Gender inequalities exist within commons-dependent communities in developing countries regarding the role of society’s overall attitudes to women as decision-makers. While, in forestry, women have some access to resources and decision-making, in other community resources like fisheries and irrigation water, women are absent and males entirely dominate. Different theories on gender and environment suggest that women’s inclusion is an important step toward reducing their economic marginalization and argue that in reality women’s economic advancement/empowerment may not get carried into home and community spaces as durable empowerment if society holds negative attitudes toward women’s needs, contribution and deservedness in families and beyond.
Due to society’s negative attitudes toward women, women remain trapped in a vicious cycle of exclusion. Breaking this vicious cycle requires combining household assets and income to assess women’s true poverty type. A flat implementation of economic policies toward women’s pathway out of poverty may not yield the desired results and may even be counterproductive if society’s negative attitudes and the poverty characteristics of women or female-headed households are not taken into account. Since all women are not homogeneous and that a few communities hold pro-women attitudes, to promote women’s economic empowerment, the role of society’s attitudes toward women’s participation as decision-makers cannot be ignored as women’s relations to their social, economic, political, and natural environments are itself a culturally and historically specific process, which can be understood only through identifying and understanding gender-specific attitudes and actions toward those environments.
Article
Mostafa Mahmud Naser and Prafula Pearce
Evolution of international climate change policy and processes commenced in 1990 with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which made the first global attempt to provide an intergovernmental platform for addressing the effects of climate change. Since then, major advances in the international dialog occurred from 1995 to 2004 during the Kyoto Protocol. However, the Kyoto Protocol outcome was not considered a major success in terms of reducing global emissions, although it succeeded in advancing global market-based flexible mitigation mechanisms, such as emissions trading, joint implementation, and the clean development mechanism. A turnaround in the global approach occurred with the Paris Agreement in 2015, which represented a major turning point in the climate debate, with a bottom-up approach allowing states to set their own emission targets. In addition, the Paris Agreement was the catalyst for formation of bodies and institutions that promote negotiated climate change themes and has permitted countries to work together to share direct practical approaches for tackling climate change. The success of the Paris Agreement can be seen as more countries commit to nationally determined contribution targets. In addition, the practical implication of the bottom-up approach for institutional investors and corporate engagement is evident from the increase in the number of global climate change litigation cases brought against corporations and financial institutions that breach climate change obligations. Going forward, some of the climate change negotiation issues of concern that have yet to be resolved include the differences in contributions required by developed nations as opposed to developing nations, sometimes referred to as the North–South divide in climate change negotiations, the issue of loss and damage associated with climate change events, such as tropical cyclones and storms, and how to account for non-economic loss and damage caused by climate change events.
Article
William D. A. Bryant
General equilibrium theory thinks of the economy as a collection of interconnected markets, each of which, in isolation and in combination, is driven toward some sort of equilibrium. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models add to this abstract point of view by calibrating models of the economy using actual economic data. The aim is to empirically solve for equilibrium demand, supply, and price levels across the markets in the economy. Many areas of economic analysis, reform, and policymaking have benefitted from scrutiny in a CGE context. This is particularly true of issues to do with tax and tariff reform, where CGE models first gained prominence. More recently, the areas of environmental economics and regulation has attracted the attention of CGE modelers. Considerations of environment and environmental regulation, inevitably involve a consideration of issues to do with water. Such issues range from aquaculture through pricing of water to virtual water—and many points in between. In the analysis of each of these issues—and the role water plays in the overall economy, CGE models have made an important contribution to understanding and informed policymaking.
Article
Simanti Banerjee
Economics conceptualizes harmful effects to the environment as negative externalities that can be internalized through implementation of policies involving regulatory and market-based mechanisms, and behavioral economic interventions. However, effective policy will require knowledge and understanding of intended and unintended stakeholder behaviors and consequences and the context in which the policy will be implemented. This mandate is nontrivial since policies once implemented can be hard to reverse and often have irreversible consequences in the short and/or long run, leading to high social costs. Experimental economics (often in combination with other empirical evaluation methods) can help by testing policies and their impacts prior to modification of current policies, and design and implementation of new ones. Such experimental evaluation can include lab and field experiments, and choice experiments. Additionally, experimental policy evaluation should pay attention to scaling up problems and the ethical ramifications of the treatment. This would ensure that the experimental findings will remain relevant when rolled out to bigger populations (hence retaining policy makers’ interest in the method and evidence generated by it), and the treatment to internalize the externality will not create or exacerbate societal disparities and ethical challenges.
Article
Govinda R. Timilsina and Kalim U. Shah
The levelized costs of electricity generation for renewable energy technologies differ and fluctuate depending on factors including capital costs, operation and maintenance costs, utilization factors, and economic lives. In addition to these factors, In the case of fossil fuels, prices and heat rate are also responsible for fluctuations. There is a global movement in favor renewable energy. Many countries have announced carbon-free electricity within the next 30–40 years, which implies massive expansion of renewable energy technologies. The newer investment trends in electricity generation technologies indicate the same. Technological breakthroughs and cost reductions of energy storage technologies would further favor renewable energy technologies and would decrease their intermittency hurdles. Developments that expand the scaling effect of renewable energy and the potential improvement in efficiency through continued research and development could bring the cost of renewable energy further down in the future. When the levelized costs of electricity generation are estimated, the declining trends of renewable energy costs are observed and can to a large extent (but not fully) be explained by certain potential drivers. Particularly for wind and solar, these drivers include technological innovation/improvements that have increased efficiency, policy supports such as research and development funding, economy of scale both in the manufacturing of equipment (solar panels, wind turbines) and installation of plants, and monopoly rent dissipation due to increased number of manufacturers and suppliers. Competition among equipment manufacturers and project developers may also contribute to cost decline as could cost reduction through improved product efficiency related to technological improvements and innovations.
Article
Ernesto Sánchez-Triana, Bjorn Larsen, Santiago Enriquez, and Andreia Costa Santos
Air pollution of fine particulates (PM2.5) is a leading cause of mortality worldwide. It is estimated that ambient PM2.5 air pollution results in between 4.1 million and 8.9 million premature deaths annually. According to the World Bank, the health effects of ambient PM2.5 air pollution had a cost of $6.4 trillion in purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted dollars in 2019, equivalent to 4.8% of global gross domestic product (PPP adjusted) that year.
Estimating the health effects and cost of ambient PM2.5 air pollution involves three steps: (1) estimating population exposure to pollution; (2) estimating the health effects of such exposure; and (3) assigning a monetary value to the illnesses and premature deaths caused by ambient air pollution.
Estimating population exposure to ambient PM2,5 has gone from predominantly using ground level monitoring data mainly in larger cities to estimates of nationwide population weighted exposures based on satellite imagery and chemical transport models along with ground level monitoring data. The Global Burden of Disease 2010 (GBD 2010) provided for the first time national, regional and global estimates of exposures to ambient PM2.5. The GBD exposure estimates have also evolved substantially from 2010 to 2019, especially national estimates in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Estimation of health effects of ambient PM2.5 has also undergone substantial developments during the last two decades. These developments involve: i) going from largely estimating health effects associated with variations in daily exposures to estimating health effects of annual exposure; ii) going from estimating all-cause mortality or mortality from broad disease categories (i.e., cardiopulmonary diseases) to estimating mortality from specific diseases; and iii) being able to estimate health effects over a wide range of exposure that reflect ambient and household air pollution exposure levels in low- and middle-income countries.
As to monetary valuation of health effects of ambient air pollution, estimates in most low- and middle-income countries still rely on benefit transfer of values of statistical life (VSL) from high-income countries.
Article
Matthew Rout, Shaun Awatere, Jason Paul Mika, John Reid, and Matthew Roskruge
Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, have an intrinsically environmental approach to economics. This approach—informed by the Māori worldview—was refined over the first millennium of inhabitation, before colonization brought the intrusion of Western institutions and the consequent involution of Māori institutions. Māori view humans as embedded within a wider nonhuman community of nature that is simultaneously spiritual and material. Māori understand “nature” as a unified spiritual-socioecology. Economics is just one facet of this whole, a facet fundamentally entwined with the whole such that all economic relationships have inherently social, spiritual, and ecological elements. At the core of Māori relationships with nature is the ethic of kaitiakitanga, or the act of guardianship over the spiritual-socioecology. Māori have a responsibility to actively care for their human and nonhuman community, to act with mana (authority and dignity), to respect nature’s tapu (sacredness), and to maintain nature’s mauri (life force). The Māori economy is underpinned by an integrated, nuanced, and adaptive framework of beliefs and institutions that constrains decision-making, ensuring the consideration of the human, nonhuman, and spiritual domains across time while simultaneously being calibrated toward delivering mutually beneficial outcomes within kin-group networks. This ensures that economic success does not come at the expense of other people, nature, or future generations. An economy based on a Māori worldview is, fundamentally, an environmental economy.
Following colonization, Māori suffered a loss of mana. Land was sold below market rate or stolen, and after massive deforestation and significant loss of native flora and fauna, Aotearoa New Zealand’s tapu was desecrated and its mauri reduced. In the mid- to late-20th century, Māori political activism and a resultant tribunal examining actions and omissions by the state during land acquisition resulted in Māori regaining mana. Consequently, Māori have overcome the drastic change in rights to their remaining land to act as kaitiaki (guardians) of this remaining land in ways both congruent with traditional practices (te ao tūroa) and adapted to changed context (te ao hurihuri). Māori have realigned the imposed governance structures of their organizations to reinstate their original focus on the intergenerational well-being of human and nonhuman communities, reinvigorating the influence of mana in business, and its capacity to create a virtuous circle. Māori have managed to thrive in the settler and global economy not despite their environmentally grounded economic approach, but because of it.
Article
Jorge H. García and Thomas Sterner
Economists argue that carbon taxation (and more generally carbon pricing) is the single most powerful way to combat climate change. Since this is so controversial, we need to explain it better, and to be precise, the efficiency gains are largest when the costs of abatement are strongly heterogeneous. This is often—but not always—the case. When it is not, standards can fill much the same role.
To internalize the climate externality, economic efficiency calls for a global carbon tax (or price) that is equal to the global damage or the so-called social cost of carbon. However, equity considerations as well as existing geographical and sectoral differences in the effectiveness of carbon taxation at reducing emissions, suggest earlier implementation of relatively high taxation levels in some sectors or countries—for instance, among richer economies followed by a more gradual phase-in among low-income countries.
The number of national and subnational carbon pricing policies that have been implemented around the world during the first years following the Paris Agreement of 2015 is significant. By 2020, these programs covered 22% of global emissions with an average carbon price (weighted by the share of emissions covered) of USD15/tCO2 and a maximum price of USD120/tCO2. The share of emissions covered by carbon pricing as well as carbon prices themselves are expected to consistently rise throughout the decade 2021–2030 and beyond. Many experts agree that the social cost of carbon is in the range USD40–100/tCO2.
Anti-climate lobbying, public opposition, and lack of understanding of the instrument are among the key challenges faced by carbon taxation. Opportunities for further expansion of carbon taxation lie in increased climate awareness, the communicative resources governments have to help citizens understand the logic behind carbon taxation, and earmarking of carbon tax revenues to address issues that are important to the public such as fairness.
Article
Joe Kerkvliet
Economics plays strong roles in the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). First, the ESA’s language allows for economic analysis of critical habitat designations, recovery plan implementations, listing postponements, and the design of habitat-conservation plans. Extensive administrative changes to the ESA in the 1990s were designed to reduce economic costs and to elicit landowners’ cooperation. These reforms were partly motivated and guided by economic analysis. Second, economic analysis plays a role in providing credible estimates of the economic costs of ESA implementation. Cost estimates are highly variable and likely to depend on species’ characteristics and the effectiveness of recovery programs. Emerging evidence suggests that the 1990 reforms are reducing costs and increasing effectiveness. Third, economic science contributes to estimation of benefits. Because of the “public goods” nature of nearly all ecosystem and species conservation efforts, estimates must be based on stated preference methods. This use leads to difficulties in establishing the authenticity of benefits estimates. Also, research suggests that benefits estimates are highly sensitive to the spatial nature of the market (beneficiaries’ geographic locations). Future research needs to tackle both authenticity and spatial issues. Fourth, benefit–cost analysis (BCA) is required by law to inform many resource decisions affecting ecosystem and species conservation. Four illustrative BCAs show that whether benefits exceed costs is highly dependent on the authenticity of benefits based on stated preference methods and assumptions about the spatial nature of the market. Substantial uncertainty accompanies both benefit and cost estimates.
Article
Faysal Mansouri and Zouheir Mighri
Coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Its human-to-human transmission was confirmed on January 20, 2020 and rapidly escalated into a global pandemic.
Coronavirus exponential spread has caused overwhelming challenges to global public health and left households and businesses counting huge economic losses.
These unprecedented global circumstances have forced policymakers to work under bilevel pressure: implement successful containment strategies and in the meantime get society and the economy to a new normal path—in other words, a trade-off between successful containment strategy and optimal reopening strategy.
As the pandemic evolves, a growing public and academic debate has taken place on the likelihood of the influence of meteorological factors as well as pollution elements on COVID-19 cycle. This potential association between meteorological factors and COVID-19 spread inevitably shapes containment strategies and social and economic reopening policy options.
An important growing literature has investigated this relationship using various statistical tools and approaches. Indeed, several researchers have attempted to provide evidence of statistical correlation between meteorological conditions as well as and air pollution factors and COVID-19 reported deaths?
Several studies have analyzed the association between meteorological factors and the spread of COVID-19 in local, regional, and global frameworks. A particular focus has been made on the identification of factors that might have impact on COVID-19 mortality rate as well as on the acceleration of diffusion of infection, for various countries including China.
