Mining is a key component of both the Brazilian and Chilean economies and accounts for an outsized share of these countries’ exports. Yet, it is a common target for environmental criticism, especially due to its impacts on local populations and ecosystems. Brazil and Chile have adopted markedly different trade strategies over the past three decades, most notably with regards to their involvement in international trade agreements. This paper investigates how these differences in trade policy since 1990 have affected the sustainability of each country’s mining sector by identifying and comparing the channels through which free trade agreements influence the environmental impacts of resource extraction.

There is a need for indicators of transportation-land use system quality that are understandable to a wide range of stakeholders, and which can provide immediate feedback on the quality of interactively designed scenarios. Location-based accessibility indicators are promising candidates, but indicator values can vary strongly depending on time of day and transfer wait times. Capturing this variation increases complexity, slowing down calculations. We present new methods for rapid yet rigorous computation of accessibility metrics, allowing immediate feedback during early-stage transit planning, while being rigorous enough for final analyses. Our approach is statistical, characterizing the uncertainty and variability in accessibility metrics due to differences in departure time and headway-based scenario specification. The analysis is carried out on a detailed multi-modal network model including both public transportation and streets. Land use data are represented at high resolution. These methods have been implemented as open-source software running on commodity cloud infrastructure. Networks are constructed from standard open data sources, and scenarios are built in a map-based web interface. We conclude with a case study, describing how these methods were applied in a long-term transportation planning process for metropolitan Amsterdam.