Documents natural resources 159 results

"Sustainability requires maintaining opportunities for future generations, so they can meet their needs. Opportunities are passed to future generations through a set of capital assets. Nature provides an important class of these assets, but markets seldom reveal the marginal value of natural capital. Rather, the marginal social worth or asset price must be imputed based on intertemporal exchange. In the context of assessing whether intertemporal allocation rules lead to sustainable development, appropriate asset prices must be based on the actual allocations and trade-offs society makes. Therefore, measuring economic programmes that enable the measurement of asset prices is an important empirical task. We review the theory of measuring natural capital asset prices and discuss the key elements of measuring economic programmes that enable the measurement of natural capital asset prices. We place the measurement of economic programmes and natural capital asset prices in the context of wealth-based sustainability metrics."

"Does the availability or variability of water matter for the economy? Does it meaningfully impact the growth and development trajectory of a country? It may seem surprising that answers to these most basic of questions remain elusive. The aim of this paper is to summarize recent work on the economic impacts of water scarcity and variability. The paper finds that there is strong evidence that variations in rainfall and water availability have significant impacts on particular sectors, such as agriculture, human capital, and even conflict. But paradoxically evidence of impacts on economic growth and other measures of aggregate economic activity remains ambiguous. The paper explains reasons for this anomaly and explores the pathways through which water impacts the economy. The paper provides a synthesis of key developments in the literature, identifies methodological gaps, and suggests policy solutions."

"Groundwater depletion is a worldwide phenomenon that has prompted calls for improved policy and management. A prominent policy recommendation, especially among economists, is the establishment of well-defined transferable groundwater rights and the promotion of water transfers or markets. Modelled effects and actual results in limited sites show promising potential, but progress has been slow, even in areas of significant need and capacity such as the western United States. This article identifies some of the complexities associated with defining groundwater rights and with managing groundwater aquifers. Those complexities may account to some degree for the incremental and limited progress toward transferable rights. Recent groundwater policy developments in California and other western states are reviewed briefly in light of those complexities."

"Experts worldwide point to the challenges our world is facing (e.g., land degradation, resource scarcity, global warming) as described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Many studies have analyzed how to cope with these challenges. Aside from promoting pro-environmental behaviors, it was proposed that technological innovations might provide the potential to cope with and compensate for natural resource scarcity. We conducted an online survey (N = 404) investigating how people's scarcity perception is related to their willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviors and their openness to new sustainable technologies. Regression analyses demonstrate that the anticipated future unavailability of resources is more crucial for predicting pro-environmental behavior than the perceived current resource availability. The expected reduced future availability of natural resources goes along with increased openness to sustainable energy (renergy = −0.32) and food technologies (rfood = −0.22). Moreover, a t-test provides evidence for the causal influence of scarcity perception by showing that pro-environmental behavior was higher following our scarcity salience manipulation (Cohen's d = 0.27). Further bootstrapping analyses showed that the salience affected individuals' technology openness via pro-environmental behavior. Also, pro-environmental behavior and openness to sustainable food and energy technologies were amplified when people believed that fewer resources will be available due to an increased concern about scarcity."

"En 1972, quatre jeunes scientifiques du MIT rédigent à la demande du Club de Rome un rapport qu'ils intitulent The Limits to Growth. Celui-ci va choquer le monde et devenir un best-seller international. Pour la première fois, leur recherche établit les conséquences dramatiques d'une croissance exponentielle dans un monde fini. En 2004, quand les auteurs reprennent leur analyse et l'enrichissent de données accumulées durant trois décennies d'expansion sans limites, l'impact destructeur des activités humaines sur les processus naturels les conforte définitivement dans leur raisonnement. Dans sa préface à l'édition française, Jean-Marc Jancovici résume parfaitement la question posée par ce livre : « Si la croissance économique perpétuelle doit, à relativement court terme, devenir un simple souvenir, comment, dans ce cadre, organiser un avenir économique, politique, social, et surtout mental qui soit désirable ? »"

"An effective innovation effort for ‘global challenges' must be multilateral, because the outcomes will be globally shared, highly uncertain, and very large-scale. At present we lack a framework for organizing such multilateral collaboration. Global challenges relate to the consumption of ‘common-pool' or ‘common property' resources. It is often held that such resources involve a ‘tragedy of the commons' for which the proposed solutions are usually full state control or privatization. However, the late Elinor Ostrom argued that the state/market approach to the commons is flawed conceptually and empirically. In multiple studies she showed that resources are often managed collectively through negotiation and collaboration among ‘polycentric' agents. This paper aims to outline the conceptual approach, to suggest that it can be scaled up to the world level as an approach to the global challenges, and to propose an agenda for research on major innovation challenges involved."

"The relatively new and still amorphous concept of ‘green growth' can be understood as a call for balancing longer-term investments in sustaining environmental wealth with nearer-term income growth to reduce poverty. We draw on a large body of economic theory available for providing insights on such balancing of income growth and environmental sustainability. We show that there is no a priori assurance of substantial positive spillovers from environmental policies to income growth, or for a monotonic transition to a ‘green steady state' along an optimal path. The greenness of an optimal growth path can depend heavily on initial conditions, with a variety of different adjustments occurring concurrently along an optimal path. Factor-augmenting technical-change targeting at offsetting resource depletion is critical to sustaining long-term growth within natural limits on the availability of natural resources and environmental services."

"‘Green growth' is almost tautologically required for global welfare to rise in the long run. Economic growth is desirable, not least because over 1 billion people still live in conditions of poverty. Undermining the ecological basis for human civilization will damage human welfare and further undermine economic growth. There are large adverse environmental externalities from economic activity that affect human welfare directly and indirectly through lower measured output. Finding ways to tackle these externalities will enhance wellbeing and allow continued growth of GDP while preserving aggregate natural capital. However, achieving this goal presents societies with major challenges. The composition of GDP is likely to have to change significantly, with more emphasis on new ideas and less on increased material throughputs. The role of the state in a ‘green growth' transition will have to go beyond internalizing externalities to ‘get prices right'. The necessary transformation will be large, system-wide, and structural, so the state must also provide, at the least, overall strategic direction. Innovation will be central to any successful strategy, as will be dealing with the distributional consequences of stronger environmental policies, particularly in developing countries. Organizing the appropriate collective action at the right levels in the face of inadequate information, while ensuring that the appropriate governance arrangements are in place, will not be easy. Policy experimentation is needed, with more rigorous ex post evaluation and, where successful, rapid dissemination of the results."