There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

This paper reports an original economic valuation of the impact of climate change on the provision of forest regulating services in Europe. To the authors’ knowledge the current paper represents the first systematic attempt to estimate human well-being losses with respect to changes in...

This paper reports an original economic valuation of the impact of climate change on the provision of forest regulating services in Europe. To the authors’ knowledge the current paper represents the first systematic attempt to estimate human well-being losses with respect to changes in...

Conventional cost-benefit rules typically assume that the alternative to the project under evaluation is 'doing nothing' or 'business as usual'. In this note we contrast this approach to one where the alternative is to provide another environmental good or service. We show that this approach,...

There are now a large number of valuation studies on the benefits of biodiversity and on ecosystem services, the services provided by different ecosystems (ESS). Both ideas have been used to elicit values from nature but in recent years the research community has focussed on ESS as the main...

Deforestation has long been heavily studied; several proximate and underlying causes behind the global decrease of forest extent have been discussed. However, systematic analyses of positive examples are sparse, even if forestation is happening in almost 70 countries (on approximately 40% of the...

This report provides an overview of methodologies to evaluate the effectiveness of policy instruments for biodiversity, covering impact evaluation, cost-effectiveness analysis and other more commonly used approaches. It then provides an inventory of biodiversity-relevant impact evaluation...

Most normative economics assumes that individuals have coherent preferences. This paper responds to growing evidence of failures of this assumption, particularly in the context of stated-preference methods widely used in environmental policy analysis. I propose a criterion of consumer...