Social-ecological systems exhibit patterns across multiple levels along spatial, temporal, and functional scales. The outcomes that are produced in these systems result from complex, non-additive interactions between different types of social and biophysical components, some of which are common to many systems, and some of which are relatively unique to a particular system. These properties, along with the mostly non-experimental nature of the analysis, make it difficult to construct theories regarding the sustainability of social-ecological systems.

Lack of access to energy services is one of the main constraints to economic development in Africa. Only about 31% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa has access to electricity, with 14% access rate in rural areas. Compounding the challenge, traditional biomass supplies up to 85% of primary energy supply, and accounts for 80% of energy consumption. With limited energy efficiency, installed generation capacity and weak institutions and energy sector governance, energy security in Africa has become a critical concern.

This book by Thomas Sterner and Jessica Coria is an attempt to encourage more widespread and careful use of economic policy instruments. The book compares the accumulated experiences of the use of economic policy instruments in the U.S. and Europe, as well as in rich and poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ambitious in scope, it discusses the design of instruments that can be employed in any country in a wide range of contexts, including transportation, industrial pollution, water pricing, waste, fisheries, forests, and agriculture.

We study the cost-effectiveness of inducing compliance in a program that caps aggregate emissions of a given pollutant from a set of heterogeneous firms based on emissions standards and the relative cost-effectiveness of such a program with respect to an optimally designed program based on tradable discharge permits. Our analysis considers abatement, monitoring and sanctioning costs, as well as perfect and imperfect information on the part of the regulator with regard to the polluters’ abatement costs.

The Costa Rican experience: extreme weather events partially explain permanent internal migration as an adaptive measure.

Advocates claim that voluntary programs can help shore up poorly performing command-and-control environmental regulation in developing countries. Although literature on this issue is quite thin, research on voluntary environmental programs in industrialized countries suggests that they are sometimes ineffective because they mainly attract relatively clean plants free-riding on prior pollution control investments.

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) of the University of Dar es Salaam

Addressing environmental challenges. including climate change has been rationalized in China as both necessary for solving domestic problems and capable of gaining new business opportunities and competitive advantages.

Using a choice experiment, we investigated preferences for distributing the economic burden of decreasing CO2 emissions in the two largest CO2-emitting countries: the United States and China. We asked respondents about their preferences for four burden-sharing rules to reduce CO2 emissions according to their country’’s 1) historical emissions, 2) income level, 3) equal right to emit per person, and 4) current emissions.

This paper analyses the economic impacts of climate change on Ethiopia’s agriculture using a countrywide computable general equilibrium model.