The livelihoods of poor people in developing countries are increasingly dependent on weather shocks whose effects are exacerbated by the lack of access to adequate insurance markets allowing risk hedging. Index-based insurance underwrites a weather risk as a proxy for economic loss: when the index falls below a certain level, farmers automatically get a payment. The aim of this paper is to study the

Economic growth has brought prosperity for large parts of the growing world population. But it also expanded the use of nature's resources and absorption capacities to a critical extent. The transition to sustainability that policy making therefore tries to promote may, however, have adverse effects on the growth path. If so, how will consumer welfare be affected? How can policy interventions be legitimized

With the deterioration of China's ecological environment, technological innovation (TI) has become an important method of green transformation and upgrading Chinese steel enterprises (CSEs) under the constraint of environmental regulation (ER). Based on environmental protection panel data of 86 CSEs from 2005 to 2014, this paper first analyzes the direct effects of heterogeneous environmental regulation

Grassland has experienced continuous degradation, resulting in serious ecosystem services loss and unsustainable grazing production. Previous studies have identified the impact of formal environmental institutions or policies on grassland protection. But, little evidence of the effectiveness of informal institutions has been found. Using village grassroots governance as a proxy for informal institutions

Micronutrient deficiencies are decisive drivers of malnutrition and persistence of illnesses globally. International food trade is increasingly shaping land and food systems, through virtual trade in land and water, but also through affecting food supply by redistribution of micronutrients. However, trade flows of micronutrients between countries have not been systematically analyzed. In this study

Although consumer demand plays a key role in the conservation of endangered livestock breeds (also referred to as old, local, rare or heritage breeds), consumer research so far has made only a minor contribution to such conservation. Based on a qualitative consumer study using think-aloud-protocols, this article sheds light on consumers' knowledge and perceptions regarding endangered livestock breeds

The belief that stringent climate policies are very costly is widespread among political decision-makers and the public. The cost argument is often used by governments as a motivation for sluggish policy making. However, such judgements ignore the economic benefits of policy changes and implicitly build on a misguided decomposition of environmental impact into separate population, income, and technology

Despite increasing attention in recent years, only a limited number of studies have investigated the determinants of landowner re-enrollment intentions in conservation incentive programs. However, none of these studies controlled for the potential self-selection of participants. The concern for a self-selection bias is policy relevant because researchers and policymakers investigate the determinants

UK food-related greenhouse gas emissions have substantially decreased over the last two decades in response to changes in the household food baskets. The evolution of diets depends on a combination of driving forces, not necessarily acting in the same direction. We propose a decomposition of household food choices which separates changes in tastes and consumer preferences from the effects of prices

Airline industry CO2 emissions have increased rapidly; air transportation released approximately 2.8% of global fuel-combustion-based CO2 emissions in 2019. Focusing on Japan, this study explored the introduction of new passenger aircraft as a CO2-reduction policy. To this end, the lifetime distribution function for passenger aircraft was specified. Lifecycle CO2 emissions and the associated costs

We examine how nutrient load compensation could help a firm expand its production when production is a source of nutrient loads, threatening the ecological status of a water body. We ask whether compensation is technically feasible and whether it can be made in an ecologically sustainable way. Credits for compensation may be provided by point or nonpoint sources. We apply our approach to the case of

Pirgmaier's paper “The value of value theory for ecological economics” is a plea to ecological economists to take a greater interest in value theory and, in particular, to appreciate the Marxian labour theory of value. This paper first criticises this view and then proceeds to outline an alternative perspective, which suggests that the focus on value should be replaced by a focus on valuation processes

The new EU Organic Regulation 848/2018 allows group certification to be applied to EU organic smallholders. Group certification is endorsed by IFOAM-Organics International and is the dominant approach to certify small organic farmers in many non-EU countries. This study provides a cross-case study evaluation of the future implementation of group certification among organic smallholders in Italy. A

Community forest management (CFM) systems have been implemented in developing countries as forest conservation initiatives with community development objectives. Women are often active in CFM by participating in non-timber forest product harvesting and management. Given the increasing presence of women in CFM, this study assesses whether participating in community forest management gives females more

The academic literature on trade-offs in ecosystem management has paid relatively little attention to justice and poverty reduction objectives. The aim of this paper is to highlight the multiple dimensions of trade-offs in ecosystem services management for poverty alleviation, and to support decision-makers in planning for the almost inevitable trade-offs arising from environmental interventions. The

Empirical evidence increasingly suggests that while the uptake of agroecology brings significant benefits to ecosystems, health, and communities, yet achieving a transition towards agroecology can still be complicated. In this article we contribute to this literature by offering a power-sensitive analysis of the transition towards agroecology. We build on insights from critical institutionalism and

This study investigates the extend of environmental inequality related to industrial air pollution in Austria. Using more than 170.000 census grid cells, each at 250 m2, and pollution measures of the E-PRTR, this study is able to provide high geographical resolution data on a national scale. The randomisation strategy applied compares the empirical socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of populations

Ecological modernisation in the form of support to the notion of green growth remains the dominant discourse in environmental policy globally. Still, questions of limits to economic expansion and growth on a planet with finite natural resources have been at the core of environmental discourses at least since the 1970's. A recent effort by Stoknes and Rockström (2018) seeks to unite notions of ecological

Segmentation of survey respondents is a common tool in environmental communication as it helps to understand opinions of people and to deliver targeted messages. Prior research has segmented people based on their opinions about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. This involved an evaluation of 16 statements, which means considerable survey time and cost, particularly

Physical components of societies like infrastructures need biophysical resources for their construction, maintenance and use. These components, analyzed as societies' material stocks, predefine energy and raw materials and provide societal services, necessary for their functioning and for social welfare. The nexus between stocks, the resource flows and the services, is crucial for the analysis of social-ecological

The solution to the challenges that society currently faces, for example climate change and global pollution, requires the understanding of the linkages between these problems. One of these linkages relates changes in climate conditions to consumption of bottled water, which constitutes a source of plastic pollution worldwide. Using information from the labour and households' environmental behaviour

The transition from a centrally planned socialist economy to free markets brought unprecedented economic growth to Mongolia, but also severe environmental problems associated with rapid urban development. Its capital city Ulaanbaatar has experienced extreme air pollution during the winter months for almost two decades. While the impacts of local air pollution on cardiovascular and respiratory health

Natural hazard insurance is advocated as an important means of risk management, however, private insurance demand often remains below critical levels. Prior loss experience and the design of governmental relief schemes are two factors potentially influencing insurance decisions. We address these two elements in monetary incentivized experiments which include representations of natural hazard insurance

How a circular economy (CE) can promote social equity remains largely unknown. We analyze how CE narratives affect interpretations of problems and actions on waste in the French food sector, particularly around the Loi Garot. We identify CE narratives that challenge the sector's previous discourse of a social and solidarity economy (SSE) by advancing market-focused solutions and actors. We show how

This research investigates citizen-consumers' representations of environmental issues by examining user-generated content. Using an exploratory approach, we collected and analyzed 856 internet memes related to various environmental topics. Our findings shed light on the human and social implications of environmental degradation. Although they use a humoristic tone, many memes suggest that the users

In the era of low-carbon energy transitions, both climate and energy justice studies have raised concerns about the deterioration of energy poverty triggered by carbon mitigation policies. Nevertheless, no in-depth analysis has thus far examined the relationship between people suffering energy poverty and their carbon dioxide emissions. This study addresses the issue by presenting a novel approach

Nature's contributions to people (NCP) are fundamental to human well-being. In particular, non-material NCP, defined as effects on personal perspectives which enhance people's quality of life, are currently the most abstract and least well-defined NCP. Avian scavengers are a globally threatened guild that plays a key role in our society but currently only valued for their NCP of disease control and

We analyzed a unique data set of livestock numbers in the Mongolian southern Gobi. In a novel approach, we combined biophysical data on precipitation and pasture biomass productivity with data on fine wool prices from 1981 through 2015 to investigate dynamic patterns and responses of livestock numbers in Mongolia's southern Gobi. Using piecewise structural equation modeling enabled us to disentangle

Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is a significant challenge to sustainable seafood production which is difficult to address in traditional governance systems. Recently, the U.S. has implemented a Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) to combat IUU fishing and seafood fraud by requiring chain-of-custody documentation of 13 species when imported to the U.S. This will exclude IUU

A marine heatwave caused the total biomass of Gulf of Alaska (GOA) Pacific cod to plummet by 67% from 2015 to 2018. Based on the results from GOA Pacific cod stock assessment model, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council cut the GOA Pacific cod total allowable catch (TAC) by 80% in 2018. This study uses a 10-region multi-regional social accounting matrix model to compute the economic impacts

Considering rapid urbanization worldwide, concern is growing that the resulting loss of green space affects welfare negatively. This study assesses how implicit prices of green amenities differ across apartments in different price groups to assess distributional impact of urban green amenities. Additionally, the paper proposes adjustments to enhance the standard hedonic model and increase comparability

This paper assesses the effects of a bail out on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon following a revision in the Forest Code. By providing a bail out to landowners with illegal deforestation, the New Forest Code has created incentives for law-abiding landowners to engage in deforestation activities as well, in the expectation of receiving future amnesties. To identify causal effects, we explore a

We investigate the effect of information provision about environmentally friendly coffee on consumers' purchasing behaviors. We use a dataset from a nationwide social experiment in Japan involving over 10,000 vending machines serving brewed coffee. We also provide empirical insights into the potential drivers affecting pro-environmental behavior of consumers through information provision. Our results

Environmental problems resulting from the use of plastics in mass products are becoming increasingly serious, and the exploitation of scarce oil resources also poses unimagined long-term risks. Economic models attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of regulatory measures, but instead of retaining polluting technologies and reducing market volume, petroplastics in products could be gradually replaced

Dry forests in tropical and subtropical areas continue to experience high deforestation rates that affect households' dependence on forest resources. Little remains understood about the relationship between household factors and deforestation patterns in Zambia. We integrate remotely sensed data with surveys of 1123 households collected in the Miombo areas between 2017 and 2019 to better understand

Since the late 1900s, 84 national constitutions have been written anew or amended to include substantive environmental human rights provisions. The nascent statistical research exploring the relationship between these rights and environmental outcomes is limited to a few studies which generally show a positive correlation between the two. Under certain conditions and controlling for confounding factors

Understanding the demand-side drivers and the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions is key to designing fair and effective environmental policies. In this study, we quantify the relationship between the carbon footprint of consumption and socio-economic characteristics of Belgian households. We use a dataset that combines household-level consumption data with an environmentally extended input-output

Growing evidence suggests that consumers should be involved in the solutions to climate change. To test the responsiveness of wine consumers to carbon footprint stimuli we set a natural field experiment in a restaurant modifying the choice architecture of wine decisions. We modified wine cards to provide different information and price incentives to consumers to test the effects of two policy interventions

This is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Sustainable Commodity Governance and the Global South.’ A broad range of transnational governance initiatives have emerged to respond to social and environmental challenges caused by commodity production. These initiatives – like voluntary sustainability standards and certifications – tend to target commodity producers in the Global South, but are overwhelmingly

Welfare systems across the OECD face many combined challenges, with rising inequality, demographic changes and environmental crises likely to drive up welfare demand in the coming decades. Economic growth is no longer a sustainable solution to these problems. It is therefore imperative that we consider how welfare systems will cope with these challenges in the absence of economic growth. We review

Agglomeration bonus schemes have become important policy tools when the environmental benefit hinges on spatial coordination of conservation sites. We here analyse how spatial factors affect the uptake of an agglomeration payment scheme in a Swiss mountain region, which seeks to establish a network of conservation areas to conserve favourable conditions for biodiversity. We use a combination of spatially

This study investigated smallholder farmers' adoption preferences for cropping patterns of cover crops, duration of adoption, and supplementing technical support to reduce agrochemicals regarding sustainable farm management (SFM). A discrete choice experiment was conducted in the Hexi Corridor (D1) and the west Loess Plateau (D2) in northwest China. The results show that farmers in D1 preferred intercropping

Biodiversity risks losing relevance in an increasingly urbanised, unequal and disembodied world. Beyond basic material needs, we might gain the greatest well-being from eudaimonia – the freedom to flourish and live meaningfully. Immersion in nature improves the fundamentals of eudaimonia: psychological, emotional and social health. This presents an opportunity to re-frame biodiversity from a passive

Global production and use of food packaging have steadily increased since the 1960s. Packaging waste is now considered one of the world's most urgent environmental problems. Most responses to the problem have focused on recycling or the introduction of biomass-based materials. Whilst useful, these approaches focus on managing the symptoms and do not address why the food system has become reliant on

This paper examines the economic impact of climate induced disasters on Sri Lanka's agricultural, industrial and services sectors and their subsectors. In doing so, it seeks to explain a central paradox – that there are winners and losers in terms of the effect of the disasters on sectoral growth. This poses problems for many developing countries which are seeking to aggressively raise economic growth

Rising incomes (and associated expenditures) have been shown to be a major driver of environmental problems. Lately, several studies have pointed to a break between the income driver and biodiversity loss on a per-capita level. The increase in land-use efficiency is pointed to as a key factor in this decoupling. However, a lot of the previous work on biodiversity footprints has been cross-sectional

The deployment of onshore wind power involves spatial sustainability trade-offs, e.g., between the minimization of energy system costs, the mitigation of impacts on humans and biodiversity, and interregional equity concerns. We analyze challenges arising for decision-making if wind power generation capacity has to be allocated spatially in the presence of such trade-offs. The analysis is based on a

The Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) approach, developed as theoretical backdrop for the assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), aims to provide a more inclusive discourse in sustainability science, while addressing some of the limitations of the ecosystem services (ES) framework. Some critical initial reactions to the NCP approach

The relation between fisheries subsidies and their effects on the level of resource extraction is widely discussed in extant literature. However, in addition to impacts on the level of fishing, the various types of subsidies can generate different incentives for greenhouse gas emissions, a subject that is still little explored. Thus, this article aims to evaluate the influence of fishing subsidies

Biodiversity worldwide has been declining rapidly in recent decades. Acquiring land for protection has been used as a main strategy to halt this decline. Conservation organizations commonly rely on spatial planning approaches to help identify priorities for land protection. These spatial planning approaches often assume that the overall amount of conservation funding is fixed, and that funds can be

This study addresses economic and ecological aspects related to aquatic invasive species occurrence and spread. The relative importance of these two factors driving the probability of occurrence of Elodea canadensis species in lakes of Sweden is quantified. Night-time lights data, a proxy for economic activity, is generated from satellite imagery and mapped to key environmental variables known to constrain

Basilicata is a region of Southern Italy where the expansion of oil operations in the 1990s was promoted as an opportunity to foster economic development. Flash-forward to 2020, Basilicata is one of the poorest regions in Italy despite the exploitation of some of the largest onshore hydrocarbon reserves within the European Union. The coincidence of high poverty rates with abundant natural resources

Environmental effects and natural resources depletion associated with agriculture production affect the agriculture response to climate change. Traditional cross-sectional climate response models ignore this requirement. This research estimates the impact of climate on European agriculture using a continental scale Ricardian analysis. We correct farm income by accounting for resources (energy, fertilisers

This paper uses survey data of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam, from 2011 to 2015, to examine the effects of bribery on environmental innovation decisions by firms, accounting for the roles of bargaining power and/or credit and institutional constraints. In the study, bribery activities are categorized into greasing and rent-seeking forms. Self-assessment of firms on the uncertainty

Whereas many studies adopting a broad perspective on sustainability have highlighted the differences and interactions between alternative and conventional models of agricultural production, very few have investigated the contradictions internal to farm organizations engaged in agroecological transition. In order to understand the difficulties faced by farmers in combining multiple aspirations, we study

Rural communities that depend on common-pool resources for their livelihoods are being increasingly affected by the expanding global market system. Because such market integration is still relatively thin, communities vary in terms of market comprehension. Using a common-pool resource dilemma experiment, this study examines the effect of market knowledge on decisions concerning the use of common-pool

Using bibliometric techniques, we evaluate the contribution of current academic research to the advancement of sustainable development agenda as expressed in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets . We focus on four knowledge domains highly relevant to the ethos of sustainable development, each with a distinct approach, to finding a balance between ecological and economic systems when