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) assets. To fill this gap, we develop an empirical analysis of the low-carbon and carbon-intensive indices for the EU, US and global stock markets. We test if financial markets are pricing the Paris Agreement (PA) by decreasing (increasing) the systematic risk and increasing (decreasing) the portfolio weights of low-carbon (carbon-intensive) indices afterwards. We find that after the PA the correlation among low-carbon and carbon-intensive indices drops. The overall systematic risk for the low-carbon indices decreases consistently, while stock markets' reaction is mild for most carbon-intensive indices. Moreover, the weight of the low-carbon indices within an optimal portfolio tends to increase after the PA. This evidence suggests that stock market investors have started to consider low-carbon assets as an appealing investment opportunity after the PA but have not penalized yet carbon-intensive assets.

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 IS practice. In this paper, an agent-based model is designed to simulate the emergence of IS relationships among companies located in a given geographical area. Companies can establish relationships traditionally (relying on face-to-face contacts) or by using a platform. Several scenarios, defined by different platform usage rates, are simulated. Results show that there is a minimum platform usage rate allowing companies to benefit from using the platform. If the platform usage rate is lower than this threshold, the platform does not contribute to generate further benefits for companies. When the platform usage rate is higher than the threshold, the individual benefits for users are higher the greater the number of other companies using the platform. Based on these results, implications on how to ensure a win-win approach for companies and platform owners can be provided, as well as implications for policymakers.

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 in Austria provides the data for our analyses. Results show that snow is the most important factor for destination choice. Nevertheless, preferences of respondents are heterogeneous. Measures that enhance price-performance ratio, i.e. lowering lift ticket prices and avoiding crowding, turn out to be the most suitable compensation for suboptimal snow conditions. As long as substitute ski areas with better snow conditions exist, destinations with marginal snow conditions are likely to face severe demand losses (up to 60%). Nevertheless, dynamic pricing has the potential to compensate medium snow reliability. If all destinations are affected by deteriorating snow conditions, total demand reduces by 64% if snow reliability is low. If these conditions and effects are limited to the beginning and the end of the ski season, demand is projected to decline by 18%.

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 and five treatments (variations of the number of perpetrators and the individual and total harms committed), we test whether the perceived severity and punishment recommendation for perpetrators of an environmental wrongdoing decrease as the number of perpetrators increases, independent of the total environmental harm committed. Unlike the studies that look at the SSP phenomenon as regards number of victims, we do not find direct support for the existence of an SSP effect regarding number of perpetrators. We do find, however, that participants evaluating the one-perpetrator treatments are more likely to judge with the highest severity. We also provide some collateral insights such as the insensitiveness of participants to the individual pollution level, once the environmental damage exceeds a certain threshold. Our results extend previous SSP studies in important directions and suggest some policy implications, and avenues for further research.

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 the natural resources governance literature. We emphasise that TTCs are consequential in limiting the ability of environmental governance to coordinate natural resource uses. Drawing on institutional complementary and cluster literature, we argue that TTCs increased significantly over the years shaping governance evolution at the macro level in the long run. We show that institutional resource regimes tend to get locked into an Institutional Complexity Trap (ICT), which prevents improvement in coordination capacity and explains the persistence of environmental governance failures. Four cases substantiate our conceptual proposition of transversal transaction costs. In addition, the process-tracing of six water governance cases in Europe from 1750 to 2004 provides empirical support to the macro dynamics of institutional complexity trap.

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 needed. This project applies a gravity model to estimate the effect of agro-environmental determinants in target countries. The response variables are derived from improved data obtained from the Land Matrix Global Observatory and the explanatory variables from a range of climatic and agricultural data sets. The issue of large numbers of zero flows in such a data set is tackled using zero-inflating regression models. Overall the results highlight the crucial role of water resources, in particular the potential of rainfed crop production in the targeted areas, and not just land abundance alone as found in previous studies. Moreover, in line with previous studies, we show that in contrast to other types of investment flows, agricultural investment flows are not negatively affected by weaker institutional regulations or corruption.

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 generates positive spillover effect on urban housing prices, while too much or poor grassland area and distance from wetland may not. Also, only cultivated land very proximity to urban residential areas may raise the housing prices, most of the cultivated land in our case may reduce the housing prices. This article contributes to the literature by integrating different ecological lands into the hedonic analysis based on spatial multilevel models and deepens the relationship between the accessibility and visibility of ecological lands and housing prices. This result implies that demand for the forest, grassland, and wetlands can be well reflected in the housing market, while demand for cultivated land is less reflected in the housing market. Our findings urge policymakers to increase the effective supply of ecological lands through urban development planning and maintain the continuous supply of existing ecological lands by implementing market, differential ecological protection mechanisms.

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 and money paid per month within each choice set. We were thus able to elicit both willingness to pay and willingness to work for alternative interventions. Respondents exhibit high demand for new water sources. From the random parameter model, only households with knowledge about water-borne parasites are price sensitive and exhibit willingness to pay values. Through a latent class model specification, higher income respondents exhibit higher willingness to pay values for all programme attributes; however, lower income participants have higher willingness to work values for certain new water sources. We found a shadow wage rate of labour that is between 15 and 55% of the market wage rate.

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 for global warming and increased by about 18% from 1997 to 2014. The bulk of produced emissions is attributable to developing economies, though a considerable amount is exported mainly via manufactured goods to high income countries, which are net-importers of methane. Trade-embodied emissions increased by 8% more than nationally produced emissions during 1997–2014, with the strongest increase experienced by China, India, and Indonesia. Decompositions of the growth rate of emissions over this period suggest that methane efficiency improved, but the effect of these efficiency gains on total emissions was outweighed by the effect of economic and population growth in low- and middle-income countries. In high-income countries, by contrast, methane efficiency gains were larger the effect of economic and population growth.

This article offers several models that test concepts of optimum population and consumption: classical or utilitarian models, contractual models, and generation-relative ethical models. This article is based on a lecture presented in August 1995, at a conference organized by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences. It is posited that classical utilitarianism casts the optimum population and consumption problem as a Genesis Problem. The authors argue that the Genesis problem is the wrong problem to study because there are no actual people. The Genesis problem asks how many people there ought to be ideally at what living standards. The unborn are not a class of people, just as mud on a river bank is not a mud hut. Actual persons and potential persons are categorically different. Actual persons have a claim that potential persons do not have. An overall ethical ordering over alternatives can only be conceived for each generation of actual people. The ethical point of view inevitably changes over time. For example, a generation in the first period consumes what they are given to consume by the older generation. In the second period, the younger generation is now the older generation who decide how many children to have and how to share nonstorable, all purpose consumption goods among themselves and future generations. Procreation is a means of making one's values durable. Human development is unfair. Those who live later benefit from the labor of their predecessors without paying the same price. Procreation and ecological preservation are a matter of ethics.

"This paper introduces general methods for quantitative analysis of the role of population in environmental change. The approach is applicable over a wide range of environmental issues, and arbitrary regions and time periods. First, a single region is considered, appropriate formulae derived, and the limitations to quantitative approaches discussed. The approach is contrasted to earlier formulations, and shown to avoid weaknesses in a common approximation. Next, the analysis is extended to the multiple region problem. An apparent paradox in aggregating regional estimates is illuminated, and the risk of misleading results is underscored. The methods are applied to the problem of climate change with two case studies, an historical period and a future scenario, used to illustrate the results. The contribution of change in population to change in green house gas emissions is shown to be significant, but not dominant in both industrialized and developing regions."

This study is an exploration of the relationships between income, demographic pressure, technological change in agriculture, and the structure of political economies in light of cross-country differences in deforestation. The study focuses on small farmers and shifting cultivation. The analysis is based on a model developed by Larson (1994) that accounts for rural poverty, rootlessness, and distribution of landholdings. Regression equations model the average annual rate of deforestation, the relative area under forests, and a recursive model that includes both the deforestation rate and the forested area. Deforestation was reasonably well explained by a dummy variable for Asia, a rank order variable of the amount of forested area in 1980, the gross domestic product per capita in 1990, the average annual population growth rate during 1981-90, and the percentage increase in value added to agriculture during 1981-90 in 1990 dollars. Findings indicate that a 10% increase in the population growth rate increased the rate of deforestation by 10.6%. A 10% increase in income per capita increased deforestation by 49.5%. The influence of income on deforestation followed Kuznet's U-shaped curve. The turning point for reduced deforestation was income of $3500 per capita. Only Central and South America are near this income level. An increase in 1 agricultural worker per household increased deforestation by 50%. A 10% increase in smallholders' share of agricultural land reduced deforestation by 3.4%. Countries with high rural rootlessness had 23.6% less relative area under forests, suggesting that rural rootlessness rather than poverty per se leads to deforestation. The recursive model shows that demographic pressures led to deforestation and were mediated by technological change. Political economy theories of deforestation received strong empirical support.

"The completed demographic transitions in industrialized countries inspired a model which underlies many well-meant policies affecting the Third World. However, the model's postulate--modernization and prosperity will lower fertility rates--has exacerbated rather than helped control worldwide population growth and the associated environmental degradation. Here we show that perceived economic opportunity leads to raising family size targets and to discarding elements of traditional cultures which formerly held fertility rates in check. Conversely, fertility rates fall when limits are recognized. These observations imply that a liberal immigration policy and large-scale foreign aid are counterproductive for restoring balance between population size and carrying capacity."

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 in Austria. We linked data from the Austrian Time-use Survey and the Austrian Household Budget Survey with the Eora-MRIO for 2009-2010 in order to estimate the household carbon footprints of all time-use activities. We introduce a functional time-use perspective differentiating personal, committed, contracted and free time to investigate the average carbon intensity of activities per hour, for an average day and for the average woman and man. We find that personal time is relatively low-carbon, while household as well as leisure activities show large variation in terms of CO2e footprint/h. The traditional gendered division of labour shapes the time-use patterns of women and men, with implications for their carbon footprints. Further research analysing differences in household size, income, location and availability of infrastructure in their relation to time use is crucial to be able to assess possible pathways towards low carbon everyday life.

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 livestock owners who bid for contracts to implement site-specific manure management practices that reduce phosphorus loadings to a major reservoir. On the demand side, we implement a real money, multi-unit public good auction for these contracts with residents who potentially benefit from reduced water quality risks. The experiments allow us to construct supply and demand curves to find an equilibrium price for water quality improvement. The field experiments provide a proof-of-concept for practical implementation of a local market for environmental improvements, even for the challenging context of nonpoint pollution.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and corresponding targets for 2030 have been adopted by world leaders at the historic UN summit in 2015. Rankings are often constructed in order to hold countries accountable to achieve these targets. This paper illustrates the sensitivity of rankings to the choice of indicators and methodological assumptions by comparing the three most prominent methods using the sample of EU28 countries. The results of our analysis suggest that a country's relative position depends almost entirely on the chosen method and indicators.

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, we find no significant impact of CMAs on any of our income measures. However, when disaggregating households by income quartile, we find that access to forest resources in RMNP may have had an income stabilizing effect for poor households. Forest income grew significantly faster among the poorest quartile of treatment relative to control households, partially because poor households recorded very low income from forests at baseline. The effect of CMAs on forest cover is minimal, although we find that conversion of woody savanna and savanna to cropland is more pronounced in villages with CMAs. These findings suggest that in the medium-term, CMAs have failed to deliver conservation or development benefits related to enhancing livelihoods or conserving forests near RMNP. Practitioners should consider different CMA models or other strategies for improving welfare and forest health outcomes in communities neighboring protected areas.

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, we calculate the tradeoff between the reduction in particulate matter and income, essentially a happiness-based measure of willingness-to-pay for mitigating air pollution. We find that people on average are willing to pay ¥258 ($42, or 1.8% of annual household per capita income) per year per person for a 1% reduction in PM2.5.

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 sciences. The discourse is shaped by authors from high-income, mainly Mediterranean, countries. Until 2012, articles largely constitute conceptual essays endorsed by normative claims. More recently, degrowth has branched out into modelling, empirical assessments, and the study of concrete implementations. Authors tend to agree in that economic growth cannot be sustained ad infinitum on a resource constraint planet and that degrowth requires far reaching societal change. Whether degrowth should be considered as a collectively consented choice or an environmentally-imposed inevitability constitutes a major debate among degrowth thinkers. We argue that the academic discourse could benefit from rigid hypotheses testing through input-output modelling, material flow analysis, life-cycle assessments, or social surveys. By analyzing the potentials for non-market value creation and identifying concrete well-being benefits, the degrowth discourse could receive wider public support and contribute to a paradigmatic change in the social sciences.

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 data and ecosystem service interactions. We first show that it is possible to reliably predict the value of ecosystem services provided by lakes based on their physical and geographic characteristics. Second, we demonstrate that interactions between ecosystem services appear to be significant for explaining lake ecosystem service values. Third, we provide an estimation of the average value of ecosystem services provided by lakes: between 106 and 140 USD$2010 per respondent per year for non-hedonic price studies and between 169 and 403 USD$2010 per property per year for hedonic price studies.

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 management, is included. Using a generalisable bioeconomic framework we show how this payment counteracts the negative economic effect of disease by increasing the optimal rotation length, and under some restrictive conditions, even makes it optimal to never harvest the forest. The analysis shows a range of complex interactions between factors including the rate of spread of infection and the impact of disease on the value of harvested timber and non-timber benefits. A key result is that the effect of disease on the optimal rotation length is dependent on whether the disease affects the timber benefit only compared to when it affects both timber and non-timber benefits. Our framework can be extended to incorporate multiple ecosystem services delivered by forests and details of how disease can affect their production, thus facilitating a wide range of applications.

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. We distinguish between the "internal" variance, which indicates the magnitude of price discrimination, and the "external" variance, that is a measure of price dispersion. We find that, for some commodities, spatial price dispersion is remarkable and persistent over time (i.e., failure of the LOP) and that there exists a strict correlation between price spikes and peaks in spatial price variability. We test whether the price distribution can be replicated through a stochastic process of extraction. Surprisingly, the actual distribution of prices, for several commodities, is well described by a random distribution. Then, the process of data aggregation is not neutral because the information at the micro-level scale might be lost at the macro-scale, due to the complexity of the IFTN. Finally, we discuss some possible economic explanations of these outcomes and the main methodological, environmental, and policy consequences.

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 combines theoretical insights from sustainable livelihoods analysis with other analytical frameworks (including the ecosystem services framework, diffusion theory, social learning, adaptive management and transitions management) to assess the vulnerability of rural livelihoods to climate change. This integrated analytical framework helps diagnose vulnerability to climate change, whilst identifying and comparing adaptation options that could reduce vulnerability, following four broad steps: i) determine likely level of exposure to climate change, and how climate change might interact with existing stresses and other future drivers of change; ii) determine the sensitivity of stocks of capital assets and flows of ecosystem services to climate change; iii) identify factors influencing decisions to develop and/or adopt different adaptation strategies, based on innovation or the use/substitution of existing assets; and iv) identify and evaluate potential trade-offs between adaptation options. The paper concludes by identifying interdisciplinary research needs for assessing the vulnerability of livelihoods to climate change.

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 to consumers. HANPP is the sum of land-use induced NPP changes and biomass harvest. We present the first national-level assessment of embodied HANPP related to agriculture based on a calculation using bilateral trade matrices. The dataset allows (1) the tracing of the biomass-based products consumed in Austria in the year 2000 to their countries of origin and quantifying the HANPP caused in production, and (2) the assigning of the national-level HANPP on Austria's territory to the consumers of the products on the national level. The dataset is constructed along a consistent system boundary between society and ecosystems and can be used to assess Austria's physical trade balance in terms of eHANPP. Austria's eHANPP-trade balance is slightly negative (imports are larger than exports); import and export flows are large in relation to national HANPP. Our findings show how the eHANPP approach can be used for quantifying and mapping the teleconnections related to a nation's biomass metabolism.

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 use and land-use intensity and their influences on national HANPP trajectories. During early stages of industrialization, population growth and increasing demand for biomass drive land-cover change, often resulting in deforestation, which raises HANPP. During later stages, industrialization of agriculture boosts agricultural yields often faster than biomass demand grows, resulting in stable or even declining HANPP. Technological change improves agricultural area-efficiency (biomass provision per unit area), thereby decoupling population and economic growth from HANPP. However, these efficiency gains require large inputs of fossil fuels and agrochemicals resulting in pressures on ecosystems and emissions. Our findings corroborate the argument that HANPP alone cannot - as sometimes suggested - be used as a simple measure of carrying capacity. Nevertheless, analyses of long-term HANPP trajectories in combination with accounts of material and energy flows can provide important insights into the sustainability of land use, thereby helping to understand limits to growth.

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 challenges for regional, national as well as global sustainability are immense in terms of future resource availability, social conflicts, pressure on land and ecosystems and atmospheric emissions. Using the concepts of social metabolism and material flow analysis, this paper presents an original study quantifying resource use trajectories for India from 1961 up to 2008. We argue for India's need to grow in order to be able to provide a reasonable material standard of living for its vast population. To this end, the challenge is in avoiding the precarious path so far followed by industrialised countries in Europe and Asia, but to opt for a regime shift towards sustainability in terms of resource use by building on a host of promising examples and taking opportunities of existing niches to make India a trendsetter.

In rapidly growing urban areas of developing countries, infrastructure has not been able to cope with population growth. Informal water businesses fulfill unmet water supply needs, yet little is understood about this sector. This paper presents data gathered from quantitative interviews with informal water business operators (n=260) in Kisumu, Kenya, collected during the dry season. Sales volume, location, resource use, and cost were analyzed by using material flow accounting and spatial analysis tools. Estimates show that over 76% of the city's water is consumed by less than 10% of the population who have water piped into their dwellings. The remainder of the population relies on a combination of water sources, including water purchased directly from kiosks (1.5 million m3 per day) and delivered by hand-drawn water-carts (0.75 million m3 per day). Energy audits were performed to compare energy use among various water sources in the city. Water delivery by truck is the highest per cubic meter energy demand (35 MJ/m3), while the city's tap water has the highest energy use overall (21,000 MJ/day). We group kiosks by neighborhood and compare sales volume and cost with neighborhood-level population data. Contrary to popular belief, we do not find evidence of price gouging; the lowest prices are charged in the highest-demand low-income area. We also see that the informal sector is sensitive to demand, as the number of private boreholes that serve as community water collection points are much larger where demand is greatest.

The concept of socio-ecological transitions is used to analyse the quantitative importance of physical imports and exports for the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the Habsburg Empire, a new dataset of foreign trade and social metabolism is presented. For the United Kingdom, the analysis relies on previously published data. Foreign trade volumes increased in both countries in the long run. Total trade volumes were much higher in the United Kingdom throughout the entire time period, on average by around a factor four. Physical factors explaining the disparities in structure and volume of foreign trade in the two countries are differences in (1) the temporal patterns of the socio-ecological transition and (2) domestic resource endowments. In both countries, energy carrying materials, i.e. fossil fuels and biomass, were the dominant resources in physical foreign trade. The analysis focuses on the physically most important material groups: coal, wood and cereals, and discusses the role of imports and exports in relation to domestic resource provision and environmental pressures. Physical foreign trade increased at a faster pace than domestic resource extraction and consumption. The socio-ecological transition was thus accompanied by rising international integration of resource supply.

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 results in overshoot-and-collapse dynamics, which are undesirable from a sustainability perspective. Here, we emphasize the importance of forward-looking policies for the long-term sustainability of human-nature interactions. We show that the internalization of this externality through a land tax can result in several win-win effects in the long run. First, more biodiversity is preserved at equilibrium, which increases the carrying capacity and total well-being of the human population. Second, a taxation path that maximizes the discounted sum of human utilities prevents or greatly alleviates overshoot-and-collapse crises, thus increasing the sustainability of the system. In particular, this result holds in the case of imperfect information regarding the precise temporal dynamics of biodiversity loss, suggesting that the design of efficient land-use management policies is possible despite incomplete ecological data. This study highlights the need to internalize biodiversity-dependent externalities through economic incentives, especially under uncertainty regarding long-term ecological dynamics.

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 quality and water conservation and reduced inputs and labor requirements. In contrast, hybrid crops are often bred for improved grain yield and earlier maturation to avoid variable conditions. We use discrete choice experiments to model adoption of sorghum as a function of attributes that differ between these technologies and traditional varieties in Mali. Overall, the main perceived advantage of perennial crops is agricultural ecosystem services such as soil improvement, while adoption of hybrid crops is hampered by the inability to reuse seed. Women farmers are less concerned about higher labor requirements associated with perennial crops and the ability to reuse hybrids seeds than male farmers. Farmers prefer traditional sorghum to perennial sorghum and are indifferent between traditional and hybrid sorghum. These findings have important policy implications for understanding tradeoffs that are central to farmer decision making when it comes to breeding technologies for climate adaptation.

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 costs and water quality, and statistical methods. We then extract elasticities indicating the percentage change in drinking water treatment costs resulting from a 1% change in water quality. Forty-six elasticities are obtained for various water quality parameters, such as turbidity, total organic carbon (TOC), nitrogen, sediment loading, and phosphorus loading. An additional 29 elasticities are obtained for land use classification (e.g., forest, agricultural, urban), which often proxy source water quality. Findings indicate relatively large ranges in the estimated elasticities of most parameters and land use classifications. However, average elasticities are smaller and ranges typically narrower for studies that incorporated control variables consistent with economic theory in their models. We discuss the implications of these findings for a DWTP's incentive to engage in source water protection and highlight gaps in the literature.

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 a possible weighting method to calculate first-order changes in society's well-being, discusses some of the potential principles of democratic 'well-being policy', and (as an illustrative example) reports data on how sub-samples of citizens believe feelings might be weighted.

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 paper presents the results of structured field interviews and a quantitative survey in the Walloon Region of Belgium. The main finding of this study is that farmers who have periodic contacts with network bridging organisations that foster cooperation and social learning in the agri-environmental landscapes show a higher commitment to change. This effect is observed both for farmers with high and low concern for biodiversity depletion. Support for network bridging organisations is foreseen under the EU Leader programme and the EU regulation 1306/2013, which could open-up interesting opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness of the current payment scheme for agri-environmental services.

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, which are common in Southern Africa. Adoption of annual pigeon pea is relatively low but perennial production of pigeon pea may be more appealing to farmers due to some of the ancillary benefits associated with perenniality. We model perennial production of pigeon pea as a function of the attributes that differ between annual and perennial production: lower labor and seed requirements resulting from a single planting with multiple harvests, enhanced soil fertility and higher levels of biomass production. The primary tradeoff associated with perennial pigeon pea intercropped with maize is competition with maize in subsequent years of production. While maize yield is approximately twice as valuable to farmers as pigeon pea yield, we find positive yet heterogeneous demand for perenniality driven by soil fertility improvements and pigeon pea grain yield.