However, Mr. Girling said that a deal reached earlier this week between TransCanada and the state of Nebraska, which will reroute Keystone XL around an environmentally vulnerable area, meant that approval for the entire pipeline could "be done on an accelerated process".
The meeting in Atkinson, a tiny town of about 1,300 in the Sandhills region, an environmentally vulnerable area of grasslands in the north central part of the state, is bracing for an influx of impassioned supporters and opponents.
In this study, the Wei River Basin (WRB), a typical eco-environmentally vulnerable region of the Loess Plateau in China was selected as the study region.
Table 2 Criteria for new settlement development Factor/criteria Type Proximity to existing urban areas Planning factor (compact development) Proximity to major roads and train lines Transport factor Distance from environmentally valuable and vulnerable areas or from protected areas Environmental factor Proximity to water (lakes and rivers) Attractiveness factor Slope gradient Physical factor.
In terms of the distance from the environmentally valuable and vulnerable areas, Italian and German students as well as academic planners expressed a similar preference (0.34; 0.31) with the Italian and German regional planners and public authorities (0.23; 0.23).
The criteria used in this research were proximity to existing urban areas, proximity to major roads and train lines, distance from environmentally valuable and vulnerable areas or from protected areas, proximity to water (lakes and rivers), and the slope gradient (see Table 2).
For this purpose, a new environmental impact definition is proposed that considers the environmentally vulnerable elements including water bodies, agricultural areas, coastal regions and forestlands located within a certain bandwidth around transportation routes.
Our results highlight the poor design of the environmental rules on environmentally vulnerable zones.
They took field trips to the vulnerable areas in 2009.
