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Waste incineration and coincineration plants in most European countries have frequently updated their flue gas cleaning systems, surpassing in most cases E.U. air emission standards. At the same time, in most developing countries, cement and other coincineration facilities follow less stringent emission regulations and have a mixed record of protecting air quality. The European Union, the United States, and Canada have established penalties for air emission violations that account for the harm done to the environment and to human health and aiming to remove the economic benefit reaped as a result of noncompliance. Despite their legal completeness, these regulations do not adequately address the probabilistic nature of air pollution. This article recasts the issue of air pollution penalties in a Bayesian decision-making framework with the aspiration that the assessment of penalties on a rigorous mathematical framework can assist in alleviating the mistrust by sections of the public on the effectiveness of air pollution regulations. Integration of economic analyses into risk assessments of emission violations can help clarify to policymakers the effect of environmental policies. Our analysis indicates that the penalty structure of the United States appears to favor the update of emission systems more often than the corresponding European Commission's penalties. Our study advances the use of the loss function as a risk analysis tool that can be used as a public policy instrument to promote environmentally friendlier air emission choices. A parabolic, compared to a linear, loss function was seen to justify higher expenses in gas cleaning systems.

The meaning about the origins of Al-Ain, the second largest city of Abu Dhabi Emirate in the UAE, resides in its name, which in Arabic means 'The spring'. The presence of abundant groundwater has allowed human settlements since the Neolithic period, marking this city as one of the oldest settlements continuously inhabited in the Gulf region. Under the rule of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nayan , Al-Ain received special attention in order to preserve its character and identity, due also to the presence of historical heritage which forms a strong sense of belonging for its community. With the establishment of the UAE in 1971, and the institution of its municipality council in 1992, a special ordinance fixed a strict limit on building height, giving also particular attention to conservation of the original landscape formed by the seven ancient oases of palm trees and their irrigation systems of aflaj, an ancient irrigation system common in most arid zones of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean. Despite all these efforts spent in order to keep its original identity, nowadays this approach appears to be scrutinised under the pressures for further expansion and innovation in response to an increasingly challenging economy. With an increasing acceleration in the process of expansion and renovation, most of Al-Ain's urban fabric, realized after oil discovery in the 1960s, and still belonging to traditional typologies, has been replaced with new constructions inspired by different models, and new large developments have been laid out to cope with the increasing demand for dwellings. After recognition in 2011 of Al-Ain's archaeological sites and oases as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city's popularity rose as a tourist destination and place of cultural interest but has revealed in the meantime its systemic fragility. This paper focuses on the process of urban growth according to the nature of place, which characterized Al-Ain's history and currently forms the substrate of its cultural identity, and the mechanism of conflict/interaction between identity and innovation towards the definition of Al-Ain's urban transformation and regenerative process.

Muscat's development into a modern city has been of an entirely different order from that experienced elsewhere in the Gulf. The Muscat of the 1970s and 1980s was a complex urban environment, and the Muscat of today remains complex in ways not typical of cites such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The novel Warda by Sanallah Ibarahim and the memoir Arabia by Jonathan Raban, provide insights into the ground conditions of Muscat at a time before present economic pressures propelled a new round of changes in the physical fabric of the city and tourist resorts nearby. Under pressure to accomplish agendas both of heritage preservation and economic development, recent urban transformations in Muscat comprise three basic strategies, each organically linked to the Muscat of previous decades: Re-Covering the Past, evident in Muscat's historic core; Phasing Space, seen in the Grand Mosque of Sultan Qaboos; and Forging Reality, present in a new wave of tourist enclaves along the Oman coast. Taken together, these strategies can be understood as original attempts to harness Muscat's complex urban and cultural pasts in order to construct a robust framework for the development of everyday life, national identity, tourist engagement and a uniquely Omani modernity for the future.

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