While the global economy continues to grow, ecosystem services tend to stagnate or decline. Economic theory has shown how such shifts in relative scarcities can be reflected in project appraisal and environmental-economic accounting, but empirical evidence has been sparse to put theory into...

While the global economy continues to grow, ecosystem services tend to stagnate or decline. Economic theory has shown how such shifts in relative scarcities can be reflected in project appraisal and environmental-economic accounting, but empirical evidence has been sparse to put theory into...

Eco-entrepreneurs in developing countries are often subject to market or institutional constraints, e.g. via credit rationing or missing markets. Conservation interventions which relax constraints may be both cost-effective and poverty reducing. A simulation using data from an intervention in...

Recent research suggests that the long term future should be discounted with a declining discount rate. One such line of research, exemplified by Weitzman [Gamma discounting, Amer. Econ. Rev. 91 (2001) 261–271], shows that the certainty equivalent discount rate is declining when future capital...

This paper describes global biodiversity conservation as a co-operative bargaining problem. We model an interdependent ‘technology rich’ North and a ‘gene rich’ South who must co-operate in the biotechnology sector in order to combine their unique and essential resources and maximise...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...

The estimated values to society from long-term public projects, including climate change mitigation and infrastructure construction, are highly sensitive to the social discount rate (SDR) employed. Governmental guidance on social discounting has predominantly been based on input from expert...

We distinguish between local problems of biodiversity loss and global ones, where international cooperation is required. Global biodiversity regulation involves choosing the optimal stopping rule regarding global land conversions, in order to ensure that some areas of unconverted natural...