Costa Rica’s environmental services payments program (Pagos por Servicios Ambientales, or PSA) started in 1997 and was the true pioneer in this area. It is broadly cited and has led to numerous calls for emulating its approach in various ways. It has itself evolved over time, with acknowledged...

Transferable development rights (TDRs) are a market-based approach to land conservation. They allow the development rights from one property to be transferred to another, with the first “sending” property placed under a development restriction or conservation easement and the “receiving”...

National government-funded payments for environmental services (PES) programs often lack sustainable financing and fail to target payments to providers of important environmental services. In principle, these problems can be mitigated by supplementing government financing with contributions from...

The paper explores a number of issues related to lot size and urban density. First, trends in single-family residential lot size over the past 35 years are examined in eight counties in the state of Maryland. We find that there was a trend toward larger lot sizes in many suburban counties in the...

In this paper, the second installment of our three-part study on the development of brownfields policy in the state of Wisconsin, we use case studies to explore the implementation of the policy at three scales: 1) two statewide initiatives, the Voluntary Party Liability Exemption process and the...

National government-funded payments for environmental services (PES) programs often lack sustainable financing and fail to target payments to providers of important environmental services. In principle, these problems can be mitigated by supplementing government financing with contributions from...

In this paper, the first part of our three-part study on the development of brownfields policy in Wisconsin, we examine the regulatory history of the brownfields policy. We start with the 1978 Hazardous Substance Spill Law, the antecedent to the brownfields regulatory reform of the 1990s, and...

This paper provides an overview of the cleanup and redevelopment of contaminated properties known as “brownfields.” It has three principal parts. First, we introduce the brownfields phenomenon and its drivers, drawing on the body of available empirical evidence to discuss characteristics of...

As the third paper in our three-part series on Wisconsin brownfields, this paper reports the results of a survey on the objectives of brownfields redevelopment, constraints to the redevelopment, the role of the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and institutional controls. The 260...

This paper uses data from household- and plot-level surveys conducted in the highlands of the Tigray and Amhara regions of Ethiopia to examine the contribution of sustainable land-management practices to net values of agricultural production in areas with low- and high-agricultural potential. A...