The current Water Abstraction License (WAL) regime in Italy is no longer flexible enough to cope with the challenges posed by human-induced climate and global environmental changes. The cornerstones of the current regime were laid down in the 1930s and have remained essentially unchanged ever...

Brahmaputra river basin is one of the most vulnerable areas in the world subject to combined effects of glacier melt, extreme monsoon rainfall and sea level rise. Water is emerging as a new possible irritant between China and India. For India, Water of Brahmaputra constitutes a major lifeline...

Economic globalization affects the environment and sustainable development in several ways and through various channels. The purpose of this paper is to review the key links between globalization and the environment. The paper intends to consider the major issues in multilateral economic...

This paper analyzes the economic and investment implications of a series of climate mitigation scenarios, characterized by different levels of ambition in terms of long term stabilization goals and the transition to attain them. In particular, the implications of fairly ambitious scenarios are...

Water is a multidimensional issue, involving water availability, access to freshwater, spatial and temporal distribution of resources, competition among its uses, ecosystems conservation, climate-related disasters and risks and several other aspects. The water security approach manages such...

Water pollution in the Venice Lagoon and its catchment is a main environmental issue. In Italy public funds are made available by specific national and regional regulations in order to support the realisation of initiatives for the abatement of pollutant loads that travel from the catchment into...

This paper discusses a framework for analyzing robust institutions for water markets drawn on the new institutional economics school of thoughts which is based on Williamson, North, Coase and Ostrom theories on transaction cost economics, property rights and collective actions. Based on these...

The Drought Management Plans (DMPs) are a regulatory instrument that establishes priorities among the different water uses and defines more stringent constraints to access to publicly provided water during droughts, especially for non-priority uses such as agriculture. These plans have recently...

There is a tendency among policy-makers and industry lobbyists toward "specific", "relative" or "output-based" quotas, i.e., freely distributed to firms proportionally to their output. With a stochastic analytical model, we demonstrate that relative quotas are dominated either by absolute quotas...