Editorial: collaborative environmental management and modelling

Abstract

After several decades of rapid technological advancement and economic growth, levels of pollution and environmental degradation are rising all over the world. Unilateral response on the part of one single country would hardly be effective. Collaborations in pollution abatement, R&D in technology development, emissions reduction, and subsidization for technology transfer offer the best promise to assist the development of an effective means to halt the accelerating trend of environmental deterioration. International cooperative agreements have to be negotiated to deal with the global environmental problem. In these negotiations, intraand inter-generational cost sharing, compensation for technology transfer, gains distribution, and sustainability are among the important issues to be resolved and pose an ensemble of problems that are best addressed through strategic modelling. Applications of operations research methodologies—such as optimization techniques, control theory, and interactive strategic analysis—are crucial to the development of collaborative environmental management paradigms and the formulation of viable solutions. This special volume of the Annals of Operations Research contains a collection of frontier research papers on operations research techniques and practicable solutions in environmental modeling and collaborative management. In the paper of Finus et al., the stability of self-enforcing climate agreements under a sequential coalition formation process of heterogeneous and farsighted players is studied. In particular, players can make proposals that are either accepted or countered by alternative