Showing papers in "Ecological Economics in 2008"

TL;DR: Payments for environmental services (PES) have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors synthesize the information presented, according to case characteristics with respect to design, costs, environmental effectiveness, and other outcomes, and conclude that user-financed PES programs were better targeted, more closely tailored to local conditions and needs, had better monitoring and a greater willingness to enforce conditionality, and had far fewer confounding side objectives than government-funded programs.

TL;DR: In this paper, two distinct accounting approaches for constructing consumption-based NEI are presented, which differ in the allocation of intermediate consumption of imported products and a consistent method of weighting production-based and consumption based NEI is discussed.

TL;DR: In this paper, a study was conducted in which attitudes and behaviour as well as the role of individual characteristics like confidence and values related to sustainable products are analyzed. But the focus of the analysis is on exploring the influence of determinants as hypothesised by the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) on sustainable food consumer behavior in Belgium.

TL;DR: Costa Rica pioneered the use of the payments for environmental services (PES) approach in developing countries by establishing a formal, countrywide program of payments, the PSA program as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a rigorous definition of the rebound effect, to clarify key conceptual issues and to highlight the potential consequences of various assumptions for empirical estimates of the effect.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose three approaches to reduce informational rents to landowners: (1) acquire information on observable landowner attributes that are correlated with compliance costs; (2) offer landowners a menu of screening contracts; and (3) allocate contracts through procurement auctions.

TL;DR: The Payment for Hydrological Environmental Services (PSAH) Program as mentioned in this paper was designed to complement other policy responses to the crisis at the interface of these problems, where the Mexican federal government pays participating forest owners for the benefits of watershed protection and aquifer recharge in areas where commercial forestry is not currently competitive.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors employed the GMM-SYS approach for the estimation of the panel VAR model in each of the four groups, and the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth was tested and ascertained.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed the global and distributional aspects of American household carbon footprint and found that 30% of total US household CO 2 impact in 2004 occurred outside the US and that households vary considerably in their CO 2 responsibilities: at least a factor of ten difference exists between low and high-impact households.

TL;DR: The Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) as discussed by the authors is the largest land retirement/reforestation program in the developing world, having the goal of converting 14.67 million hectares of cropland to forests by 2010 (4.4 million of which is on land with slopes greater than 25°).

TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper conducted an eco-efficiency analysis for regional industrial systems in China by developing data envelopment analysis (DEA) based models, which showed that Tianjing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Beijing, Hainan and Qinghai are relatively eco-efficient.

TL;DR: In this paper, an applied site selection tool, which takes into account three variables that vary in space: environmental services provided, risks of losing those services, and participation costs, is presented.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors employ data disaggregated at the individual and local level to show that consideration of amenities such as climate, environmental and urban conditions is critical when analyzing subjective well-being.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the lacunae in valuation of ecosystem services from a psychological perspective by arguing that the common person's perception of the ecosystem is quite different from what is conceptualized by conventional economists.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that an HDI of no less than 0.8 and a per capita ecological footprint less than the globally available biocapacity per person represent minimum requirements for sustainable development that is globally replicable.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed and analyzed U.S. agri-environmental programs using literature review and program data, focusing on several key questions: has benefit-cost targeting increased the environmental benefit obtained from program budgets? Has competitive bidding reduced program costs? To what extent have these program designs resulted in additional gain (that would not have otherwise been obtained)?

TL;DR: A payments for ecosystem services (PES) system came about in South Africa with the establishment of the government-funded Working for Water (WfW) programme that cleared mountain catchments and riparian zones of invasive alien plants to restore natural fire regimes, the productive potential of land, biodiversity, and hydrological functioning as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: This paper developed a multinomial logit model of farmer's choice of crops and found that both temperature and precipitation affect the crops that South American farmers choose, and that farmers in wetter locations are more likely to grow rice, fruits, potatoes, and squash and in dryer locations maize and wheat.

TL;DR: In this article, a comprehensive assessment of global socioeconomic biomass harvest, use and trade for the year 2000 is presented, where the authors developed country-level livestock balances and a consistent set of factors to estimate flows of used biomass not covered by international statistics (eg grazed biomass, crop residues) and indirect flows (i.e., biomass destroyed during harvest but not used).

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a model developed in the Netherlands for the estimation of damage caused by floods, which combines information on land use and economic data, and data on flood characteristics and stage-damage functions, where the geographical dimension is supported by modern GIS to obtain a damage estimate for various damage categories.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe and compare the two cases, using a common PES definition and methodology, drawing on both primary interview-based information and secondary data, and find that both schemes have relatively effective in reaching their environmental objectives, in terms of having probably high additionality levels and low leakage effects.

TL;DR: In this article, the information dynamics between corporate environmental disclosure, financial markets and public pressures are analyzed, and it is shown that enhanced environmental disclosure translates into more precise earnings forecasts by analysts.

TL;DR: The payment for environmental services (PES) scheme as discussed by the authors was developed to protect 2774 hectares of a watershed containing the threatened cloud-forest habitat of 11 species of migratory birds.

TL;DR: The potential human health impact of rabies associated with the vulture decline is found to be significant and this, and a wide range of other impacts suggest that significant resources should be put into testing of pharmaceutical products to ensure that similar situations are not repeated.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce a concept for social learning developed in the European project HarmoniCOP and discuss its implications for the cultural and institutional context of water resources management.

TL;DR: The ecological footprint is a measure of the resources necessary to produce the goods that an individual or population consumes It is also used as a measure for sustainability, though evidence suggests that it falls short as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the hypothesis that environmental management systems and managerial activities to reduce negative environmental impacts which are not part of EMS have a positive influence on the probability of firms to carry out environmental innovations.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the interaction between financial and social performance in a sample of 289 firms from the US covering the period 1991-2004 and employing two different test methods, namely lagged OLS and Granger causation, there appears to be preliminary evidence that the direction of the "causation" predominantly runs from financial to social performance.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a different approach to derive information on individual preferences for local environmental quality by analyzing data drawn from the German socioeconomic panel in an attempt to explain differences in self-reported levels of well-being in terms of environmental quality.