A vast literature in fisheries economics focuses on drivers of fishers' behavior with limited attention given to what happens once the fish are landed. This often strongly contrasts with a main ...policy focus on coastal communities, with fisheries management as an additional instrument in supporting livelihoods. This study shows that the number of Norwegian landing plants has been reduced in recent decades, and that quantity landed, annual plant operation time, and attracting smaller vessels decrease the probability of exit. Interestingly, plants in communities with additional landing locations have lower probabilities of exit, pointing to an industry cluster effect.
There is an increasing focus on environmentally sustainable seafood, which creates a potential for segmentation in the seafood market. Several recent studies demonstrate that consumers prefer ...ecolabeled wild seafood over unlabeled seafood. In addition, there is increasing evidence of a preference for wild fish relative to farmed fish, despite the rapid increase of aquaculture production. Recently, ecolabels have also been introduced for farmed fish. An interesting question is whether the preference for wild fish is primarily related to the perceived lack of environmental sustainability in aquaculture, or whether it is a perceived quality difference. In this paper, a choice experiment is used to investigate these issues in Germany for salmon using the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) ecolabel for farmed salmon and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) ecolabel for wild salmon. Using a mixed logit model, the random parameter specification indicates substantial variation in consumer preferences beyond demographic variables. With respect to the main question, the ASC ecolabel not only makes up for the negative association of farmed salmon, but gives a similar price for the ASC labeled salmon as for MSC labeled wild salmon. This is an indication that environmental concerns and not quality differences are the major issue in segmenting the market between farmed and wild fish.
There are calls for social innovation to help with the effort to halt biodiversity loss. However, research on social innovation and biodiversity is dispersed and covers a multitude of disciplines. A ...systematic overview of research on social innovation and biodiversity is missing and this paper contributes by focusing on social innovation to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss and unsustainability. The paper reviews research on social innovation in changing land use (agriculture, forestry, aquatic ecosystems and cities), in tackling exploitation of organisms (fishing, hunting, harvesting), and in addressing threats of climate change, pollution and invasive species. Across these drivers, we find a) a strong emphasis on social innovation as civic action for changing practices in addressing unsustainability, b) that social innovation research tends to focus on local experimentation although there are bodies of literature on policy-driven innovations and consumer/producer-driven innovations, and c) that there is very little research taking a critical perspective to explore negative or unintended consequences of social innovation. Drawing on the review, we propose three cross cutting issues that can be a focus for future research, practice and supportive policy: social innovation for nature-based solutions, social innovation for participatory governance, and social innovation for technology that tackles biodiversity loss.
•Review covers social innovation tackling main drivers of biodiversity loss.•Social innovation for biodiversity focuses on civic action for changing practices.•Literature focuses on local experimentation with gaps on indigenous solutions.•Cross-cutting themes are nature-based solutions, technology and governance.•Transformation research needs a focus on social innovation and social exnovation.
The economic value of water quality is poorly understood in Hawaii. Quantifying the economic value of coastal water quality would inform policy decisions that impact the coast and help justify ...expenditures in water quality improvements. We conducted a non-market valuation of beach recreationalists’ preferences and willingness to pay for water quality and associated attributes at Oahu beaches. Using a discrete choice experiment analyzed by a conditional logit model, results suggest individuals were willing to pay $11.43 per day at the beach to reduce days of bacterial exceedance from 11 to 5 per year, a further $30.72 to reduce it to no bacterial exceedances at all. WTP to move from 15 ft to 30 ft of underwater visibility was $35.71, a further $14.80 to increase from 30 ft to 60 ft. Respondents were also willing to pay $15.33 to improve coral reef cover from 10% to 25%, a further $4.89 to improve to 45% cover. WTP for moving from 9 fish species to 18 species was $7.14, a further $2.47 to increase that to 27 fish species. These environmental improvements can improve Oahu recreationalists’ welfare by $205 million, $550 million, $639 million, $265 million, $274 million, $88 million, $128 million, and $44 million per year, respectively. Welfare gains may justify increased spending in management and restoration of coastal ecosystems.
India has a history of contested land ownership over forests. The contest is between government that has held legal rights and forest-dwelling communities whose traditional rights have not been ...recognised. However, in 2008 a legislative reform – Forest Rights Act (FRA) – was introduced that gave forest ownership rights to forest-dwellers. We study evolution of land-related disputes after enactment of FRA. Two opposing forces are expected. While provision of land rights is likely to address forest-dwellers contestation over diversion of forest land, existence of contradictory laws as well as implementation gaps undermine the rights of forest dwellers. Additionally, the legislation is likely to increase the value that communities place on land, increasing their demand for titles in case of a contest. We employ difference-in-difference methodology to show that land disputes increased after FRA implementation. We show that contradictory conservation policies, lax implementation and increased incentives to demand claims resulted in this increase.
•We study a legislation in India that gave forest land rights to forest dwellers.•We assess how land related disputes evolved after the legislation.•Results show increased likelihood of land disputes after the policy reform.•Existence of contradictory legislations is shown to be responsible for the increase.•Increased demand for land rights is also suggested as a channel.
Retrospectives Frischmann, Brett M.; Marciano, Alain; Ramello, Giovanni Battista
The Journal of economic perspectives,
10/2019, Volume:
33, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin ...focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed on environmental resources. Unconstrained consumption of a shared resource—a pasture, a highway, a server—by individuals acting in rational pursuit of their self-interest can lead to congestion and, worse, rapid depreciation, depletion, and even destruction of the resources. Our societies face similar problems, with respect to not only environmental resources but also infrastructures, knowledge, and many other shared resources. In this article, we examine how the tragedy of the commons has fared within the economics literature and its relevance for economic and public policies today. We revisit the original piece to explain Hardin's purpose and conceptual approach. We expose two conceptual mistakes he made: conflating resource with governance and conflating open access with commons. This critical discussion leads us to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the recent Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, who spent her life working on commons. Finally, we discuss a few modern examples of commons governance of shared resources.
We analyze the targeting and additionality of the Chilean afforestation program reforms implemented in the mid-1990s. Propensity score matching estimates are obtained by potential erosion categories ...using random area sample data. The additional afforestation percentage is estimated to be larger for none or low and very severe categories of potential erosion parcels. Even though the program helped maintain forest cover to highly erodible land, afforested parcels with high opportunity costs and possible negative amenity benefits are also attributed to the program. To improve the cost-effectiveness and to avoid misallocation of land and water resources, more effective targeting is required.
Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. ...Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, though beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners. A regulator interested in providing incentives to landowners for increased provision of ecosystem services often lacks complete information on landowners’ costs. The combination of spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric cost information means that the optimal provision of ecosystem services cannot be achieved using standard regulatory or payment for ecosystem services approaches. Here we show that an auction that sets payments between landowners and the regulator for the increased value of ecosystem services with conservation provides incentives for landowners to truthfully reveal cost information, and allows the regulator to implement the optimal provision of ecosystem services, even in the case with spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric information.
Hydrogen fuel is considered as the cleanest renewable resource and the primary alternative to fossil fuels for future energy supply. Sustainable hydrogen generation is the major prerequisite to ...realize future hydrogen economy. The electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), as the vital step of water electrolysis to H2 production, has been the subject of extensive study over the past decades. In this comprehensive review, we first summarize the fundamentals of HER and review the recent state-of-the-art advances in the low-cost and high-performance catalysts based on noble and non-noble metals, as well as metal-free HER electrocatalysts. We systemically discuss the insights into the relationship among the catalytic activity, morphology, structure, composition, and synthetic method. Strategies for developing an effective catalyst, including increasing the intrinsic activity of active sites and/or increasing the number of active sites, are summarized and highlighted. Finally, the challenges, perspectives, and research directions of HER electrocatalysis are featured.
The adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015 shifted the attention towards sustainability-related concerns in both developing and developed counties. The aim of this paper is to ...examine how agricultural productivity – a key driver in achieving many of these SDGs – is affected by carbon emissions, deforestation, renewable energy consumption, natural resources, and regional integration for the ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. Using the Mean Group (MG) class estimators, able to tackle the cross-sectional dependence in the data, empirical findings reveal that environmental degradation (in the form of CO2 emissions) reduces agricultural productivity in the region. Both the forest area and natural resource variables negatively affect the productivity of the agricultural sector, while the use of renewable energy sources positively contributes to the agricultural sector. However, despite being one of the highest integrated regions in the world, regional integration among the ASEAN members does not boost their agricultural productivity. The causality tests confirm the existence of bidirectional causality between agricultural productivity and renewable energy consumption, and unidirectional causality across a few other variables. Accordingly, the study provides policy recommendations for the governments of ASEAN economies on improving the environmental performance of agriculture and achieving the SDGs by 2030.
Display omitted
•The relationship among agricultural productivity, carbon emissions, deforestation, renewable energy, and regional integration is analyzed.•CO2 emissions reduces agricultural productivity in ASEAN countries.•Both the forest area and natural resource variables negatively affect the productivity of the agricultural sector.•Renewable energy sources positively contribute to the agricultural sector.
PDF
