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Welfare economics must adapt to the growing consensus over the assignment of rights to animals. We extend nonmarket valuation techniques to the study and measurement of the preferences of Chinook salmon regarding their aquatic habitat and the value of their existence. We find that these techniques are as valid for fish as they are for humans. Our applied study indicates that opportunities exist for Pareto-improving trades between salmon and California agricultural and hydropower interests. (JEL Q510), I. INTRODUCTION In an important book, Roderick Nash (1989) places the development of environmental ethics into the broader framework of the expansion of rights. He argues that the extension of [...]

Emissions trading markets have been successful in addressing pollution problems where regulated entities can be treated in a similar manner and precise control of emissions quantities across time and space is not critical. In other situations, trading must account for individual circumstances, complexity, and the patchwork of existing regulations. In these circumstances trading systems have elements of contracts, in that transactions are unique and must be negotiated and approved individually. Such programs imply a high payoff to improved environmental information and to innovations in trading systems that allow making better use of such information. (JEL Q21, Q25, Q28), I. INTRODUCTION Emissions trading programs have been riding a wave of ascendancy in environmental policy since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 created the Acid Rain Trading Program. This [...]

Byline: Neda Oljaca (1), Andrew G. Keeler (1), Jeffrey Dorfman (1) Abstract: We empirically estimate a penalty function for water quality violations of private firms in Georgia. We find that seriousness of infraction and historical compliance records strongly influence penalty levels, while the intentionality of violations and the method of discovery do not. The size of the polluting company is also an important determinant of financial penalties. Overall the results support the plausibility of modeling assumptions used in much the theoretical enforcement literature but indicate the need for caution in interpreting models that assume penalty amounts are invariant to violation characteristics. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602 Article History: Registration Date: 03/10/2004

Three competing local options are examined by developing a model of municipal choice of solid waste disposal technologies. The three options include incineration in energy recovery facilities (ERF), landfilling and recycling. It is shown that incineration and the ERF optimum depend on the underlying costs of the different disposal options and the characteristics of the waste stream.

An enforcement model was developed wherein non-compliance penalties are determined by the strategic interaction between regulatory agencies and industries. The balance between monitoring and sanctioning activities is highly dependent on the power of the regulator's enforcement technology. This power reflects the political, legal and social opinions toward the issues being enforced. The model proves that grave offenses will be characterized by low detection rates and strong enforcement while pollution will be characterized by frequent interaction with regulators and relatively mild enforcement activity.

In this paper we develop a model to simulate the impacts of changes in freshwater flows into and out of the San Francisco Bay/Delta on the California Central Valley salmon fishery. The model also describes interactions among these water flow controls, hatchery operations, and harvest regulation. Traditionally, the management of California's freshwater resources and anadromous fisheries has been undertaken separately, in the literature and in practice. We demonstrate the potential gains from a coordinated management approach.

Barring an unprecedented large-scale effort to raise island elevation, barrier-island communities common along the US East Coast are likely to eventually face inundation of the existing built environment on a timescale that depends on uncertain climatic forcing. Between the present and when a combination of sea-level rise and erosion renders these areas uninhabitable, communities must choose levels of defensive expenditures to reduce risks and individual residents must assess whether and when risk levels are unacceptably high to justify investment in housing. We model the dynamics of coastal adaptation as the interplay of underlying climatic risks, collective actions to mitigate those risks, and individual risk assessments based on beliefs in model predictions and processing of past climate events. Efforts linking physical and behavioural models to explore shoreline dynamics have not yet brought together this set of essential factors. We couple a barrier-island model with an agent-based model of real-estate markets to show that, relative to people with low belief in model predictions about climate change, informed property owners invest heavily in defensive expenditures in the near term and then abandon coastal real estate at some critical risk threshold that presages a period of significant price volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valuation of ecosystem services can provide evidence of the importance of sustaining and enhancing those resources and the ecosystems that provide them. Long appreciated only as a commercial source of oysters, oyster reefs are now acknowledged for the other services they provide, such as enhancing water quality and stabilizing shorelines. We develop a framework to assess the value of these services. We conservatively estimate that the economic value of oyster reef services, excluding oyster harvesting, is between $5500 and $99,000 per hectare per year and that reefs recover their median restoration costs in 2-14 years. In contrast, when oyster reefs are subjected to destructive oyster harvesting, they do not recover the costs of restoration. Shoreline stabilization is the most valuable potential service, although this value varies greatly by reef location. Quantifying the economic values of ecosystem services provides guidance about when oyster reef restoration is a good use of funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We create a proxy for the cost of irrigation water in Georgia from a sample of Georgia irrigators by investigating the marginal cost of pumping groundwater. We then combine this proxy with agronomic and climatic variables to estimate the response of agricultural water use to differences in the marginal cost of irrigation. The results show that pumping costs are a significant determinant of water use, and imply that agricultural water use would be moderately affected by institutional changes that would explicitly price water. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Fifty-five percent of Georgia's developed coastline has been armored with various types of erosion protection devices. This article is about beach improvement projects at Jekyll Island that would operate under (a) a nourishment policy or (b) a retreat policy. Benefits are calculated from an intensive, on-site survey of beach visitors and the costs are calculated from observable sources. Two financing methods are considered: general revenue and user fee financing. The analyses imply recommending beach improvement as an effective policy within the considered time frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydrokinetic turbines harnessing energy from ocean currents represent a potential low carbon electricity source. This study provides a detailed techno-economic assessment of ocean turbines operating in the Gulf Stream off the North Carolina coast. Using hindcast data from a high-resolution ocean circulation model in conjunction with the US Department of Energy's reference model 4 (RM4) for ocean turbines, we examine resource quality and apply portfolio optimization to identify the best candidate sites for ocean turbine deployment. We find that the lowest average levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from a single site can reach 400 $/MWh. By optimally selecting geographically dispersed sites and taking advantage of economies of scale, the variations in total energy output can be reduced by an order of magnitude while keeping the LCOE below 300 $/MWh. Power take-off and transmission infrastructure are the largest cost drivers, and variation in resource quality can have a significant influence on the project LCOE. While this study focuses on a limited spatial domain, it provides a framework to assess the techno-economic feasibility of ocean current energy in other western boundary currents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]