Ecological Economics最新文献

We study how different types of individuals respond to being forced to make a minimum contribution to a global public good. Participants in our experiment decide how much of their endowment to contribute towards offsetting CO2 emissions. We elicit their contributions when they are free to spend any amount of their endowment on carbon offsets and when they are forced to spend a certain minimum amount on it. We find that those who contribute more than the minimum before it is imposed contribute less overall once the minimum comes into effect. This is true for both a low and a high level of the minimum and appears to be driven in part by pessimistic beliefs about the contributions of others. We show that the lower minimum also reduces overall contributions relative to a situation with no minimum. We do not find evidence that having the level of the minimum determined through a majority vote rather than an exogenous procedure has any material impact on these results.

In the last decade many publications have appeared on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. We undertake a systematic review of their content, data and methods. This involves the use of computational linguistics to identify main topics investigated. Based on a sample of 561 studies we conclude that: (1) content covers 11 main topics; (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling; (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible; (7) various studies represent a “reverse causality” confusion, i.e. use the term degrowth not for a deliberate strategy but to denote economic decline (in GDP terms) resulting from exogenous factors or public policies; (8) few studies adopt a system-wide perspective – instead most focus on small, local cases without a clear implication for the economy as a whole. We illustrate each of these findings for concrete studies.

This paper investigates the role of institutions in decoupling economic growth from environmental impacts, employing the Varieties of Capitalism framework. It finds that Northern European countries have achieved more significant decoupling than other Western OECD countries since the 1980s, as measured by the Ecological Footprint of Consumption. Differences in corporatism, as well as the amount and type of public social expenditures, are hypothesized to play a crucial role in explaining this pattern. Multiple regression analysis reveals that larger proportions of GDP allocated to universal social expenditures — not contingent on work status — are robustly associated with stronger decoupling. This suggests that the considerable investments of Northern European countries in universal social benefits have been key for effectively reducing the environmental impacts associated with economic growth.

This article aims to rediscover a relatively unknown author to the general public, Slavcho Zagorov, and to revive his ideas. Zagorov was a Bulgarian economist and statistician whose main works date back to 1954 and are mainly devoted to the concept of energy flows in the economy and human metabolism explained through the prism of thermodynamics. His work and career are reminiscent of another Balkan economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. We first present Zagorov's theoretical work on the importance of energy in economic activity and secondly on the measurement of national income and productivity through energy. Thirdly, we show the relation he establishes between energy and utility. Finally, we discuss his texts in relation to his professional and personal trajectory and point out some preliminary elements of comparison with Georgescu-Roegen's work.

As a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and with a substantial potential of carbon storage, agriculture and food (agri-food) systems play a two-fold role in achieving the Paris goal of well below 2 °C of global warming. Against this background, this paper assesses the mitigation potentials, economic effects, co-benefits and trade-offs of biophysically feasible transitions of the Austrian agri-food system. By combining biophysical accounting with a comparative-static multi-sectoral computable general equilibrium model, we assess both supply- and demand-side driven transition scenarios. These scenarios entail substantial changes in the Austrian agri-food system, mitigating between 70 and 110% of GHG emissions relative to the reference pathway in 2050, with lower emission intensities from agricultural practices and enhanced sinks through afforestation. Two out of three scenarios lead to economy-wide costs of up to 1% of gross domestic product. Despite these small changes at the macroeconomic scale, output effects within the Austrian agri-food sectors are substantial, with primary production and manufacturing of plant-based products emerging as winners in terms of sectoral revenue, while animal-based primary production and manufacturing lose. The agri-food system transitions considered create health co-benefits, but reveal trade-offs between mitigation potentials, biodiversity conservation and economic effects.

A fishery encompasses various interconnected systems, including ecological, socioeconomic, and governing systems. Managing fisheries requires the simultaneous consideration of all these systems, making it a challenging endeavor. To address these challenges, fisheries bioeconomic models have emerged as a crucial tool. They are particularly valuable in the context of small-scale fisheries, which are often complex, overlooked and poorly understood. Thus, this paper presents a dynamic multispecies and multigear bioeconomic model that can illuminate the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of small-scale fisheries under different management scenarios. The model was applied to a small-scale fisheries system in Southern Brazil that has as a notable feature a cooperative fishing behavior between dolphins and fishers. Three scenarios were explored: the base scenario (status quo), the optimal management scenario, and the constrained optimal management scenario. The model outputs demonstrated a clear tradeoff between labour effort, species conservation, and economic rent. Shifting from the base to an optimal management scenario would result in a labour employment reduction within the system but concurrently yield higher stock levels, economic rent, and wages. These results illustrate how our model can explore critical management scenarios across the multiple dimensions of fisheries systems. In essence, this research offers a novel contribution in the form of a bioeconomic model tailored for small-scale fisheries involving multiple species.

The three US macroeconomic policy paradigms of the twentieth century, defined by transformational economic shocks, had distinct energy characteristics. The pre-Keynesian era (to 1929) was dominated by coal; the Keynesian era (1930–1973) witnessed substantial growth with unconstrained access to abundant domestic oil supplies; and the Monetarist era (after ∼1973) was energy constrained. Moreover, the economic shocks that precipitated paradigm changes were rooted in changes to energy supply. The Great Crash of 1929 followed from discovery of vast oil fields in the US Southwest. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 occurred in part due to US peak oil production; and together they established the conditions for the First Oil Crisis of 1973.

We conduct a systematic review (SR) of the empirical literature on Climate Change Education (CCE) through the lens of behavioral economics. We focus on the effects of educational interventions on actual behaviors or beliefs regarding the prevalence or social acceptability of these behaviors. We identify 86 studies evaluating CCE interventions. Most of them employ pre-post evaluations, which are more susceptible to demand effects and social desirability bias. Almost all report positive effects in terms of pro-environmental outcomes. Only 19 studies look at the effects of CCE on actual behavior (mainly on recycling, trashing or energy saving) or norm-related beliefs. Most interventions involve activities aimed at engaging learners. Others focus on nudges (like stickers or posters). A minority is based on lectures, deliberative discussions, or science-based interactions. The SR reveals important gaps in the literature and potential tensions that can inform future research in behavioral ecological economics.

Mineral raw materials consumption is expected to increase in the near future. Their extraction is frequently associated with adverse effects on renewable resources, such as water and biodiversity, and rivalries with other interests. In this article, we investigate how existing institutional regimes safeguard the sustainability of resources affected by mineral extraction. We apply an Institutional Resource Regime analytical framework to two case studies, in Sweden and Spain, to identify regulatory incoherences and gaps that lead to unsustainable use of resources employed in extractive activities, and the changes required to shift towards integrated institutional regimes. We find that in both cases extractive activity operates within complex institutional regimes which do not guarantee sustainability as a result of 1) ongoing pollution from historic mining, 2) weak policy enforcement, 3) a mismatch between property rights and public policy, 4) lack of mandatory instruments that promote a deeper understanding of the cumulative effect of land use changes. We reflect on the role of land use planning and strategic environmental assessment in moving towards more integrated institutional regimes. We conclude that a clearer definition is needed of the limits within which extraction can take place sustainably, setting priorities in terms of raw materials consumption and the importance of a wider discourse on responsible mineral consumption.