Climate change and escalating degradation of ecosystem services place the need for greening economic growth on the international policy agenda. To make growth greener and more inclusive, it is crucial to change the institutions and incentive structures in national sector reforms and to involve poor and vulnerable groups in decision making.

This professional practice report reflects upon lessons learned from piloting and evaluating an innovative approach to policy strategic environmental assessment (SEA) in developing countries. The primary analytical focuses of the approach are institutions and governance characteristics, plus it places strong emphasis on learning. The piloting provides valuable insights about the conduct of SEA at the policy level and in socio-political where there is limited experience with SEA.

We examine risk preferences in an urban setting in a low-income developing country with nonstudent subjects by adapting the experimental approach of Holt and Laury (HL; 2002). We conducted 22 group experiments with 404 participants and used in-kind payoffs. The average respondent was ‘riskaverse’ (the midpoint of Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) intervals among participants was 0.53, roughly in line with most similar studies in poor countries).

In this paper, we explore the synergies and tradeoffs between abatement of global and local pollution. We built a unique dataset of Swedish heat and power plants with detailed boiler-level data 2001-2009 on not only production and inputs but also emissions of CO2 and NOx.

Twenty years ago, governments gathered for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. The “Rio Declaration” laid out several principles of sustainable development, including the central role of policy instruments. In this article, we take stock of where we stand today in implementing sound and effective environmental policy instruments throughout the world, particularly in developing and transitional economies.

The purpose of the present article is to consider optimal trade policies for biofuels, taking into account the potential for carbon leakage and the complex set of policies used or discussed for biofuels. First, the authors consider the case of optimal trade policies and find that the combination of an import standard and a border carbon adjustment welfare dominates using only a border carbon adjustment (BCA).

This article provides an interpretive survey on implications of insights from behavioral economics for environmental policy. In particular, it discusses whether, and if so how, policy implications based on conventional economic theory have to be modified when insights from behavioral economics are considered.

We study how uncertainty about climate change severity affects the relative benefits of early abatement and a portfolio of research and development (R&D) in lowering future abatement costs. Optimal early abatement depends on the curvature of the marginal benefit and marginal abatement cost (MAC) functions and how the uncertain parameter affects marginal benefits.