An early-mid project evaluation of the benefits and costs of the Tragowel Plains Salinity Management Plan estimated the net cost after six years at A$ 5.5 million. The cumulative cash flows for the water transfer, drainage and halophyte programs were all positive with benefit to cost ratios...

An allowance for water use is part of the agronomic analysis implicit in the foundation of any sensible economic evaluation of crop response or change of farming system. Diminishing returns to investment in water use efficiency imply that the optimum level of investment is determined by the...

A false expectation based on the notion that it is easy to raise water use efficiency, and that all increases in water use efficiency will also increase net social welfare, will lead to gross underestimation of the economic impact of reduced irrigation allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin. A...

Water use efficiency data was used to estimate the impact of reducing sales water allocations on a range of irrigated dairy farms categorised according to intensity of water right. The expected deficiency in available water was estimated for each farm category on the basis of historical demand...

Approaches to valuing regional responses in plant productivity from investment in natural resource management are reviewed. The usefulness of data from surveys for estimating marginal physical product is discussed. Since investment reduces declining trends in productivity, an estimate of value...

Policy makers in Vietnam face difficult choices when deciding reservoir water management strategies between irrigation and fisheries. In this paper, an economic optimization model for water management is developed to facilitate policy makers' decision making. The model includes the response of...

Many environmental policy issues involve conflicts between nature conservation and economic development. The economic rationale behind deciding among alternative options is predicated on some form of benefit-cost analysis (BCA). Key issues to date have been non-market valuation, the...

Oil mallees are one of the preferred options to combat dryland salinity in the Western Australian wheatbelt, but their economics are uncertain. We compare three scenarios: on-farm mallee oil production, industrial oil and wood-based electricity production, and a combined oil, electricity and...

The environmental accounting literature covers both public and private, or corporate, fields. The needs of private firms differ from public organisations in that environmental accounting systems must pay for themselves. Stakeholder analysis and the so-called triple bottom line forget that...

Three policy options for greenhouse gas abatement in the predominantly grazing systems of Western Australia are analysed. The two taxation policies (a tax on total emissions, and a tax on methane emissions only) are only effective at extreme tax rates ($85/t CO2 equivalents) where the farming...