By defining some behaviors as crimes, law defines incentives and protects society from direct and indirect, tangible and intangible negative impacts. Whatever the severity of the prescribed penalties for those that prevaricate, society and its institutions need to act at the level of law...

Making decisions about optimal investments in green infrastructure necessitates setting social discount rates. This paper suggests a practical way for determining the discount rate for projects or programmes in which one of the options is to maintain or restore land to an undeveloped state. We...

This paper shows that implicit assumptions about the numeraire good in the Kaldor–Hicks efficiency–equity analysis involve a “same-yardstick” fallacy (a fallacy pointed out by Paul Samuelson in another context). These results have negative implications for cost-benefit analysis, the...

The intervention of dual dispatch defibrillation by ambulance and fire services in the County of Stockholm had positive economic effects. For the cost-benefit analysis, the return on investment was high and the cost-effectiveness showed levels below the threshold value for economic efficiency...

The Scheldt is a tidal river that originates in France and flows through Belgium and the Netherlands. The tides create significant flood risks in both the Flemish region in Belgium and the Netherlands. Due to sea level rise and economic development, flood risks will increase during this century....

Until recently, research on potential economic impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on transport infrastructure was scarce, but currently this area is rapidly expanding. Indeed, there is a growing international interest, including the European area, regarding the impacts of...

On May 23, 2006, the landslide-debris flow occurred in several places of the lower Northern Thailand. These destroyed about 4,000 houses resulting in about 10,000 people having to be permanently evacuated. They also damaged large areas of high potential agricultural growth in the highland and...

The Feitsui reservoir is a major water supply source for more than five million people in Northern Taiwan. The reservoir water quality has been good, but is threatened by eutrophication due to excessive nutrient input and siltation due to sediment loads. Recently, the water authorities in Taiwan...

Maintaining a river system’s minimum water flow is a pre-condition for achieving the “good ecological status” prescribed by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). In areas of water scarcity the reuse of treated water for agricultural irrigation is seen as a promising option to...

Soil and water conservation ecological compensation can be simply defined as a monetary payment to offset the environmental loss. An illustration is given in this study describing the payment compensation to water resource conservation and soil losses in Erlongshan reservoir catchment, China. A...