Declining water quality as a result of increased nutrient leaching is a serious and growing concern, both internationally and in New Zealand. Water pollution issues have traditionally been addressed with command-and-control type regulation, but market-based nutrient trading schemes are becoming...

This paper examines six different approaches to nutrient management, and simulates the economic costs and environmental impacts associated with them using NManager, a partial equilibrium simulation model developed by Motu and NIWA, the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research. We...

In this paper, we construct a dataset of annual expected forest profits in New Zealand from 1990-2008 at a fine spatial resolution. We do not include land values in any of our profit calculations. We estimate four measures of expected forest profits based around net present value (NPV), land...

Without effective developing country participation in climate mitigation it will be impossible to meet global concentration and climate change targets. However, developing countries are unwilling and, in many cases, unable to bear the mitigation cost alone. They need huge transfers of resources...

Risk (and often the certainty) of adverse environmental outcomes motivates environmental regulation; other risks also affect welfare outcomes. Economic instruments are one way to reduce environmental risk while maintaining flexibility that helps manage other risks. However regulation not only...

Pastoral farming can result in adverse environmental effects such as nitrogen leaching and greenhouse gas emissions. However, the cost of mitigation and hence the socially appropriate level of tolerance for environmental effects is still unclear. Research to date within New Zealand has either...

Our goal is to predict which forests are harvestable in New Zealand each year, and the stumpage profits attained from harvesting. We begin by documenting how Motu updates the 2008 Land Use in Rural New Zealand map to match the 2013 National Exotic Forest Description planted forest dataset. We...

Water quality in Lake Rotorua has been declining for at least the last 30 years as increased levels of nutrients have entered the lake. Despite significant effort and expenditure, the level of nutrients entering the lake still exceeds sustainable levels. A nutrient trading system would help the...

No country has previously attempted to include either agriculture or forestry in an emissions trading system. The New Zealand government is planning to include both. This paper describes how they plan to do it, what some of the critical issues have been and some of the outstanding challenges. If...