Provision Of Environmental Goods Research Articles

Environmental goods provision and gentrification: Evidence from MillionTreesNYC

Urban trees offer extensive environmental benefits. However, the distribution of trees in urban areas often disproportionately favors higher-income neighborhoods. Implementing tree-planting programs in lower-income neighborhoods may provide environmental amenity values but may also lead to unintended consequences, such as gentrification. This paper focuses on one of the largest tree-planting programs in the U.S., the MillionTreesNYC Program, and estimates the impact of an increased supply of urban street trees on housing values and neighborhood compositions. The results demonstrate that the additional urban street trees did serve as an environmental amenity, resulting in higher housing values and attracting more white, educated, and young households to areas with new trees. However, the gentrification effects of this tree-planting program were relatively small, with minimal change in community composition. These findings suggest that it is possible to provide public goods without significant displacement of the existing population while also reaping the numerous benefits trees offer to urban areas.

The effect of payer units on the willingness to pay in a contingent valuation survey

ABSTRACTThis study shows that a bias occurs due to the ambiguity of payer units in terms of the willingness to pay (WTP) for the provision of environmental goods in contingent valuation surveys. We use forest conservation in Shiga Prefecture, Japan as evaluation target and set up a contingent valuation survey based on three different questions that depend on the assumed payer unit (household, individual, or “strictly” individual unit). “Strictly” means the individual and household payer units are both included in the question. The results show no significant differences in WTP between household and individual payer units, while the individual WTP is more than the “strictly” individual. Assuming that respondents’ income evaluation and environmental quality recognition are correct, respondents will respond with individual WTP even if they are asked questions about household WTP. Moreover, there exists a difference in the WTP of individuals depending on whether other household members have made any payments. We called these difference “payer unit bias.” Furthermore, the survey reveals an underestimation of the aggregated value of environmental goods for household units. Therefore, it can be concluded that the contingent valuation survey should consider payer units.

The contribution of the European Society for Soil Conservation (ESSC) to scientific knowledge, education and sustainability

Soil is an integral component of the global environmental system which supports the quality and diversity of terrestrial life on Earth. Therefore, it is vital to consider the processes and impacts of soil degradation on society, especially on the provision of environmental goods and services, including food security and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Scientific societies devoted to soil science play significant roles in reducing soil degradation and promoting soil conservation by advancing scientific knowledge, education and environmental sustainability.The ESSC was founded on 4 November 1988, with the aims to:1.Support research on soil degradation, soil protection and soil and water conservation.2.Provide a network for the exchange of knowledge about soil degradation processes and soil conservation research and practises.3.Produce publications on major issues relating to soil degradation and soil and water conservation.4.Advise regulators and policy-makers on soil issues, especially soil degradation, protection and conservation.The societal challenges that can be addressed through better soil protection, advancing knowledge and scientific approaches to soil protection and sustainable management, mean the ESSC embraces the on-going development, application, review and constructive criticism of highly innovative scientific soil conservation methods. In this context, the ESSC analyses and publicizes the roles and functions of soil in natural and human-modified systems and the functional optimization of soils to ensure sustainable environmental protection.“The thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal of the land” (Rachel Carson (1962) in ‘Silent Spring’).

Measuring economic and environmental efficiency for agricultural zones in Iraq using data envelopment analysis

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a non-parametric linear programming based on method for evaluating performance of similar production units such as agricultural firms. Although the method is already extensively applied in many areas of economics, its use in environmental economics and related fields is still limited. The productivity of the agriculture sector in Iraq has yet to reach an acceptable level to control resources and increase production to meet the modern century requirements. The concept recognises the need to simultaneously raise yields, increase input use efficiency and reduce the negative environmental impacts of farming systems to secure future food production and to sustainably use the limited resources for agriculture. Accordingly, this paper proposes a novel approach to measure using DEA to evaluate five zones in production strategic crops. The significance of this objective lies in the fact that some of the zones have limitations while others adversely impact their environment. This paper also employs a model to determine the efficiency of one over zone over the others and to improve optimal mix of the resources and paths to improve the index of technical efficiency and eco efficiency. Incorporating provision of environmental goods as one of the outputs of the farm and reducing environmental pressures are also outlined.

The Social Costs of Environmental Goods Provision: A Cautionary Guide to the Revealed-Preference Approach

AbstractEmpirically estimated behavioral models have emerged as the preferred approach to revealing the social opportunity costs of pollution abatement in many areas of environmental economics. This paper identifies conceptual issues in the implementation of the revealed-preference approach to nonpoint-source pollution and provides methods to overcome them. We focus on the common second-best setting where emissions are not measurable at the source and pollution reduction is incentivized indirectly through payments tied to practice adoption. First, we show through simulation that in discrete choice models estimated on microdata, the use of predicted opportunity costs provides an erroneous estimate of underlying abatement costs. We then focus on two metrics commonly used to represent the marginal social costs of abatement actions, namely, average and marginal program expenditures incurred by the regulating agency. We show theoretically and empirically that these metrics generally fail to reveal underlying s...

Community forestry and its mitigation potential in the Anthropocene: The importance of land tenure governance and the threat of privatization

This paper highlights the key role of community forestry in enhancing the sustainability of forest ecosystems and their provision of environmental goods and services, while also analyzing the tensions facing land tenure governance in the Anthropocene. While rural communities and indigenous peoples make a significant contribution to the preservation of the Earth System along the mitigation pathway proposed by Steffen et al. (2007), their access rights to community and ancestral forestland are contested. Climate change, technological innovation, rising commodity prices and neoliberal deregulation have paved the way for an acceleration of the processes of land-grabbing and accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003, 2004). The struggle of three Argentine wichí indigenous communities in the Salta province of Argentina illuminates the situation of many peasant and indigenous peoples in Latin America, confronting powerful transnational businesses that dispute access to their land and possession of natural resources. Fragile institutions fail to enforce communities' rights that have been recognized by international and national regulations, thus perpetuating inequities and exclusion.

Using ecological modernisation theory to account for the evolution of the zero-carbon homes agenda in England

ABSTRACTDespite early successes, the ‘zero-carbon homes’ agenda in England is being wound down. Ecological modernisation theory, which focuses on the way in which political, economic, and social forces interact with one other in the provision of environmental goods and services, is used to explain this. Existing literature on zero-carbon homes is fragmented, with scholars focusing on a range of social, economic, or political explanations. Ecological modernisation theory reconciles these various strands to produce a nuanced explanation for this agenda’s evolution. An ambitious but poorly defined legislative approach placed a burden on house-builders to meet compliance costs associated with zero-carbon, but framing sustainability economistically also led to considerable uncertainty. The 2008 financial crisis, the politicisation of housing, and the election of a government with a deregulatory mandate influenced the resilience of the policy agenda as private-sector actors exploited the uncertainty and political will in order to evade their policy burdens.

Incentives, Green Preferences, and Private Provision of Impure Public Goods

Pro-environmental preferences are being used increasingly as environmental policy tools. In this paper, I consider the role of heterogeneous green preferences for private provision of environmental goods that have both private and public characteristics. Under different assumptions of information available to a regulator, I characterize equilibrium properties of several mechanisms. I find incentive-compatible Nash equilibria that provide socially optimal public goods provision when the regulator can enforce individual consumption contracts, as well as when reported consumption contracts are supplemented with group penalties. The role of budget balancing is recast as a policy intervention for correcting environmental market failures. Throughout the paper, I ground the exposition with examples of consumer behavior in the context of green electricity programs and goal setting for energy conservation.

The water surfaces' ecosystem services and the opinion of different stakeholders: an approach based on goal programming

The water surfaces have a high environmental value and allow the development of quality traditional products, which may take advantage of the local conditions. Since 1985, the state entities supported and accompanied the construction of a considerable number of dams, all located in the Guadiana river basin, in Algarve, south Portugal. In this context, it is important to understand how the stakeholders involved perceive these water surfaces, namely their role on the provision of environmental goods. This paper proposes a goal programming approach to simulate the preferences and the consensus of the stakeholders involved considering not only the preferences of the majority but also the minority, which often appears undervalued. The results show that the proposed methodology was able to provide new insights about stakeholders' opinions and preferences for a correct management.

Market-Based Instruments for Ecosystem Services: Institutional Innovation or Renovation?

Recent years have seen widespread experimentation with market-based instruments (MBIs) for the provision of environmental goods and ecosystem services. However, little attention has been paid to their design or to the effects of the underlying pro-market narrative on environmental policy instruments. The purpose of this article is to analyze the emergence and dissemination of the term “market-based instruments” applied to the provision of environmental services and to assess to what extent the instruments associated are genuinely innovative. The recommendation to develop markets can lead in practice to a variety of institutional forms, as we show it based on the example of payments for environmental services (PES) and biodiversity offsets, two very different mechanisms that are both presented in the literature as MBIs. Our purpose is to highlight the gap between discourse and practice in connection with MBIs.

On the Measurement of Social Progress and Wellbeing: Some Further Thoughts

AbstractSince 2008, the world has experienced several dramatic events: the financial crisis of 2007–08, the earthquake in Japan, the sovereign debt crisis and the revolutions in the Arab world. All of these developments have called into question not just our current policies, but also the measurement systems on which we base their configuration. What we measure affects what we do. Increasingly, there is a demand to go beyond measures of market activity (GDP) and towards measures of wellbeing. Reductions in wellbeing (following deteriorations in people's physical and psychological health, community life or employment status, or in the provision of environmental goods) that are accepted in the name of maximization of material wealth results in totally misguided policies. This article surveys some recent and clear instances in which our measurements have gone wrong, and suggests revisions that may translate into better informed and more sustainable policies.

Modelling the Linkages between Cross‐Compliance and Agri‐Environmental Schemes Under Asymmetric Information

AbstractAgri‐environmental schemes (AESs) and cross‐compliance (CC) are the two main components of the common agricultural policy (CAP) that address environmental issues. Under regulation 1698/2005, agri‐environmental scheme design has been established in such a way as to use CC as the baseline against which prescriptions and payments are identified. In this framework, agri‐environmental payments to farmers are justified only for the component of public goods produced (if any) above the CC prescription level. This constraint has become a major determinant of the design of agri‐environmental schemes in all EU Member States in which both instruments are implemented. This paper investigates farmer participation, compliance choices and the socially optimal level of monitoring when CC and agri‐environmental schemes are jointly considered, and when information about compliance is asymmetrically distributed between farmers and the public regulator. The results show that the two policy instruments interact with each other, with agri‐environmental payments actually providing incentives for CC, when the CC monitoring and sanction system does not guarantee full compliance. However, the numerical example in Emilia‐Romagna (Italy) demonstrates that with the present combination of controls and sanctions, farmers have very little incentive to be compliant with both cross compliance and agri‐environmental schemes. Hence, the results highlight that monitoring in CC or in AES does not have the same effect on the farmers’ compliance. This underscores the need for further research in this field, particularly as provision of environmental goods becomes more important in the future CAP.

How financial compensation changes forest owners' willingness to set aside productive forest areas for nature conservation in Denmark

Agri-environmental schemes' ability to increase the provision of environmental goods has been questioned because such schemes may pay landowners for something they would have done anyway. Contributing to this discussion, the aim of this paper is to investigate how financial compensation changes forest owners' declared willingness to set aside productive forest areas for nature conservation. The study is based on a survey of forest owner attitudes and ownership objectives in Denmark. First, it was analyzed how forest owners' declared willingness to set aside productive forest area for nature conservation changed when they were offered financial compensation. The majority of forest owners (64%) increased their willingness to set aside forest when offered financial compensation, whereas for others, compensation resulted in no change or, for a few respondents, even decreased the willingness. Hence, financial compensation may help to increase the provision of environmental goods but it is necessary to be aware of groups not motivated by financial incentives. Secondly, a binary logit model showed that the greatest likelihood of financial compensation increasing the motivation for setting aside forest is observed for owners who are young, female, live in the western part of Denmark and own farmland. Policy makers can use such information to target subsidy schemes at particular groups.

Parks, streets and “just empty space”: the local environmental experiences of children and young people in a Scottish study

This article is concerned with the nature and significance of inequality in the environmental experience of children and young people. We argue that research in this area needs to widen in perspective and address a complex set of environmental attributes that matter to children and young people, and to their development. Discussing a study conducted in three differing locations in Scotland, the paper examines the local places that were important to children and young people, and the factors that affected the benefits they derived from them. The results illustrate that unequal experiences arise partly through different material provision of environmental goods, but also issues of quality and maintenance, and that relational dynamics have a crucial role. An important concern is not just the quality of experiences in the present, but the effects that environmental experiences in early life have on skills and capacities taken forward into adulthood.

Adverse Selection in the Environmental Stewardship Scheme: Does the Higher Level Stewardship Scheme Design Reduce Adverse Selection?

AbstractThe Environmental Stewardship Scheme provides payments to farmers for the provision of environmental services based on foregone agricultural income. This creates a potential incentive compatibility problem which, combined with information asymmetry about farm land potential, can lead to adverse selection of land into the Scheme and therefore a less cost‐effective provision of environmental goods and services. However, the Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) Scheme design includes some features that potentially reduce adverse selection. This paper studies the adverse selection problem of the HLS using a principal‐agent framework at the regional level. It is found that, at the regional level, the enrolment of more land from lower payment regions for a given budget constraint has reduced the adverse selection problem through contracting a greater overall area and thus higher overall environmental benefit. In addition, for landscape regions with the same payment rate (i.e. of the same agricultural value), differential weighting of the public demand for environmental goods and services provided by agriculture (measured by weighting an environmental benefit function by the distance to main cities) appears to be reflected in the regulator’s allocation of contracts, thereby also reducing the adverse selection problem.

Statistical Modelling of Incentive Design Under Limited Information - The Case of Public Access to Farmland

This paper explores the use of statistical modelling to aid efficient policy design for the provision of environmental goods on farms under conditions of adverse selection. The specific case of incentive-based schemes to enhance the supply of public access to farmland is used as an example. A range of site willingness-to-pay (WTP) distributions are used to explore the benefits derived from policies designed under different levels of information. Where no individual farm information is available, low payment rates are optimal, but efficient market creation may not be possible. Increasing the information set allows discretion in pricing and entry: optimal payment rates and net benefits are higher and the pay-off from procuring improved information can be substantial. Such benefits are reduced where there is a welfare cost associated with increased government expenditure. Optimal policies are sensitive to the skewness of the WTP distributions. Mechanisms for increasing the information set available to policy makers are discussed.

Public provision of environmental goods: Neutrality or sustainability? a reply to david miller

Theorists of liberal neutrality, including in this context David Miller, claim that it is unjust for environmental policy to privilege a particular conception of the good by appealing to normative principles derived from any substantive conception of human flourishing. However, analysis of Miller's arguments reveals the inability of procedural justice thus understood to adequately engage with the complex and contested issue of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the world. Miller's attempt to distinguish categories of public goods generally, and environmental goods in particular, according to the possibility of reasonable disagreement, is seriously flawed. It results in an inability to distinguish between want-regarding and ideal-regarding justifications for the public provision of environmental goods, and more generally, an inability to recognise ecological sustainability as an important aspect of the common good. Effective environmental policy is not rendered illegitimate or unjust by incompatibility with liberal neutrality.

Provision of Environmental Goods on Potentially Abandoned Land - The White Carpathians Protected Landscape Area

At the beginning of the transition, the economic decline of agriculture partially relaxed the pressure on the wildlife. However, the policy continued to concentrate on regulating the intensity of production rather then creating incentives to produce environmental qualities. The structural adjustment process in agriculture caused the low return (poor) land to be released from production, especially, in protection zones with severe environmental restrictions. Land abandonment resulted in a rapid degradation of wildlife and landscape in places where these natural values were legally protected. The article examines the organisation of the provision of landscape and wildlife in the White Carpathians protected landscape area after 1997, when the new agricultural legislation and policy recognised compensations for restrictions and has gradually introduced incentives to cultivate potentially abandoned land. It was found that there was more than one governance structure, and that these were not necessary supporting each other. Our investigation concluded that solving the conservation problem is not separable from the rural development problem of the region, and therefore, that there is a need for participation of local community in terms of contributing producers but mainly consumers of high natural values.

Nash Equilibrium Dynamics of Environmental and Human Capital

This paper explores the Nash equilibrium dynamics of environmental and human capital in an overlapping generations model. Environmental capital is degraded by consumption but can be improved by the voluntary provision of environmental goods. Human capital is formed by a child's learning effort together with his parent's human capital and environmental capital. We show that the laissez faire economy will be either stagnant, growing, or collapsing in the long-run, depending on the returns to scale of the learning technology with respect to the two kinds of capital, the initial state of the economy, and the relative price of the environmental and consumption goods. We also examine the role of the consumption tax policy of both the short-lived and long-lived government for correcting environmental externalities.

The provision of environmental goods and services by local non-governmental organizations: An illustration from the Squamish Forest District, Canada

In rapidly-growing rural areas, new demands for provision of environmental and recreational goods and services have been accompanied by governmental policies and programs designed to involve non-governmental organizations (NGOs) directly in environmental decision-making and day-to-day management. In this paper, it is argued that certain local-level NGOs have become increasingly influential in the provision of environmental goods and services locally by combining their understanding of policy-making, with an awareness of local environmental issues and opportunities for specific projects. By developing a four-part framework, the term ‘exchange agents’ presented by Lowe et al. (1993) is adapted and developed to explain the means by which NGOs gain influence in environmental management. The framework focuses attention on the changing character of rural areas, NGO roles and orientations, networking among NGOs and funding partnerships between NGOs and public agencies. The framework is used to explain the differential influence of local-level NGOs in the Squamish Forest District, located near Vancouver, Canada. From this analysis some cautions are raised about ‘community stewardship’, the rubric by which local-level environmental policies and programs are currently implemented.