Many policy initiatives and scientific studies promote the use of economic accounting as a statistical basis for end-users and policy-makers' evaluation of the distributive and allocative effects of environmental and economic policies. This can help in assessing the costs and the benefits of taxes and subsidies, public expenditures for environment protections, payment schemes for ecosystem services

This paper uses the GEM-E3 macroeconomic computable general equilibrium model to calculate the magnitude of greenhouse gas (GhG) emission rebound effects across a range of efficiency scenarios in the automotive sector supply chain. The scenarios are technically feasible as they are designed using bottom up information from the iron and steel industry. Rebound effects occur when efficiency improvements

Although biodiversity is generally diminishing, in some areas its conservation is expanding. However; the exact path of this expansion is uncertain. This can lead to problems of path-dependence and lock-in effects. Path dependence describes situations where history strongly influences present decisions and lock-in effects refer to situations where an earlier decision provides strong incentives to follow

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature on post-growth futures. Modern imaginings of the future are constrained by the assumptions of growth-based capitalism. To escape these assumptions we turn to utopian fiction. We explore depictions of work in Cokaygne, a utopian tradition dating back to the 12th century, and William Morris's 19th century News from Nowhere. Cokaygne is a land of excessive

We studied people's preferences to support a renewable energy programme to grow seaweed for biogas production, using a choice experiment. Participants had to choose one among three alternatives, two of which were variations of a seaweed programme and the third was the status quo. The two alternatives were defined in terms of four attributes: the number of households powered, the percentage of coastline

This paper presents an analytical framework to identify and understand grassroots water governance practices, which we call ‘rooted water collectives’ (RWC). RWCs can be multi-scalar organizations that engage in common property resources management or multi-scalar social movements that advocate for common property resources governance. The framework, which we open for discussion, scrutinizes (1) the

We investigate the effect of the informal sector and a range of governance indicators on both global and local pollutants for a panel of 58 countries during 1996–2011. The analysis employs a fixed effects-instrumental variable generalized method of moments approach. We find that the size of the informal sector has a significant impact on environmental quality, which is conditional on the level of economic

Copper raw materials (CRM) and copper waste and scrap (CWS) are the two main sources of copper manufactured products. Due to the uneven geographical distribution of copper production and consumption, international CRM and CWS trade developed. However, no study has explored the complicated interdependencies between CRM trade and CWS trade or investigated the characteristics of this multiplex trade system

This paper studies a Green Public Procurement (GPP) policy decided by the Swedish government in 2006, stating objectives related to organic farming. The policy aims to increase the public sector's organic food purchases, in order to incentivise Swedish farmers to convert to organic practices, thereby contributing to national environmental quality objectives. We analyse the effect of organic food procurement

The link between natural resources and conflict has been extensively analysed by the empirical literature. Yet, there is disagreement on both the existence and the type of relationship connecting resources to conflict. Existing research has focused on demonstrating the impact of resource scarcity or abundance on the risk of conflict, but no effort has explored the reasons behind the persisting disagreement

Incentivising households to lower their electricity consumption is increasingly used as a tool to create a more flexible electricity demand. Previous reviews estimate that electricity savings of 6.4–7.4% can be achieved through monetary, informational and behavioural incentives. This papers argues that a more realistic estimate is of a 1.9–3.9% reduction in consumption based on the most recent experimental

The climate targets agreed in Paris 2015 render deep decarbonization of energy- and emission-intensive industries crucial. Policy makers are interested in the macroeconomic consequences of such decarbonization pathways and often rely on integrated modelling studies. However, the underlying modelling assumptions and uncertainties often remain unquestioned or invisible, although they may govern the models'

Resilience is a hot topic within the international development agenda and Sustainable Development Goals. Nowadays, resilience plays a crucial role in improving the quality of life of vulnerable categories and is designed as a major strategy to face the diverse dimensions and dynamics of vulnerability. Energy results among the most relevant fields of applications of resilience policies, especially when

In the context of globalizing transboundary environmental challenges, strategies to protect and secure the local commons such as water resources have been increasingly scaled up. Consequently, local communities have started to engage in transnational mobilisations to defend their rights and express their concerns. This often implies the adoption and institutionalisation of emerging global norms, principles

The demand for hydropower production, as a prominent sustainable development strategy, has created a boom in the number of planned hydropower projects, especially small ones. These projects are mainly located in post-socialist transition and developing countries. However, emerging evidence suggests that most of the projects remain on paper. One reason for this is prevalent corruption. In the literature

This article introduces a novel (environmental) interpretation of a “Keynesian coordination game” and develops four potential scenarios to remaining within a global carbon emissions constraint. With inspiration from research on “ecologically unequal exchange” (EUE), we demonstrate the drawbacks of present “green growth” strategies by considering how pollution- and resource-intensive industries are

A global multi-regional input-output model with sub-national resolution for Galicia, north-west Spain, was used to study physical and value added trade balances between Galicia, the rest of Spain and the world. Within the framework of Ecologically Unequal Exchange theory, we argue that a region, such as Galicia, can play a twofold role as core and periphery in the global division of extractive activities

Finding sustainable pathways to efficiently allocate limited available water resources among increasingly competing water uses has become crucial due to climate-change-induced water shortages and increasing water demand. This has led to an urgent need for the inclusion of economic principles, models, and methods in water resources management. Although several studies have developed macro-economic models

The commodification of nature, through privatization, marketization, monetary valuation and other associated processes, has become a central topic in social sciences to examine the conditions and effects of the economic approaches for supporting conservation policies all around the world. The aim of this contribution is to delineate the current state of knowledge, within and beyond ecological economics

We survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full-text analysis of peer-reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013. To identify relevant contributions, we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword-based identification strategy: a combined focus on (a) the human-nature relationship, (b) the long-term uncertain future, (c) normative

Evidence from public goods game experiments holds the promise of informing climate change policies. To fulfill this promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to this specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions behavior in public goods games generalizes to decisions about voluntary climate actions. We observe each participant in two different decision

Telecoupled systems connect consumption and other choices in one part of the world with land-use and land-cover change in another. While such connections are increasingly well documented, research on governing telecoupled systems is in its infancy. Drawing on recent discussions in sociology, we argue that models for governing telecoupled systems must consider two types of information flows. Low-bandwidth

We develop an inclusive wealth type index for natural capital in the Barents Sea that accounts for ecosystem services via trophic interactions. We consider three key fish species in the Barents Sea under stochastic growth dynamics. Compared to evaluation at market prices, the estimated wealth from the inclusive wealth approach is several times higher. Ecosystem wealth depends on the management scheme

The agricultural sector faces a series of environmental challenges such as water and soil pollution, erosion or biodiversity loss, especially in monoculture systems. Alternatively, crop diversification is seen as an option to reduce negative impacts and to enhance agricultural Ecosystem Services (ES). Most of these ES, such as improving resilience, despite the benefits and the high social value, do

There are growing concerns that timber harvesting in the tropics, even when done sustainably, can increase carbon emissions. Despite these concerns, few studies have addressed whether households that engage in timber harvesting would be willing to forgo property rights to receive payments for carbon sequestration. This study addresses this issue by examining the trade-off between timber production

Does the division of a society into identity groups increase the risk of unsustainable resource use? This study considers the theory that diversity leads to degradation by preventing joint-planning across a community of resource users. A cooperative game theory model is used to derive conditions that should make this problem appear. When resource users can plan extraction choices together, sufficient

We analyze to what extent climate conditions affect the prevalence of sharecropping as a form of traditional land tenure. We investigate how sharecropping tenure is related to climate risk and how it interacts with fertilizer use and livestock ownership that both influence production risk. We first develop a stylized theoretical model to illustrate the role of climate for land tenure and production

The Chinese government aims to mitigate climate change while also reducing local air pollution; this requires co-control of greenhouse gases and pollutants. Here, we develop a method combining an elasticity analysis and a multi-regional input–output model, to measure changes in the emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants and corresponding socio-economic costs caused by the adjustments in intermediate

A pricing-based mechanism that implements the optimal water policy while accounting for environmental externalities is developed. The analysis is presented in the context of a comprehensive water economy, stressing the tradeoffs between water use in the provision of ecosystem services vs. other uses. A distinction is made between conveyed and instream environmental water, which turns out to have important

The Q-method identifies groups of people with similar or diverging perspectives and is increasingly used for analysing resource conflicts. However, it is uninformative on the prevalence of perspectives in the general population. The Norwegian government considers planting spruce climate forests on abandoned pastures, the habitat for many red listed species. We identify three prevailing stakeholder

It is increasingly recognized that a transition to sustainable finance is crucial to scale up the low-carbon investments needed to achieve the global climate targets. A main barrier to portfolios' decarbonization is the lack of conclusive evidence on whether low-carbon investments add value to a portfolio, and on whether markets react to climate announcements by rewarding (penalizing) low-carbon (carbon-intensive)

This paper explores the direct network effect for online platforms supporting industrial symbiosis (IS), which is a recommended strategy to support the transition towards the circular economy. Through IS, companies can use wastes produced by other companies as inputs to production processes. Online platforms supporting companies in operating IS relationships can play a critical role in developing the

Climate change will affect tourism as one of the sectors most dependent on natural resources. Due to the strong dependency of many peripheral areas on tourism, climate change has the potential to destabilize regional economies. The objective of this paper is to assess the impacts of climate change on ski tourism demand. A tourist survey (n = 1957) with a choice experiment conducted in 53 ski areas

Some experimental and archival studies have found support for the scope-severity paradox (SSP), according to which the perceived harm of the same crime or wrongdoing decreases when the number of victims is greater. In the context of environmental wrongdoing, we investigate whether the SSP applies when the number of perpetrators of a wrongdoing increases. Using a survey experiment with two scenarios

This article proposes a new theoretical explanation to the question of environmental governance failures, combining micro and macro explanations in the long run. We put forward the concept of Transversal Transaction Costs (TTCs) as a critical source of governance failures. TTCs are transaction costs induced by interlinkages between public policies and property rights, an area under-investigated by

Worldwide increasing demand for agricultural products poses the critical question of where this additional production will take place. In this context, the phenomenon of large scale Foreign Land Acquisition (FLA) is one strategy that has been controversially discussed in scientific and public debates. A better understanding of what factors drive FLA-flows between investor and target countries is still

This paper attempts to explore the spillover effects of ecological lands, including forest, grassland, wetland, and cultivated land, on housing prices. To this end, we test hypotheses from a spatial multilevel hedonic model in Wuhan, China. We find that forest size and wetland size has a linear positive spillover effect on urban housing prices, and a moderate grassland area and distance from wetland

Schistosomiasis is a serious health problem in many parts of Africa which is linked to poor water quality and limited sanitation resources. We administered a discrete choice experiment on water access and health education in rural Uganda, focussing on interventions designed to reduce cases of the disease. Unlike previous studies, we included a payment vehicle of both labour hours supplied per week

We develop a global dataset of methane inventories derived from production, supply use (final production), and consumption activities for 1997–2014, disaggregated to 78 countries/regions. Our dataset extends existing data on methane emissions to 2014 and allows to trace emissions embodied in international trade in intermediates and in final goods. Anthropogenic emissions are quantitatively important

Mitigating climate change to achieve the goal of staying below 2 °C of warming requires urgent reductions of emissions. Demand-side measures mostly focus on the footprints of consumption. Analysing time use can add to understand the carbon implications of everyday life and the potentials and limitations for decarbonising consumption better. We investigate the carbon footprints of everyday activities

We evaluate the impact of collaborative management agreements (CMAs) designed to protect forests and raise incomes for smallholders living adjacent to Rwenzori Mountains National Park (RMNP), Uganda. We use a quasi-experimental study design to estimate changes in several income measures, as well as land cover using three waves (2003, 2007, and 2012) of household survey and remote sensing data. Overall

Global food prices are typically analysed in a time-series framework. We complement this approach by focusing on the spatial price dispersion of the country-pair bilateral trade in the international food trade network (IFTN), for ten relevant commodities. The main purposes are to verify if the Law of One Price (LOP) holds and to investigate the emergence of randomness in the price-formation mechanism

The destruction of natural habitats for agricultural production results in local biodiversity loss. Biodiversity loss in turn affects agricultural production indirectly through a range of biodiversity-dependent ecosystem services. Land conversion thus results in a negative externality, mediated by changes in biodiversity. When the consequences of this externality are delayed in time, lack of internalization

Changing climatic conditions present new challenges for agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa. Sorghum has proven to be an adaptable and resilient crop despite limited funding for crop development. Recent breeding efforts target hybrid and perennial technologies that may facilitate adaptation to climate change. Advantages of perennial crops over their annual counterparts include improved soil

Watershed protection, and associated in situ water quality improvements, has received considerable attention as a means for mitigating health risks and avoiding expenditures at drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs). This study reviews the literature linking source water quality to DWTP expenditures. For each study, we report information on the modeling approach, data structure, definition of treatment

Innovative market mechanisms are being increasingly recognized as effective decision-making institutions to incorporate the value of ecosystem services into the economy. We present a field experiment that integrates an economic auction and a biophysical water flux model to develop a local market process consisting of both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, we operate an auction with small-scale

This paper estimates the monetary value of cutting PM2.5, a dominant source of air pollution in China. By matching hedonic happiness in a nationally representative survey with daily air quality data according to the dates and counties of interviews in China, we are able to estimate the relationship between local concentration of particulate matter and individual happiness. By holding happiness constant

Degrowth has evolved within a decade from an activist movement into a multi-disciplinary academic paradigm. However, an overview taking stock of the peer-refereed degrowth literature is yet missing. Here, we review 91 articles that were published between 2006 and 2015. We find that the academic degrowth discourse occupies a small but expanding niche at the intersection of social and applied environmental

This study presents the first meta-analysis on the economic value of ecosystem services delivered by lakes. A worldwide data set of 699 observations drawn from 133 studies combines information reported in primary studies with geospatial data. The meta-analysis explores antagonisms and synergies between ecosystem services. This is the first meta-analysis to incorporate simultaneously external geospatial

Forests deliver multiple benefits both to their owners and to wider society. However, a wave of forest pests and pathogens is threatening this worldwide. In this paper we examine the effect of disease on the optimal rotation length of a single-aged, single rotation forest when a payment for non-timber benefits, which is offered to private forest owners to partly internalise the social values of forest

Perennial crops have numerous ecological and agronomic advantages over their annual counterparts. We estimate discrete choice models to evaluate farmers' preferences for perennial attributes of pigeon pea intercropped with maize in central and southern Malawi. Pigeon pea is a nitrogen-fixing leguminous crop, which has the potential to ameliorate soil fertility problems related to continuous maize cultivation

Governments are becoming interested in the concept of human well-being and how truly to assess it. As an alternative to traditional economic measures, some nations have begun to collect information on citizens' happiness, life satisfaction, and other psychological scores. Yet how could such data actually be used? This paper is a cautious attempt to contribute to thinking on that question. It suggests

Compensation payments to farmers for the provision of agri-environmental services are a well-established policy scheme under the EU Common Agricultural Policy. However, in spite of the success in most EU countries in the uptake of the programme by farmers, the impact of the scheme on the long term commitment of farmers to change their practices remains poorly documented. To explore this issue, this

Experts working on behalf of international development organisations need better tools to assist land managers in developing countries maintain their livelihoods, as climate change puts pressure on the ecosystem services that they depend upon. However, current understanding of livelihood vulnerability to climate change is based on a fractured and disparate set of theories and methods. This review therefore

Global trade of biomass-related products is growing exponentially, resulting in increasing 'teleconnections' between producing and consuming regions. Sustainable management of the earth's lands requires indicators to monitor these connections across regions and scales. The 'embodied human appropriation of NPP' (eHANPP) allows one to consistently attribute the HANPP resulting from production chains

The 'human appropriation of net primary production' (HANPP) is an integrated socio-ecological indicator measuring effects of land use on ecological biomass flows. Based on published data for Austria, Hungary, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain and the UK, this paper investigates long-term trends in aboveground HANPP and discusses the relations between population, economic growth, changes in biomass

India's economic growth in the last decade has raised several concerns in terms of its present and future resource demands for materials and energy. While per capita resource consumption is still extremely modest but on the rise, its sheer population qualifies India as a fast growing giant with material and energy throughput that is growing rapidly . If such national and local trends continue, the