Pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) is often promoted by reinforcing or highlighting own benefits. However, considering that actors also care about the outcomes for others (i.e. they hold other-regarding preferences), PEB may also be encouraged by addressing these other-regarding preferences. In this paper, we review the results from social science experiments where interventions addressing other-regarding

The notion of insurance value of ecosystems has both conceptual and practical appeal. However, the operationalisation of the concept does not yet match the typical assumptions about the governance of ecosystems and ecosystem service provision. The articles in this special section provide the first comprehensive effort to address this challenge by offering conceptualizations and examples of metaphorical

Like most countries globally, COVID-19 continues to have a demonstrable health, economic, and environmental impact on Russia. The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible ramifications for environmental quality in Russia during and following the coronavirus pandemic. Our work builds on the framework of Elinor Ostrom, as we argue that the pandemic and subsequent lockdown in Russia has highlighted

Labour productivity is a key concept for understanding the way modern economies use resources and features prominently in ecological economics. Ecological economists have questioned the desirability of labour productivity growth on both environmental and social grounds. In this paper we aim to contribute to ongoing debates by focusing on the link between labour productivity and worker wellbeing. First

In addition to promoting conservation, the use of recycled water offers numerous environmental benefits and can also provide a sustainable water supply for municipal, industrial, and agricultural sectors. However, there are members of the public who express their concerns over the adoption of recycled water. This research employs an in-person field study, which combines an incentive-compatible decision

Environmental economic valuation allows to derive values from individuals' behaviour in hypothetical markets, but it is not exempt from certain biases. This work aims to evidence the existence of Social Desirability Bias (SDB) in the use of the stated preference method for environmental valuation. SDB is due to the consideration that, when interviewed, people provide responses to match the interviewer's

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs in agriculture are designed to encourage farmers to adopt agro-environmental practices through financial or non-financial incentives. Using a choice-based conjoint (CBC) analysis, we measured public preferences regarding different constitutive attributes of PES (e.g., types of agro-environmental measures, conditions of payment, responsible institutions

This paper analyzed the competitiveness of premium and regular Fair Trade and Organic (FTO) coffees relative to conventional coffee using consumer panel data. The coffees were categorized into four groups based on their certification labels and prices: Premium or Regular Conventional, and Premium or Regular FTO. Competitiveness was measured in terms of price sensitivity and substitution behavior in

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technically feasible deep decarbonisation solution. Still it is not widely adopted, arguably due to some basic political economy and policy challenges. One issue is the large infrastructure needs of transporting and storing CO2. However, a more fundamental challenge in the current UK industrial policy landscape is concern over introducing new costly capital requirements

Recognising the well-known limitations of economic growth as a litmus test of progress and the call by Target 19 of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 to “develop measurements on progress on sustainable development that complement gross domestic product”, this paper advances understanding of the linkages between alternative measures of economic well-being, the well-being economy and the SDGs. A

This study aims to resolve a potential water conflict between the upper catchment communities of the Okavango River Basin and the downward communities in the Okavango Delta. A model to payment for ecosystem services is developed at the basin level, recognizing spatial diversity and water flows. It addresses four objectives: (1) To assess relationships between water consumption and land use from a spatial

Models of human-environment systems frequently employ the model of rational behaviour in which a rational, perfectly informed and self-interested homo oeconomicus maximises individual utility. This model has been criticised with regard to its adequacy in models of social-ecological systems, because other motives exist beyond profit maximisation that affect land-use decisions. The question arises what

Water scarcity and stress are not new phenomena for many regions around the world. Problems are exacerbated by growing populations, changing weather patterns and reduced water supplies, associated with longer run climatic change. To help mitigate the problems, consumer conservation programs, including education programs directed at outdoor water use, have been created. We analyze the impact of one

Standard approaches to environmental and natural resource use externalities generally focus on single-sector resources and user groups. Remedies include Pigouvian-style government constraints, small group controls following Elinor Ostrom, or less frequently, bargaining across users as outlined by Ronald Coase. However, many difficult natural resource management problems involve competing uses of the

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 are a widely recognized framework to guide sustainable development policies and actions. This papers aims to analyze the potential of SDGs to improve government and business coordination by aligning their reporting practices. To do so, we assess the consistency between the sustainability indicators at the national level (Belgian)

The average household size in China has declined over the past few decades and will continue to drop, which leads to a loss of scale economies. Its implications for electricity demand and sustainability could be especially profound because of the high ecological/environmental intensity of electricity in China and the expected boom in demand. Using nationally representative household survey panels from

This paper explores the epistemological basis for economic prognostications of climate change activists arising from, arguably, the most important scientific problem confronting modern society: the facts, beliefs and theories associated with the measurement, causes, impact and mitigation of climate change. This facilitates identification of the role that rhetoric plays in activist claims associated

Consumer reactions to firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication range from favorable approval to outright skepticism toward the company. This paper contributes to the CSR literature by introducing a so-far overseen but relevant variable that helps to explain why consumer sometimes react positively and sometimes negatively to CSR communication: the ambient temperature. With a controlled

Under the premise that the total emissions of PM(particulate matter) of air pollution is established, the allocation of PMemission rights in various provinces of China is the feasible way to governance the ash haze. In this paper, a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model that takes into account the objectives of efficiency and equity is constructed. On the basis of evaluating the PMemission performance

Discounting the future is essential to inform long-term decisions, but the future of humanity is being put in jeopardy by using the same discount rate for all capital types. Different types of capital assets (built, human, social, natural) have inherently different characteristics and contribute differently to the production of all goods and services. They will behave and depreciate differently and

In theory, eco-labels have great potential to reduce the environmental and social impact of products via consumer choice. In practice, the diffusion of eco-labels remains limited, with consumers expressing concerns about their value. One problem is a perceived tradeoff between the eco-label sustainable attributes and the quality of the product. In this paper, we examine whether this tradeoff is also

Based on two contrasting experiences of the construction of non-monetized social indicators carried out at different levels (local and international), this article examines the effects of interpretive communities on indicators, on collective processes, and on social and scientific context – particularly that of information systems. The first initiative we examine is the Social Progress Index (SPI)

The journey towards sustainability has become paramount to industry, government and research. To date, the main contributions have proposed valuable theoretical models to study the transitions to sustainability. However, a quantitative examination of the phenomenon is still limited. In this paper, we exploit a multilevel-growth model to empirically explore the relevance of different geographical scales

The Porter hypothesis asserts that well-designed regulations can foster innovation for a “win-win” solution, but it requires environmental regulations to be strict but flexible, which is impractical for most developing countries. This paper explores how environmental regulations in a developing country can spur corporate innovation. Using the geographic distribution of wars during 1644 and 1911 as

This paper provides an empirical investigation on the effects that regional economic structures exert on the socioeconomic determinants of material productivity. To this aim, first we develop a taxonomy of economic structures for more than 280 European regions that are classified in four overarching groups: agriculture-, industry-, intermediate- and service-based economies. Second, we perform a panel

The countries in the Mediterranean basin increasingly specialized in Mediterranean agricultural products for exports throughout the twentieth century. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to quantify and discuss on the impacts that this growing Mediterranean exports specialization generated on water resources over the last century. To that aim, we focus on the water embodied in Mediterranean

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative approach among firms involving physical exchanges of materials, energy, and wastes, which creates economic advantages for firms and environmental benefits for the society. In this paper, we adopt an ecosystem approach to conceptualize the network of firms involved in IS relationships (ISN), in terms of organisms (firms), functions (waste exchange), and services

This paper presents a case study of deliberative energy modelling focused on the future of electricity in Saskatchewan, Canada. Participants included representatives from the provincial electricity utility and from environmental organizations. These diverse social actors participated in defining the desired scope and output of the model, providing data and insights that were incorporated into the model

In the last few years, China released national cross-sector action plans to address its air, water, and soil pollution. These action plans establish targets and timelines for pollution reduction, taking aim at high-polluting sectors and articulating strategies for controlling emissions. In this perspective, we demonstrate the need for transparent, accurate methods and data appraising the financial

Deliberative valuation of ecosystem services is expected to capture the diversity of values related to ecosystem services and to facilitate learning and reconsideration of previously held preferences and positions. This paper reports on a study of a deliberative non-monetary valuation process that was designed to address the value of peatland ecosystem services in Southern Finland. Three parallel citizen

This article foregrounds sense of place as a key concept to further advance spatial theorisations within both ecological economics and degrowth. We delineate the scope of the concept and apply it to the fracking controversy in Lancashire, UK. Specifically, we elucidate how sense of place associations were mobilised by pro- and anti-fracking actors to legitimate and advance their respective positions

Faced with a growing sense of urgency to combat climate change, environmental policy is increasingly turning to alternative policy instruments. One method for boosting green behaviour among individuals rooted in applied behavioural economics is loss framing - transforming existing messages so that they emphasise the potential negative consequences of an action or inaction on the environment. This paper

Moving to a post-growth economic paradigm requires research to identify compelling ways to more effectively communicate the key ideas of this transition to the public. This study uses framing theory to examine the effects of four message frames about transitioning to an economic paradigm not centered on economic growth. The four message frames were: environmental gain, environmental loss, well-being

Preferences elicitation can be a challenging exercise for citizens participating in assessment surveys. It is even more challenging when it comes to complex and unfamiliar ecosystems and the threatened ecosystem services they provide. Making people aware of the characteristics of the ecosystem services being valued is determinant for the assessment process. We investigated the impact of familiarity

Nearly all Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) offer farmers stable annual payments over the duration of the contract. Yet AES are often intended to be a transition tool, thus decreasing payment sequences would appear particularly attractive for farmers. The standard discounted utility model supports this notion by predicting that individuals will prefer a decreasing sequence of payments if the total

This study examines the role of citizen trust in explaining climate policy support, using the case of low-carbon transportation policies in Canada – namely a carbon tax, electric vehicle purchase subsidies, and three regulations. Through a representative survey of 1,552 Canadian citizens collected in 2019, we assess: 1) support and opposition of policies, 2) trust in several key actors, and 3) other

Societies use material and energy resources to build up, maintain and utilize long-lasting structures such as buildings, infrastructures or machinery, i.e. entertain a ‘social metabolism’. Nexus approaches provide useful heuristics for interdisciplinary analyses of (un)sustainable society-nature interactions, for example by highlighting relations between different resources (e.g. land, water and energy)

This research investigates farm households' adaptations to climate change-driven monsoon floods in the rural district of Nowshera, Pakistan. Some households in these flood-affected communities have undertaken autonomous adaptations to flooding. We surveyed five hundred farm households from both flood-affected and unaffected villages to investigate the factors driving the uptake of the following autonomous

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the most widely used measure of economic performance world-wide. Where long-run economic sustainability and human well-being are concerned, GDP can provide misleading policy advice. While the limitations of GDP are discussed conceptually in the literature, we provide a quantitative example demonstrating the implications of using only GDP to inform policy design. In the

One of the main debates surrounding payments for ecosystem services (PES) is to what extent should PES design focus on social equity concerns. While much of the debate is centered around theoretical arguments, here we focus empirically on the question of whether there are trade-offs between social-environmental effectiveness and social equity in PES design and implementation. Towards this end, we use

Sustainable energy policy and tackling climate-change-related issues require exploring energy consumption patterns. This paper proposes an integrative methodological approach called grounded survey for understanding behavioral factors behind household energy consumption. The study aims to overcome the restrictions of both quantitative and qualitative studies by combining participatory-systems-mapping

Surrounding natural environments, especially green space and forests, are considered beneficial to our physical and psychological health. Nevertheless, their contributions to our health expenditure are limitedly investigated in the literature to date. The goal of this paper is to explore associations between health spending and forest environments at the prefectural level in Japan. Fully considering

This paper aims to model the connection between economic growth and the environment, assuming that developing economies face an environmental constraint that developed economies did not suffer when they started their processes of economic development. Following the model of Lucas (2000), this paper simulates world income dynamics since the year 1800, setting up the parameters such that the model accurately

The climate crisis and appeals to tackle it are often framed in moral terms, but few studies tested whether individual variation in moral intuitions correlate with pro-environmental behaviours that may affect the climate commons. In the present study we ask whether moral intuitions regarding harm (care and compassion), fairness, in-group loyalty, stance towards authority, and purity, as quantified

Nature affects human well-being in multiple ways. However, the association between species diversity and human well-being at larger spatial scales remains largely unexplored. Here, we examine the relationship between species diversity and human well-being at the continental scale, while controlling for other known drivers of well-being. We related socio-economic data from more than 26,000 European

Agriculture contributes to deforestation and the conversion of other terrestrial ecosystems, affecting important ecosystem functions. A growing share of the produced agricultural commodities is traded between countries. It is widely assumed that international trade reduces humanity's pressure on land ecosystems by optimizing the mix of origin, i.e. by sourcing products from countries where land is

Production of French Polynesia's black pearls is entirely dependent on oceanic conditions. Yet, conditions are changing due to climate change. This research evaluates the potential economic consequences of increased seawater temperature on black pearl production. A stochastic-dynamic bioeconomic simulation simulated the growth of oysters and pearl quality under current and projected seawater temperatures

The present study evaluates the economic impacts of fluctuations in anchovy (Engraulis spp.) catch in Gyeong-Nam (GN) province, South Korea, arising due to warming seawater, accounting for the effects of the responses of the anchovy price. It combines an inter-regional input-output (IRIO) model of two regions (i.e., GN province and all other provinces combined) with a simultaneous equation system (SES)

In this paper, we construct a theoretical model considering that wage distortion is exogenous and endogenous, respectively, to explore the effect of wage distortion on green technological progress. Furthermore, using the panel data of China's industrial sector, we investigate the direct influence and mediating effect of wage distortion on green technological progress. We find that the green technological

This paper analyzes a unique fisheries co-management institution in Japan that has implemented two distinct sets of co-management rules within a single fishing season. The uniqueness stems from the fact that the fishing effort coordination implemented during the first half of the season and the ‘derby’ fishing during the latter half sit at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of cooperative behavior

A multidisciplinary assessment of the sustainability status of 11 coastal small-scale fishery systems in the Brazilian Amazon was performed using the Rapfish method with 31 indicators representing six evaluation fields (ecological, economic, ethical, institutional, social, and technological). The method employs a constrained multidimensional scaling ordination technique; uncertainty is expressed through

Indian internal migration is among the highest in the world, with 30% of the population migrating, often for work. Such population movement can alleviate poverty and reduce forest degradation. However, estimates of this double dividend are scarce. We estimate the potential of internal migration to alleviate poverty by exploring migrant characteristics and their investments. We then evaluate whether

Promotion is an overwhelming motivation for local cadres in China. In the past, local cadres used to compete in economic tournaments for career advancement. As the central government shifts to emphasizing environmental protection, it is critical to examine whether the changed incentive structure drives local cadres to pursue environmental protection. Adopting a database covering cadres and pollution

This paper takes both value-added trade and trade-implied CO2 emission reduction responsibility into account, which constructs a unified conceptual framework to recalculate CO2 emission reduction responsibility from the perspective of value-added trade. This allows policymakers to trace worldwide CO2 emissions at multiple levels of trade, production, consumption, and shared principle alongside the

In this study, we examine whether Willingness To Pay (WTP) for green energy is related to hope and several attitudes towards climate change, namely, denial, worry and level of understanding. Using cross-sectional data comprising answers from 905 respondents from the Netherlands, we find that people who are more generally hopeful are willing to pay more for green energy, but only if this hope is not

Using the concept of appropriation, the initial act of social metabolism, and other land use transition perspectives, this paper examines the land use transitions and landscape appropriation in the Colombian South Pacific region (CSP) across three historical periods: the Colonial period (16th–18th centuries), the opening of the liberal economy (19th century), and globalization (20th–21st centuries)

Transparency in resource revenue management is seen as an important strategy to avoid misuse and misappropriation. Theory predicts that transparency will allow citizens to gain information on revenue management; better informed citizens in turn will enter the debate on resource governance issues, voice concerns, and demand improved accountability if necessary. However, there is little micro-level evidence

This article analyses why Green National Accounting based on the SEEA system and/or a “Green GDP” have not been seriously integrated in policy making processes, despite the long-standing public concern that economic growth may harm the environment.. Combining a historical institutionalist and a public policy-oriented theoretical approach rooted in Political Science in order to understand this puzzle

Improvements in ex situ storage of genetic and reproductive materials offer an alternative for endangered livestock breed conservation, but collections should be optimized cost-effectively to avoid duplication, and with reference to the sustainability of in situ breeds. We developed a multi-period chance-constrained optimization model to rationalize collections of endangered livestock breeds at risk