Composite indicators are becoming increasingly infuential tools of environmental assessment and advocacy. Nonetheless, their use is controversial as they often rely on ad-hoc and theoretically problematic assumptions regarding normalization, aggregation, and weighting. Nonparametric data...

This paper is based on empirical research on a taxonomy of technological environmental innovations. It draws on a databank with over 500 examples of new technologies (materials, products, processes and practices) which come with benign environmental effects. The approaches applied to...

In this essay, three separate yet interconnected components of pro-environmental decision making are considered: (a) knowledge, in the form of basic scientific understanding and procedural knowledge, (b) risk perception, as it relates to an individual’s direct experience of climate change and...

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such...

USA, Canada and Argentina have challenged before the World Trade Organisation the European Communities’ (EC) denial of Genetically Modified (GM) product imports, which took place from 1998 to 2004 . Against this background, the goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we will determine which...

The evolution of renewable resources is characterized in many cases by different time scales where some state variables such as biomass, may evolve relatively faster than other state variables such as carrying capacity. Ignoring this time scale separation means that a slowly changing variable is...

This survey paper examines various information insufficiencies in biodiversity conservation and their impact of regulatory choices. We surveyed the literature in the field and identified four major types of informational insufficiencies in making efficient biodiversity conservation decisions: 1)...

Standard non-cooperative game theoretical models of international environmental agreements (IEAs) draw a pessimistic picture of the prospective of successful cooperation: only small coalitions are stable that achieve only little. However, there also exist IEAs with higher participation and more...

We study an international climate agreement that assigns emission quotas to each participating country. Unlike the simplest models in the literature, we assume that abatement costs are affected by R&D activities undertaken in all firms in all countries, i.e. abatement technologies are...

This paper analyzes incentives for polluting firms to exchange abatement cost information under the non-linear pollution tax scheme (‘differential tax’) introduced by Kim and Chang [J. Regul. Econom. 5, 1993, 193-197]. It shows that polluting firms have - under mild conditions - an incentive...