Many experts believe that low-cost mitigation opportunities in agriculture are abundant and comparable in scale to those found in the energy sector. They are mostly located in developing countries and have to do with how land is used. By investing in projects under the Clean Development...

Greenhouse gas emissions are largely determined by how energy is created and used, and policies designed to encourage mitigation efforts reflect this reality. However, an unintended consequence of an energy-focused strategy is that the set of policy instruments needed to tap mitigation...

This paper reviews various applications of cooperative game theory (CGT) to issues of water resources. With an increase in the competition over various water resources, the incidents of disputes have been in the center of allocation agreements. The paper reviews the cases of various water uses,...

Economic efficiency has to do with how much wealth a given resource base can generate. Equity has to do with how that wealth is to be distributed in society. Economic efficiency gets far more attention, in part because equity considerations involve value judgements that vary from person to...

From the earliest times, water resources have been allocated on the basis of social criteria -maintaining the community by ensuring that water is available for human consumption, for sanitation, and for food production. Societies have invested capital in infrastructure to maintain this...

This cross-country evaluation of institutional responses to problems in the water sector shows that changes in the nature of water problems have changed the development paradigm underlying water institutions. There is increasing recognition of how decentralized allocation mechanisms can...

Governments and developing agencies promote participatory approaches in solving common pool resource problems, such as in the water sector. Two main participatory approaches have been applied separately, namely negotiation and mediation. In this paper the authors apply the Role-Playing Game that...

The authors describe and analyze a nongovernmental, multi-stakeholder, consensus-based approach to river basin management in the Fraser River basin in Canada. The Fraser River drains 238,000 km2 of British Columbia, supporting nearly 3 million residents and a diverse economy. Water management...

The authors explore the use of cross-sectional analysis to measure the impacts of climate change on agriculture. The impact literature, using experiments on crops in laboratory settings combined with simulation models, suggests that agriculture will be strongly affected by climate change. The...

The environment and security literature has argued that freshwater scarcity often leads to inter-state conflict, and possibly acute violence. The contention, however, ignores the long history of hydro-political cooperation exemplified by hundreds of documented agreements. Building on a theory...