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PERI's program in Development, Peacebuilding, and the Environment breaks from the conventional framework of economic well-being measured in Gross National Product (GNP). In each of its components, DPE explores how democratization in the distribution of power - at the international, national, and local levels - can advance sustainable and secure livelihoods for all.

Updated and Expanded Toxic 100 Index

Industrial facilities in the United States release some 1.5 billion pounds of industrial toxics into the air each year. The latest version of PERI's Toxic 100  uses the most recent available data from the Risk Screening Environmental Indicators project of the Environmental Protection Agency to rank the largest corporations in the United States by the human health risk from their airborne toxic releases. The rankings take into account not only the quantity of releases, but also the relative toxicity of chemicals, the exposure of nearby populations, and transport factors such as prevailing winds and height of smokestacks. PERI's Toxic 100 builds on the achievements of the right-to-know movement. The goal is to engender public participation in environmental decision-making, and to help stakeholders translate the right to know into the right to clean air.

>> Go to the Toxic 100 Index

Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuilding

In the aftermath of violent conflict, how do the economic challenges of statebuilding intersect with the political challenges of peacebuilding? How can the international community help lay the fiscal foundations for a sustainable state and a durable peace? In this edited volume, James Boyce, (Director of PERI’s Development, Peacebuilding, & the Environment Program), and Madalene O’Donnell  (United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations) lift the curtain that often has separated economic policy from peace implementation.

Drawing on recent experiences in war-torn societies such as Uganda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Guatemala, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, and Palestine, this book brings to life a key dimension of how peace and states are built.  

>> Order Peace & the Public Purse from Lynne Rienner Publishers

Reclaiming Nature: Environmental Justice and Ecological Restoration

Reclaiming Nature, edited by James Boyce (Director of PERI's Development, Peacebuilding & the Environment program) along with Sunita Narain and Elizabeth A. Stanton, offers a hopeful new vision of the relationship between people and nature. The contributors to this volume chart a course between denial and despair over world’s mounting environmental problems. They realize that human activities can have positive impacts on nature’s wealth as well as negative ones. The crucial question is how we can tip the balance in favor of the positive. In the form of essays by well-known economists, environmentalists, and activists, this book offers readers hope for a better tomorrow, inspired by examples of people across the world who are building natural assets by adding value, democratizing access, capturing benefits, and defending the commons.

>>Link to the Natural Assets project homepage
>> Go to Anthem Press to order the book

In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster, and Race after Katrina

Hurricane Katrina opened a window on a world often ignored by media, policy makers, and the public. Facing enhanced environmental vulnerability and stranded by a lack of public transit, residents of the poorest and blackest neighborhoods of New Orleans quickly educated America that disasters and rescues are not equal opportunity affairs. James K. Boyce, Director of PERI'S Environment Program, joins authors Manuel Pastor, Robert Bullard, Alice Fothergill, Rachel Morello-Frosh and Beverly Wright in this groundbreaking analysis of the complex repercussions of natural disaster, examining, in the context of Katrina, the ways in which environmental disparities by race and class operate in the United States.

>>In the Wake of the Storm Full Report (60 pages)