result, 30,000 people lost their jobs, sparking concerns about the long-term impact of the closure on the community. However, the Department of Labour and Employment provided support packages in the form of financial assistance to informal sector workers and training for formal sector workers to enhance their employability. More than P507.1m ($9.4m) worth of compensation had been distributed as of February 2019.

Positive Performance

Although industry leaders feared the economic impact of the closure, as Boracay accounted for 20% of the country’s tourism revenue, the effects have not been as severe as expected. Although the Department of Tourism (DOT) scaled down the arrivals target in late 2018, a record 7.1m visitors came to the country that year. The closure of Boracay encouraged a surge in the marketing of new destinations, showcasing a variety of different islands.

When Boracay reopened in October 2018, steps were taken to prevent further damage and ensure visitors respect the environment. Smoking and alcohol are prohibited on the beach and in public areas, and a maximum allowance of 19,000 tourists and 15,000 workers has been imposed to ensure the island’s capacity is not exceeded. There are also strict environmental accreditation procedures in place for hotels and resorts. “The closure showed we are serious about protecting our natural resources and minimising environmental impact, and that we are focused on preserving and highlighting the beauty of our country for generations,” Jhaytee Wong, executive vice-president of the Philippine Travel Agencies Association, told OBG.

New Benchmark

Boracay has become the model for sustainable tourism, and the success of the rehabilitation programme is a potential springboard for establishing a culture of environmentally conscious tourism across the country. The National Tourism Development Plan 2016-22 was revised to improve environmental protection guidelines. According to local media reports, similar rehabilitation programmes have been proposed for Manila Bay, El Nido, Panglao, Siargao, Sagada and Baguio to ensure that other popular destinations meet the environmental standards of the new Boracay.

In February 2019 the government launched the Manila Bay Task Force as part of a cross-ministerial effort to enforce environmental regulations and improve water quality. Having a budget of P2bn ($37.2m), it aims to make the water at Manila Bay safe for swimming by end-2019. Waste water treatment facilities in Metro Manila will also be upgraded, demonstrating the current administration’s commitment to sustainable tourism. “We are trying to encourage corporate social responsibility, so we are highlighting destinations that practise green tourism,” Mavic Sevilla, head of corporate planning and business development at the DOT’s Tourism Promotions Board, told OBG.

The positive effects of Boracay’s temporary closure look set to continue in terms of promoting a diversified offering of destinations, and encouraging sustainable practices and the rehabilitation of over-saturated areas.

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Spatial Variations of the Activity of 137 Cs and the Contents of Heavy Metals and Petroleum Products in the Polluted Soils of the City of Elektrostal

• DEGRADATION, REHABILITATION, AND CONSERVATION OF SOILS
• Open access
• Published: 15 June 2022
• Volume 55 , pages 840–848, ( 2022 )

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• D. N. Lipatov 1 ,
• V. A. Varachenkov 1 ,
• D. V. Manakhov 1 ,
• M. M. Karpukhin 1 &
• S. V. Mamikhin 1  

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The levels of specific activity of 137 Cs and the contents of mobile forms (1 M ammonium acetate extraction) of heavy metals (Zn, Cu, Ni, Co, Cr, Pb) and petroleum products were studied in the upper soil horizon of urban landscapes of the city of Elektrostal under conditions of local radioactive and chemical contamination were studied. In the soils within a short radius (0–100 m) around the heavy engineering plant, the specific activity of 137 Cs and the contents of mobile forms of Pb, Cu, and Zn were increased. The lognormal distribution law of 137 Cs was found in the upper (0–10 cm) soil layer; five years after the radiation accident, the specific activity of 137 Cs varied from 6 to 4238 Bq/kg. The coefficients of variation increased with an increase in the degree of soil contamination in the following sequence: Co < Ni < petroleum products < Cr < 137 Cs < Zn < Pb < Cu ranging from 50 to 435%. Statistically significant direct correlation was found between the specific activity of 137 Cs and the contents of mobile forms of Pb, Cu, and Zn in the upper horizon of urban soils, and this fact indicated the spatial conjugacy of local spots of radioactive and polymetallic contamination in the studied area. It was shown that the specific activity of 137 Cs, as well as the content of heavy metals and petroleum products in the upper layer (0–10 cm) of the soils disturbed in the course of decontamination, earthwork and reclamation is reduced.

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INTRODUCTION

Contaminants migrate and accumulate in urban ecosystems under the impact of both natural and technogenic factors. The processes of technogenic migration of 137 Cs are most pronounced in radioactively contaminated territories. It was found in urboecological studies that the intensity of sedimentation of aerosol particles containing radionuclides and heavy metals is determined by the types of the surfaces of roofs, walls, roads, lawns, and parks and by their position within the urban wind field [ 12 , 26 ]. Traffic in the cities results in significant transport of dust and associated contaminants and radionuclides [ 15 , 24 ]. During decontamination measures in the areas of Chernobyl radioactive trace, not only the decrease in the level of contamination but also the possibility of secondary radioactive contamination because of the transportation of contaminated soil particles by wind or water, or anthropogenic transfer of transferring of ground were observed [ 5 , 6 ]. Rainstorm runoff and hydrological transport of dissolved and colloidal forms of 137 Cs can result in the accumulation of this radionuclide in meso- and microdepressions, where sedimentation takes place [ 10 , 16 ]. Different spatial distribution patterns of 137 Cs in soils of particular urban landscapes were found in the city of Ozersk near the nuclear fuel cycle works [ 17 ]. Natural character of 137 Cs migration in soils of Moscow forest-parks and a decrease in its specific activity in industrial areas have been revealed [ 10 ]. Determination of the mean level and parameters of spatial variations of 137 Cs in soils is one of primary tasks of radioecological monitoring of cities, including both unpolluted (background) and contaminated territories.

Emissions and discharges from numerous sources of contamination can cause the accumulation of a wide range of toxicants in urban soils: heavy metals (HMs), oil products (OPs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and other chemical substances. Soil contamination by several groups of toxicants is often observed in urban landscapes [ 20 , 23 ] because of the common contamination source or close pathways of the migration of different contaminants. A comprehensive analysis of contamination of urban soils by radionuclides and heavy metals has been performed in some studies [ 21 , 25 ]. The determination of possible spatial interrelationships between radioactive and chemical contaminations in urban soils is an important problem in urban ecology.

A radiation accident took place in the Elektrostal heavy engineering works (EHEW) in April 2013: a capacious source of 137 Cs entered the smelt furnace, and emission of radioactive aerosols from the aerating duct into the urban environment took place. The activity of molten source was estimated at about 1000–7000 Ci [ 14 ]. The area of contamination in the territory of the plant reached 7500 m 2 . However, radioactive aerosols affected a much larger area around the EHEW, including Krasnaya and Pervomaiskaya streets, and reached Lenin Prospect.

Geochemical evaluation of contamination of the upper soil horizon in the city of Elektrostal was carried out in 1989–1991. This survey indicated the anomalies of concentrations of wolfram, nickel, molybdenum, chromium, and other heavy metals related to accumulation of alloying constituent and impurities of non-ferrous metals in the emissions of steelmaking works [ 19 ].

The aim of our work was to determine the levels of specific activity of 137 Cs, concentrations of mobile forms of heavy metals (Zn, Cu, Ni, Co, Cr, and Pb) and oil products in the upper soil horizons in different urban landscapes of the city of Elektrostal under the conditions of local radioactive and chemical contamination.

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D. N. Lipatov, V. A. Varachenkov, D. V. Manakhov, M. M. Karpukhin & S. V. Mamikhin

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Lipatov, D.N., Varachenkov, V.A., Manakhov, D.V. et al. Spatial Variations of the Activity of 137 Cs and the Contents of Heavy Metals and Petroleum Products in the Polluted Soils of the City of Elektrostal. Eurasian Soil Sc. 55 , 840–848 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1064229322060072

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Received : 21 October 2021

Revised : 22 December 2021

Accepted : 30 December 2021

Published : 15 June 2022

Issue Date : June 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1134/S1064229322060072

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40 Facts About Elektrostal

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 21 May 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy , materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes , offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

Elektrostal's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and promising future make it a city worth exploring. For more captivating facts about cities around the world, discover the unique characteristics that define each city . Uncover the hidden gems of Moscow Oblast through our in-depth look at Kolomna. Lastly, dive into the rich industrial heritage of Teesside, a thriving industrial center with its own story to tell.

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