When the Stern Review challenged the conventional wisdom and called for strong and immediate action on climate change, reactions were initially fierce. However, the ensuing debate has shown a new consensus in the making.

This article contains three contributions to this discussion posted by: Robert Mendelsohn, Thomas Sterner and U. Martin Persson, and John P. Weyant.

Explaining soil capital facilitates a better understanding of constraints and opportunities for increased agricultural production and reduced land degradation. The diversity in farmers’ soil capital, production strategies, and general farming systems (including conservation investments) points to the value of internalizing these aspects in the formulation of the government’s policies and extension advice on sustainable agriculture.

This paper integrates traditional economic variables, soil properties, and variables on soil conservation technologies to estimate agricultural output among small-scale farmers in Kenya’s central highlands. The study finds that integrating traditional economics and soil science is invaluable, especially as omitting measures of soil capital can cause omitted-variable bias. The central policy implication is that while fertilizers are generally beneficial, their application is a complex art, and more is not necessarily better.

India has been running large-scale interventions in the energy sector over the last decades. Still, there is a dearth of reliable and readily available price and income elasticities of demand to base these on, especially for domestic use of traditional fuels.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate the dry conditions already experienced in southern Africa. When rainfall does come, it is likely to be in bursts of greater intensity, leading to erosion and flood damage. However, these predictions have had very little influence on policy in southern African countries.

This paper proposes that ethnicity coupled with ethnic nepotism may reduce interpersonal generalised trust.

We use the 2001 wave of the World Values Survey data for eight African countries to test this claim, and show that while ethnicity and ethnic nepotism are each important in affecting generalised trust levels, their interaction has a self-reinforcing and negative effect on trust levels. The results underscore the importance of institutions in controlling ethnic nepotism and thus partly in mitigating the adverse effects of ethnicity on trust.

There is evidence that the Fast Track Land Reform Program created insecurity among its beneficiaries and adversely impacted investments in soil conservation. However, households in the study that believed investing in land enhanced tenure security invested significantly more in soil conservation measures than other households.

This analysis of the fishers’ compliance with regulations in Lake Victoria, Tanzania, gives support to the traditional economics-of-crime model and shows that the extension of the basic deterrence model can lead to a richer model with substantially higher explanatory power.

This study used the newly developed metafrontier approach to assess the technical efficiency of small-scale food production in the Ethiopian highlands at plot level, in order to investigate the role of soil conservation technology in enhancing agricultural productivity.