Documents Swanson, Tim 2 results

"We distinguish between local problems of biodiversity loss and global ones, where international cooperation is required. Global biodiversity regulation involves choosing the optimal stopping rule regarding global land conversions, in order to ensure that some areas of unconverted natural reserves remain to support the production sector that exists on converted lands. The basic difficulty with implementing a solution to this global problem lies in the asymmetry in endowments between those states that have previously converted, and those that have not. We demonstrate that the fundamental problem of global biodiversity regulation is similar to the bargaining problem analysed by Nash, Rubinstein, and others. There are benefits from global land conversion, and there must be agreement on their distribution before the conversion process can be halted. Since the institutions addressing global biodiversity problems are either highly ineffectual (benefit-sharing agreements, prior informed-consent clauses) or very extreme (incremental cost contracts), the biodiversity bargaining problem remains unresolved. For this reason we anticipate that suboptimal conversions will continue to occur, as a way of protesting the ineffective and unfair approaches employed in addressing this problem to date."

Following 'Blueprint for a Green Economy' (the Pearce Report), David Pearce and his team have turned their attention to global environmental threats. If it makes sense to apply economic analysis to national environmental problems, then it makes even more sense to apply it to world-wide dangers. The authors start by describing the reasons for using economic approaches to common resources like climate, ozone and biodiversity. They then take a detailed look at the economic ways of tackling the issues involved in global warming, ozone layer depletion, environmental degradation in the Third World, population, rain forests, aid, equity, international environmental co-operation and what might amount to green foreign policies. They show not only how to take all these things into account in economic theory, but also the economic price of failing to do so. Blueprint 2 is an agenda for international and governmental economic action.