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Excessive heat is a major and growing risk for urban residents. Urban trees can significantly reduce summer peak temperatures, thus reducing heat-related mortality, morbidity, as well as cooling energy demand. However, urban tree canopy is inequitably distributed in US cities, which has been shown to contribute to higher summer temperatures in people-of-color (POC) neighborhoods. Here, we utilize a unique dataset of high-resolution tree canopy cover to estimate the inequality in summertime heat-related mortality, morbidity, and electricity consumption across a sample of 5,723 US municipalities and other places, housing 180 million people during the 2020 census (50.6% in majority non-Hispanic white neighborhoods, 49.4% in majority people-of-color, POC, neighborhoods). We also model the potential to increase tree cover in these municipalities in 5% increments up to a realistic maximum, the 90th percentile of tree cover observed in each municipality for each impervious surface class. On average, trees in non-Hispanic white neighborhoods cool the air by 0.19 ± 0.05⁰C more than in POC neighborhoods, leading annually to trees in white neighborhoods helping prevent 190 ± 139 more deaths, 30,131 ± 10,406 more doctors’ visits, and 1.4 ± 0.5 terawatt-hours (TWhr) more electricity consumption than in POC neighborhoods. The greatest inequality in the protective value of trees occurs in the Northeastern US. We estimate that for these 5,723 municipalities, the maximal feasible urban reforestation program in residential neighborhoods could add 1.2 billion trees, reducing population-weighted average summer temperatures by an additional 0.38 ± 0.01⁰C. Relative to the current status quo, this increase in the cooling benefits of trees would reduce annual heat-related mortality by an additional 464 ± 89 people, annual heat-related morbidity by 80,785 ± 6110 cases, and annual electricity consumption by 4.3 ± 0.2 TWhr, while increasing annual carbon sequestration in trees by 23.7 ± 1.2 MtCO2e and decreasing annual electricity-related GHG emissions by 2.1 ± 0.2 MtCO2e. The total economic value of these benefits, including the value of carbon sequestration and avoided emissions, would be USD 9.6 ± 0.5 billion, although in many neighborhoods the cost of increased tree cover exceeds these benefits. The exception is neighborhoods that currently have lower tree cover, especially those that are majority POC, as these neighborhoods have a much higher return-on-investment from tree planting.

Summary: Background: Previous studies focusing on urban, industrialised regions have found that excess heat exposure can increase all-cause mortality, heat-related illnesses, and occupational injuries. However, little research has examined how deforestation and climate change can adversely affect work conditions and population health in low latitude, industrialising countries. Methods: For this modelling study we used data at 1 km2 resolution to compare forest cover and temperature conditions in the Berau regency, Indonesia, between 2002 and 2018. We used spatially explicit satellite, climate model, and population data to estimate the effects of global warming, between 2002 and 2018 and after applying 1·0°C, 1·5°C, and 2·0°C of global warming to 2018 temperatures, on all-cause mortality and unsafe work conditions in the Berau regency, Indonesia. Findings: Between 2002 and 2018, 4375 km2 of forested land in Berau was cleared, corresponding to approximately 17% of the entire regency. Deforestation increased mean daily maximum temperatures by 0·95°C (95% CI 0·97–0·92; p

Limited time and resources remain to constrain the climate crisis. Natural climate solutions represent promising options to protect, manage and restore natural lands for additional climate mitigation, but they differ in (1) the magnitude and (2) immediacy of mitigation potential, as well as (3) cost-effectiveness and (4) the co-benefits they offer. Counter to an emerging preference for restoration, we use these four criteria to propose a general rule of thumb to protect, manage and then restore lands, but also show how these criteria explain alternative prioritization and portfolio schemes. This hierarchy offers a decision-making framework for public and private sector actors to optimize the effectiveness of natural climate solutions in an environment in which resources are constrained, and time is short. Natural climate solutions, along with reduction in fossil fuel emissions, are critical to mitigating climate change and meeting climate goals. This Perspective outlines a hierarchy for decision-making regarding protecting, managing and then restoring natural systems for climate mitigation.

Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions is critical to limit global warming below 2°C. However, the magnitude and timing of beneficial effects of emissions reductions on labor productivity and the size of those effects relative to the costs of emissions reductions remain understudied. Here we use reanalysis data and climate model simulations to estimate current and future potential global labor losses associated with heat and air pollution exposure. We also examine the timing of benefits for avoided air pollution and heat exposure under a mitigation scenario consistent with limiting warming to around 2°C. Under the 2°C scenario compared to a higher emissions scenario representative of current mitigation policies, we find large, near-term benefits for countries with relatively poor air quality, such as China, India, and Nigeria. Avoided global labor productivity losses associated with air pollution exceed $600 billion/year within a decade, and peak by mid-century at about $860 billion/year. By contrast, avoided productivity losses associated with heat exposure do not exceed $500 billion/year until mid-century, but continue to grow for the remainder of the century. Over all time horizons, the avoided global labor productivity losses from aggressive emissions reductions exceed estimated additional energy investments needed to limit warming to ~2°C.

Land tenure security is increasingly recognized as a foundational element for advancing global sustainable development agendas, but questions remain about how it affects human well-being and environmental outcomes. We identify 117 studies that aimed to estimate the causal effect of land tenure security interventions on these outcomes. Approximately two-thirds of these studies reported positive links between improved tenure security and human well-being or environmental outcomes. Close to half of the studies that examined social and environmental outcomes reported positive impacts on both. The majority of studies assessed government-implemented interventions that statutorily recognized rights through land titling and formalization in the 1990s and 2000s. More research is needed to bolster the body of evidence on the effects of non-technical interventions (for example, capacity building and awareness raising) and the devolution of rights to inform future land policy efforts and accelerate sustainable development. A meta-analysis of 117 studies to determine the impacts of land tenure security on socio-environmental outcomes and sustainable development.

Despite its rich water resources, Brazil is increasingly facing extreme hydrologic events such as droughts and floods. The Sao Paulo Cantareira water supply system (CWSS) offers an opportunity to examine the potential economic benefits of nature-based solutions (NbS) to improve water security and reduce the economic cost of drought. This study explores the potential benefits under a counterfactual NbS land-use scenario compared to actual land use and assesses the economic viability of NbS investments in the CWSS. Specifically, we estimate the economic cost of the 2014–2015 drought in Sao Paulo state for the industrial and water sectors served by the CWSS. We estimate the potential avoided costs under the NbS scenario and conduct a cost–benefit analysis of the NbS scenario investments, including both water supply and carbon sequestration benefits. We estimate that the economic losses of this single drought event totaled BRL 1.6 billion. If NbS had been implemented, this cost could have been reduced by 28%. A cost–benefit analysis that includes only the water supply or both the water supply and carbon sequestration benefits indicates that the NbS scenario has a positive net present value of BRL 144 million and BRL 632 million, respectively. Thus, our results highlight the economic viability of the hypothetical NbS investment in mitigating extreme climatic events.

Agroforestry systems have the potential to sequester carbon and offer numerous benefits to rural communities, but their capacity to offer valuable cooling services has not been quantified on continental scales. Here, we find that trees in pasturelands ("silvopasture") across Latin America and Africa can offer substantial cooling benefits. These cooling benefits increase linearly by -0.32 °C to -2.4 °C per 10 metric tons of woody carbon per hectare, and importantly do not depend on the spatial extent of the silvopasture systems. Thus, even smallholders can reap important cooling services from intensifying their silvopasture practices. We then map where realistic (but ambitious) silvopasture expansion could counteract a substantial fraction of the local projected warming in 2050 due to climate change. Our findings indicate where and to what extent silvopasture systems can counteract local temperature increases from global climate change and help vulnerable communities adapt to a warming world.

Achieving the 1.5–2.0 °C temperature targets of the Paris climate agreement requires not only reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but also increasing removals of GHGs from the atmosphere1,2. Reforestation is a potentially large-scale method for removing CO2 and storing it in the biomass and soils of ecosystems3–8, yet its cost per tonne remains uncertain6,9. Here, we produce spatially disaggregated marginal abatement cost curves for tropical reforestation by simulating the effects of payments for increased CO2 removals on land-cover change in 90 countries. We estimate that removals from tropical reforestation between 2020–2050 could be increased by 5.7 GtCO2 (5.6%) at a carbon price of US $20 CO2–1, or by 15.1 GtCO2 (14.8%) at US$50 tCO2–1. Ten countries comprise 55% of potential low-cost abatement from tropical reforestation. Avoided deforestation offers 7.2–9.6 times as much potential low-cost abatement as reforestation overall (55.1 GtCO2 at US$20 tCO2–1 or 108.3 GtCO2 at US$50 tCO2–1), but reforestation offers more potential low-cost abatement than avoided deforestation at US$20 tCO2–1 in 21 countries, 17 of which are in Africa. There is a growing need to find cost-effective options for greenhouse gas abatement. In this study, spatially disaggregated marginal abatement cost curves are developed to facilitate economic appraisal of tropical reforestation.

High air temperatures are a public health threat, causing 1300 deaths annually in the United States (US) along with heat-related morbidity and increased electricity consumption for air-conditioning (AC). Increasing tree canopy cover has been proposed as one way to reduce urban air temperatures. Here, we assemble tree cover and developed land-cover information for 97 US cities, housing 59 million people, and use regression relationships to analyze how much current urban tree cover reduces summer (JJA) air temperatures and associated heat-related mortality, morbidity, and electricity consumption. We find that 78% of urban dwellers are in neighborhoods with less than 20% tree cover. Some 15.0 million people (25% of total) experience a reduction of 0.5–1.0°C from tree cover, with another 7.9 million (13% of total) experiencing a reduction of greater than 1.0°C. Current relationships between temperature and health outcomes imply that urban tree cover helps avoid 245–346 deaths annually. Heat–mortality relationships in the 1980s, when a smaller fraction of US households had AC, imply a greater role in the past for urban tree cover in avoiding heat-related mortality. As AC availability has increased, the value of tree cover for avoiding heat-related mortality has decreased, while the value of tree cover for reducing electricity consumption likely has increased. Currently, for the 97 cities studied, the total annual economic value of avoided mortality, morbidity, and electricity consumption is an estimated $1.3–2.9 billion, or $21–49 annually per capita. Applying our results to the entire US urban population, we estimate urban tree cover annually supplies heat-reduction services worth $5.3–12.1 billion.

Restoring tree cover in tropical countries has the potential to benefit millions of smallholders through improvements in income and environmental services. However, despite their dominant landholding shares in many countries, smallholders' role in restoration has not been addressed in prior global or pan-tropical restoration studies. We fill this lacuna by using global spatial data on trees and people, national indicators of enabling conditions, and micro-level expert information. We find that by 2050, low-cost restoration is feasible within 280, 200, and 60 million hectares of tropical croplands, pasturelands, and degraded forestlands, respectively. Such restoration could affect 210 million people in croplands, 59 million people in pasturelands and 22 million people in degraded forestlands. This predominance of low-cost restoration opportunity in populated agricultural lands has not been revealed by prior analyses of tree cover restoration potential. In countries with low-cost tropical restoration potential, smallholdings comprise a significant proportion of agricultural lands in Asia (∼76 %) and Africa (∼60 %) but not the Americas (∼3%). Thus, while the Americas account for approximately half of 21st century tropical deforestation, smallholder-based reforestation may play a larger role in efforts to reverse recent forest loss in Asia and Africa than in the Americas. Furthermore, our analyses show that countries with low-cost restoration potential largely lack policy commitments or smallholder supportive institutional and market conditions. Discussions among practitioners and researchers suggest that four principles - partnering with farmers and prioritizing their preferences, reducing uncertainty, strengthening markets, and mobilizing innovative financing - can help scale smallholder-driven restoration in the face of these challenges.

Canada has natural solutions to support its efforts to tackle climate change: forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agriculture., Alongside the steep reductions needed in fossil fuel emissions, natural climate solutions (NCS) represent readily deployable options that can contribute to Canada’s goals for emission reductions. We estimate the mitigation potential of 24 NCS related to the protection, management, and restoration of natural systems that can also deliver numerous co-benefits, such as enhanced soil productivity, clean air and water, and biodiversity conservation. NCS can provide up to 78.2 (41.0 to 115.1) Tg CO2e/year (95% CI) of mitigation annually in 2030 and 394.4 (173.2 to 612.4) Tg CO2e cumulatively between 2021 and 2030, with 34% available at ≤CAD 50/Mg CO2e. Avoided conversion of grassland, avoided peatland disturbance, cover crops, and improved forest management offer the largest mitigation opportunities. The mitigation identified here represents an important potential contribution to the Paris Agreement, such that NCS combined with existing mitigation plans could help Canada to meet or exceed its climate goals.

Spatial prioritization is a critical step in conservation planning, a process designed to ensure that limited resources are applied in ways that deliver the highest possible returns for biodiversity and human wellbeing. In practice, many spatial prioritizations fall short of their potential by focusing on places rather than actions, and by using data of snapshots of assets or threats rather than estimated impacts. We introduce spatial action mapping as an approach that overcomes these shortfalls. This approach produces a spatially explicit view of where and how much a given conservation action is likely to contribute to achieving stated conservation goals. Through seven case examples, we demonstrate simple to complex versions of how this method can be applied across local to global scales to inform decisions about a wide range of conservation actions and benefits. Spatial action mapping can support major improvements in efficient use of conservation resources and will reach its full potential as the quality of environmental, social, and economic datasets converge and conservation impact evaluations improve.

Humid heat impacts a large portion of the world’s population that works outdoors. Previous studies have quantified humid heat impacts on labor productivity by relying on exposure response functions that are based on uncontrolled experiments under a limited range of heat and humidity. Here we use the latest empirical model, based on a wider range of temperatures and humidity, for studying the impact of humid heat and recent climate change on labor productivity. We show that globally, humid heat may currently be associated with over 650 billion hours of annual lost labor (148 million full time equivalent jobs lost), 400 billion hours more than previous estimates. These differences in labor loss estimates are comparable to losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, annual heat-induced labor productivity losses are estimated at 2.1 trillion in 2017 PPP$, and in several countries are equivalent to more than 10% of gross domestic product. Over the last four decades, global heat-related labor losses increased by at least 9% (>60 billion hours annually using the new empirical model) highlighting that relatively small changes in climate (

Urban trees reduce respirable particulate matter (PM10) concentrations and maximum daytime summer temperatures. While most cities are losing tree cover, some are considering ambitious planting efforts. Maximizing PM10 and heat mitigation for people from such efforts requires cost-effective targeting. We adapt published methods to estimate the impact of a decade (2004–2014) of tree cover change on city-level PM10 and heat mitigation in 27 U.S. cities and present a new methodology for estimating local-level PM10 and heat mitigation by street trees and tree patches. We map potential tree planting sites in the 27 cities and use our local-level PM10 and heat mitigation methods to assess the population-weighted return on investment (ROI) of each site for PM10 and heat abatement for nearby populations. Twenty-three of the 27 cities lost canopy cover during 2004–2014, reducing estimated city-level PM10 removal by 6% (168 tons) and increasing city-level average maximum daily summer temperature by 0.1 °C on average across cities. We find large potential for urban reforestation to increase PM10 and heat abatement. Intra-city variation in planting site ROI – driven primarily by differences in population density around planting sites – exceeds four orders of magnitude, indicating large scope for targeting to increase PM10 and heat abatement from reforestation. Reforesting each city’s top 20% ROI sites could lower average annual PM10 concentrations by >2 μg/m3 for 3.4–11.4 million people and average maximum daily summer temperatures by >2 °C for 1.7–12.7 million – effects large enough to provide meaningful health benefits – at a combined annual cost of $102 million.

Agroforestry, or the intentional integration of trees on crop or pastureland, is a sustainable land use system that provides ecosystem services including climate change mitigation and private benefits for smallholders. While existing reviews of agroforestry adoption focus on government policy, there is increasing interest from, and opportunities for, non-state actors to accelerate agroforestry adoption. The purpose of this critical review is to identify points of entry for non-state actors to increase smallholder incentives for agroforestry adoption in low and middle income countries. We identify opportunities for non-state actors to address key market failures in all stages of the agroforestry system. We find that non-state actors have advantages of proximity and institutional knowledge that provide opportunities for direct and indirect intervention to increase agroforestry adoption.

Remote sensing offers an increasingly wide array of imagery with a broad variety of spectral and spatial resolution, but there are relatively few comparisons of how different sources of data impact the accuracy, cost, and utility of analyses. We evaluated the impact of satellite image spatial resolution (1 m from Digital Globe; 30 m from Landsat) on land use classification via ArcGIS Feature Analyst, and on total suspended solids (TSS) load estimates from the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) for the Camboriu watershed in Southeastern Brazil. We independently calibrated SWAT models, using both land use map resolutions and short-term daily streamflow (discharge) and TSS load data from local gauge stations. We then compared the predicted TSS loads with monitoring data outside the model training period. We also estimated the cost difference for land use classification and SWAT model construction and calibration at these two resolutions. Finally, we assessed the value of information (VOI) of the higher-resolution imagery in estimating the cost-effectiveness of watershed conservation in reducing TSS at the municipal water supply intake. Land use classification accuracy was 82.3% for 1 m data and 75.1% for 30 m data. We found that models using 1 m data better predicted both annual and peak TSS loads in the full study area, though the 30 m model did better in a sub-watershed. However, the 1 m data incurred considerably higher costs relative to the 30 m data ($7000 for imagery, plus additional analyst time). Importantly, the choice of spatial resolution affected the estimated return on investment (ROI) in watershed conservation for the municipal water company that finances much of this conservation, although it is unlikely that this would have affected the company's decision to invest in the program. We conclude by identifying key criteria to assist in choosing an appropriate spatial resolution for different contexts.

Flooding is the costliest form of natural disaster and impacts are expected to increase, in part, due to exposure of new development to flooding. However, these costs could be reduced through the acquisition and conservation of natural land in floodplains. Here we quantify the benefits and costs of reducing future flood damages in the United States by avoiding development in floodplains. We find that by 2070, cumulative avoided future flood damages exceed the costs of land acquisition for more than one-third of the unprotected natural lands in the 100-yr floodplain (areas with a 1% chance of flooding annually). Large areas have an even higher benefit–cost ratio: for 54,433 km2 of floodplain, avoided damages exceed land acquisition costs by a factor of at least five to one. Strategic conservation of floodplains would avoid unnecessarily increasing the economic and human costs of flooding while simultaneously providing multiple ecosystem services. Flooding is the costliest natural disaster. Focusing on the United States, this analysis finds that by 2070 avoided damages exceed land acquisition costs for more than one-third of unprotected natural lands in the 100-year floodplain.

Water funds seek to promote long-term watershed conservation with multiple benefits for biodiversity and human well-being. This approach has grown rapidly, particularly in Latin America where more than 30 water funds were in operation or development by 2014. To meet the need for evidence to guide ongoing decisions, we assessed the goals and strategies of 16 programs that were operating in 2013–2014 in association with the Latin American Water Funds Partnership. Our findings underscore the diversity within this approach to investment in watershed services. The various financial, governance, and management mechanisms adopted by these programs reflected their distinct biophysical, socio-economic, and political contexts. All 16 water funds aimed to secure water quality (15/16) and/or quantity (including the timing of flows) (14/16). The majority of programs also explicitly strived for co-benefits to local livelihoods (9/16) and biodiversity (11/16). Public funding secured through legislation provided the most funding to date, but private, NGO, and development bank source were also important for some programs. While programs have actively engaged rural land stewards, this stakeholder group was represented on governance boards in just 4 of 16 funds. Additionally, while the majority of water funds with activities on the ground (13/16) reported biophysical and social impact monitoring (8/16), many faced significant logistical, technical, and funding challenges to its implementation. We recommend greater inclusion of rural land stewards on governance boards, increased engagement of the private sector, and a sustained commitment to an evidence-based approach to increase the likelihood that programs will attain their goals.

U.S. land management can contribute 1.2 Pg CO2e year−1 of greenhouse gas mitigation, 76% of which costs USD 50 Mg CO2e−1 or less., Limiting climate warming to

Herein we investigate Life Cycle Cost (LCC) and Return on Investment (ROI) as potential decision variables for evaluating the economic performance (ROI) and financial feasibility (LCC) of a set of flood mitigation strategies over time. The main novelty of this work is the application of LCC and ROI analyses at the urban level to an asset portfolio of flood-prone buildings. Reduced flood damage is treated probabilistically as avoided costs (LCC analysis) and returns (ROI analysis), respectively. The proposed methodology is applied to the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which suffers severe riverine flooding on a sub-annual basis. Specifically, LCC and ROI of five mitigation scenarios that include large-scale catchment rehabilitation, settlement set-backs and waste management are compared with the current situation. The main result is that the highest-performing flood mitigation option includes both conventional interventions and ecosystem rehabilitation.

The demand for timely monetary estimates of the economic value of nonmarket ecosystem goods and services has steadily increased over the last few decades. This article describes the use of benefit transfer to generate monetary value estimates of ecosystem services specifically. The article provides guidance for conducting such benefit transfers and summarizes advancements in benefit transfer methods, databases and analysis tools designed to facilitate its application.

Animals in Florida provide a variety of benefits to people, from recreation (fishing, hunting, or wildlife viewing) to protection of human life and property (oysters and corals provide reef structures that help protect coasts from erosion and flooding). By measuring the economic value of these benefits, we can assign a monetary value to the habitats that sustain these species and assess the value that is lost when development or other human-based activities degrade animal habitat. This 5-page fact sheet presents the results of a study that assessed the value of protecting five animal species in Florida and showed the economic value of protecting animal habitat.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have received considerable attention as a promising approach for correcting environmental externalities. Frequent shortcomings or outright lack of performance assessments of environmental interventions in general and PES projects in particular have resulted in recommendations for ”optimal” PES designs. Conditionality—paying service providers only if services or proxy inputs are delivered—and targeting—allocating payments based on service gains, provision costs or both—are central to such recommendations. We argue that a) true economic optimality is an unattainable PES objective and improving PES cost-effectiveness is a more realistic aspiration, and that b) current PES programs actually prevent cost-effectiveness analyses because they lack appropriate ecosystem service definitions and thus output measurements. We review the effects of conditionality on service flows and provide a framework for identifying the cost-effective level of conditionality stringency. We identify key analytical methods, data and analysis tools required to improve the cost-effectiveness of PES—or any ecosystem service—projects. Needed analytical concepts, metrics, and monitoring and modeling approaches often are sufficiently available for PES design to begin incorporating them. What is missing is their coherent application. Improving spatial-analytical and monitoring capacities should allow gradual implementation of modifications needed to improve PES cost-effectiveness.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are emerging worldwide as important mechanisms to align investments in human and natural well-being. PES projects are often defined as voluntary transactions where well-defined environmental/ecosystem services (or land uses likely to secure those services) are bought by a minimum of one service buyer, from a minimum of one service provider, if and only if the service provider continuously secures service provision (conditionality). Further criteria of PES include limiting additional objectives and ensuring that payments reward behaviour that would otherwise not occur (additionality). Together these best practices for PES are increasingly accepted as the most efficient means to achieve desired outcomes and are guiding funding for PES projects. We used a series of water funds (watershed-oriented PES projects based on a trust fund model) to examine how theoretical best practices could inform and improve practice and also how theory could learn from practical efforts. We conclude that thoughtful consideration is required when evaluating the promise of a PES approach against a theoretical ideal. We found that requiring conditionality may limit the use of creative finance mechanisms such as trust funds that can provide long-term benefits for conservation and human well-being, and that requiring additionality can exclude benefits from social diffusion and result in the inefficient targeting of PES funds. Finally, public–private partnerships in water funds lead to multiple additional/side objectives but partnerships are likely to lower transaction costs and provide transparent, long-term landscape-scale watershed management.

Market-based approaches are increasingly being advocated as tools for achieving the conservation of ecosystem services. We examine the reasons why markets so far appear to have failed to provide an efficient allocation of many ecosystem services, and identify the conditions under which markets deliver efficient resource allocation. We discuss different forms of market-based approaches to ecosystem services and identify the characteristics of services that make them better suited to one or another of these approaches. We find that lack of low-cost measurability and valuation currently precludes efficient allocation of many ecosystem services through market-based approaches. Still, some forms of market-based approaches hold promise for cost-effectively managing some ecosystem services provided by and to agricultural lands. In many cases some form of well-designed government involvement will be required to seek outcomes that protect the public interest.

An estimated 2.5 billion people remain without access to modern energy supplies. This shortfall is expected to grow as the population in developing countries continues to grow rapidly and the existing infrastructure ages. The United Nations’ goal of lowering poverty by half by 2015 will not be attained unless the poor in developing countries gain greater access to basic infrastructure and services, including energy services. The key objective of this paper is to analyze trends in overseas development assistance (ODA) to the energy sector in developing countries during the period 1990–2003, relative to realized private sector investments. This analysis then forms the basis for policy recommendations for consideration by decision makers within countries that are major contributors to ODA.

Conservation of species and their habitats yields economic benefits to society. The principal U.S. species conservation law, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), requires the designation of critical habitat for ESA-listed species. The ESA provides room for economic analysis to enter conservation decisions by stipulating that the decision to designate a particular area take into account the resulting economic impact. Unfortunately, the agencies implementing the ESA generally do not quantify the benefits of designation in their economic analyses, arguing that uncertainties associated with monetary quantification of benefits are too large. We examined that argument in a case study of critical habitat designation for the Canada lynx. We found that well-established valuation methodologies allow quantification of many of the benefits of designation. We further found that expected benefits of designation surpass expected costs in seven of our eight scenarios. This underscores the importance of including benefits in...

High ambient ozone (O3) concentrations are a widespread and persistent problem globally. Although studies have documented the role of forests in removing O3 and one of its precursors, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), the cost effectiveness of using peri-urban reforestation for O3 abatement purposes has not been examined. We develop a methodology that uses available air quality and meteorological data and simplified forest structure growth-mortality and dry deposition models to assess the performance of reforestation for O3 precursor abatement. We apply this methodology to identify the cost-effective design for a hypothetical 405-ha, peri-urban reforestation project in the Houston–Galveston–Brazoria O3 nonattainment area in Texas. The project would remove an estimated 310 tons of (t) O3 and 58 t NO2 total over 30 y. Given its location in a nitrogen oxide (NOx)-limited area, and using the range of Houston area O3 production efficiencies to convert forest O3 removal to its NOx equivalent, this is equivalent to 127–209 t of the regulated NOx. The cost of reforestation per ton of NOx abated compares favorably to that of additional conventional controls if no land costs are incurred, especially if carbon offsets are generated. Purchasing agricultural lands for reforestation removes this cost advantage, but this problem could be overcome through cost-share opportunities that exist due to the public and conservation benefits of reforestation. Our findings suggest that peri-urban reforestation should be considered in O3 control efforts in Houston, other US nonattainment areas, and areas with O3 pollution problems in other countries, wherever O3 formation is predominantly NOx limited.

Economic and population growth in Asia over the last three decades has been unprecedented. While conventional economic indicators have been increasing consistently, indicators of resource and environmental quality have been deteriorating, raising questions about the implications of future growth. Economic growth in the future is considered to be contingent on ensuring a more efficient use of natural resources, while simultaneously striving to reduce environmental impacts. We examine time trends of three efficiency indicators; agricultural efficiency, energy efficiency of economic production and carbon efficiency of energy use, for the five most populous countries in Asia in order to assess whether industrial development has lead to increased resource use efficiency and an associated reduction in total resource use and environmental impacts. Our results indicate that agricultural efficiency has decreased in all five countries. Results are mixed for energy and carbon efficiencies. Where increases in energy and carbon efficiency have occurred, they have been completely overwhelmed by absolute increases in energy use and carbon emissions caused by increases in the scale of economic activity. Based on this analysis, we study the potential for further improvements and policy implications for future food supply, energy consumption and carbon emissions in the region.

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the industrial component of the Costa Rican economy and quantitatively and qualitatively reviews the historical aspects and trends, including the impact of internally and externally derived policies. It discusses several emerging industries, including tourism, textiles, and computers. There are two important components of sustainability related to Costa Rican industry. The first, “economic sustainability,” is the degree to which the industry is financially sustainable. The second criterion for sustainability, “biophysical sustainability,” is more stringent, and relates to whether there will be available indefinite supplies of necessary raw materials (current and substitutes) and unlimited or at least sufficient environmental absorption capacity to allow the continuation of current trends in the throughput of material and the output of waste. Because Costa Rican industry is to a large degree dependent upon the imported resources it requires as inputs, the ultimate assessment of its sustainability cannot be carried out without an analysis of the biophysical underpinnings of the county's economy, and the relation between biophysical sustainability and the relative prices of necessary raw materials and products generated.

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of Costa Rica's experiences with the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) demanded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It critiques the neoclassical economic theory underlying these policies, and gives an evaluation of the efficacy of these policies. The major problems caused by SAPs and export-led growth are increased trade deficits by encouraging imports through their emphasis on free trade and tariff reductions, the latter of which also have reduced government revenues. This chapter outlines the arguments advanced by many prominent thinkers about development who have concluded that the policies of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) were ill-designed, for they did not solve the problems they were supposed to, while at the same time they generated many new ones. Underlying all of the SAPs has been a naively rigid and highly selective implementation of theoretical neoclassical economics.