Marine and coastal ecosystems - and thus the benefits they create for humans - are subject to increasing pressures and competing usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime policy in the EU and aims at...

National governments and development agencies have invested considerable effort in recent years to develop methodologies and tools to screen their projects for the risks posed by climate change. However, these tools have largely been developed by the climate change community and their...

This paper examines the likely impact on agriculture of the climate change which has already taken place between 1960 and 2000. Accumulating greenhouse gases have caused global temperatures to rise approximately 0.25 °C during this period and for precipitation patterns to shift. Using...

The study tests the popular belief that Democrats (and more generally, liberals) are “green” while Republicans (more generally, conservatives) are “brown”, for several measures of California air quality indicators. We employ two alternative econometric identification strategies on...

Environmental conditions are likely to have an effect on people’s sense of life satisfaction, both directly and indirectly. In recent years there has been a burgeoning literature assessing the relationship between measures of environmental quality and subjective well-being. This type of...

Using the extended Ramsey rule, the socially efficient rate is the difference between a wealth effect and a precautionary effect of economic growth. This second effect is increasing in the degree of uncertainty affecting the future. In the literature, it is usually calibrated by estimating the...

The quintessence of recent natural science studies is that the 2°C target can only be achieved with massive emission reductions in the next few years. The central twist of this paper is the addition of this limited time to act into a non-perpetual real options framework analysing optimal...

We analyse the influence of climate on average life satisfaction in 87 countries using data from the World Values Survey. Climate is described in terms of 'degree-months' calculated using an optimally-selected base temperature of 65°F (18.3°C). Our results suggest that countries with climates...

Ocean acidification is increasingly recognized as a major global problem. Yet economic assessments of its effects are currently almost absent. Unlike most other marine organisms, mollusks, which have significant commercial value worldwide, have relatively solid scientific evidence of biological...

Diminishing emission budgets and increasing risks of catastrophic damages from climate change require analyses of rapid response options including geoengineering options such as ocean iron fertilization (OIF). To decide whether or not OIF might be such an option an assessment of its potential as...