For ecosystem services analysis, a key to collaboration between natural and social scientists is the identification and measurement of linking indicators: biophysical indicators that facilitate social evaluation, including monetary valuation of ecological changes. As ecosystem service analysts...

Water pollution taxes, or effluent fees, have long been advocated by environmental economists as a regulatory approach to cost effectively achieve water quality improvements. The article reviews the arguments in favor of taxes and traces the history of the idea in U.S. policy debates. Particular...

The article addresses the question of whether responsibility for pollution created in the past should be retroactively applied to firms, or if the costs of cleaning up existing pollution should be financed by the public. We show that making firms liable for retrospective environmental costs can...

Financial assurance rules, also known as financial responsibility or bonding requirements, foster cost internalization by requiring potential polluters to demonstrate the financial resources necessary to compensate for environmental damage that may arise in the future. Accordingly, assurance is...

Increasingly popular tailored regulation (TR) initiatives like EPA's Project XL allow plants to voluntarily substitute site-specific environmental performance standards for command-and-control regulations that dictate pollution abatement strategies. TR can significantly reduce participants'...

Increasingly popular tailored regulation (TR) initiatives like EPA's Project XL allow plants to voluntarily substitute site-specific environmental performance standards for command-and-control regulations that dictate pollution abatement strategies. TR can significantly reduce participants'...

Increasingly popular tailored regulation (TR) initiatives like EPA’s Project XL allow plants to voluntarily substitute site-specific environmental performance standards for command-and-control regulations that dictate pollution abatement strategies. TR can significantly reduce participants’...

Green gross domestic product (green GDP) is meant to account for nature’s value on an equal footing with the market economy. Several problems bedevil green GDP, however. One is that nature does not come prepackaged in units like cars, houses, and bread. Even worse, green GDP requires...

Conservation investments are increasingly evaluated on the basis of their return on investment (ROI). Conservation ROI analysis quantitatively measures the costs, benefits, and risks of investments so conservancies can rank or prioritize them. This paper includes case studies—of three...