Managing water resources independently may result in substantial economic losses when those resources are interdependent with each other and with other environmental resources. We first develop general principles for using resources with spillovers, including corrective taxes (subsidies) for...

Local and global changes continue to influence interactions between groundwater and terrestrial ecosystems. Changes in precipitation, surface water, and land cover can affect the water balance of a given watershed, and thus affect both the quantity and quality of freshwater entering the ground....

Pollution management based on marginal abatement costs is optimal only if those abatement costs are specified correctly. Using the example of nitrogen pollution in groundwater, we show that the marginal abatement cost function for any given pollution source can be directly derived from a...

Efficient management of groundwater resource systems requires careful consideration of relationships — both positive and negative — with the surrounding environment. The removal of and protection against “bad” and "ugly" natural capital such as invasive plants and feral animals and the...

We review the economics perspective on sustainable resource use and sustainable development. Under standard conditions, dynamic efficiency leads to sustainability of renewable resources but not the other way around. For the economic‐ecological system as a whole, dynamic efficiency and...

This report provides the first comparison of standard economic indicators for three sectors that are key to future sustainability in Hawai‘i - renewable energy, agriculture and natural resource management. Economic information has long been collected for many sectors in Hawai‘i,...

Environmentally friendly technologies typically yield social returns far in excess of the private returns to the innovating firm. Governments issue grants to fund such projects in an attempt to increase their supply, but completion is uncertain and many projects never yield a successful...

Payments for ecosystem services should be informed by how both the providing-resource and the downstream resource are managed. We develop an integrated model that jointly optimizes conservation investment in a watershed that recharges a downstream aquifer and groundwater extraction from the...

Among the ethical objections to intergenerational impartiality is the violation of consumer sovereignty given that individuals are impatient. We accommodate that concern by distinguishing intra- and inter-generational discounting in an OLG model suitable for analyzing sustainability issues....

In many parts of the world, irrigation and groundwater consumption are largely dependent on groundwater. Minimizing the adverse effects of water scarcity requires optimal as well as sustainable groundwater management. A common recommendation is to limit groundwater extraction to maximum...