This paper asks how countries can implement their commitments to limit the increase in the global average temperature under the recent Paris Agreement on Climate Change for agriculture. An initial examination of the relevant trade rules and case law indicates that they appear unable to legally...

Man’s history and developmental endeavour have been advancing alongside a trail of ecological ramifications and climate change. Since prehistoric times, scientists have not recorded an accelerated shift in ecology during any other epoch beside that of modern man on the planet. The paper seeks...

Increasing concerns about energy security and climate change mitigation have led to significant policy support for biofuels, particularly for cellulosic biofuels. This paper examines the short- and long-run effects of Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) on the mix of agricultural and forest biomass,...

Public trustees at the state, federal, and tribal level are tasked with ensuring that those responsible for destroying or damaging natural resources sufficiently compensate the public for its loss. Those trustees have the fiduciary duty to maintain and restore the natural resources within the...

The following paper analyzes the economic and demographic factors determining the conversion of mangroves in the coastal provinces of Thailand to commercial shrimp farming. Mangrove conversion is therefore determined by the returns to shrimp farmers (i.e. the price of shrimp), the input costs to...

Several studies have examined the relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth. However, most of them did not take into account financial developments and institutional quality. Moreover, Stern (2004) noted that there are important econometric weaknesses in the earlier...

Between 1990 and 2008, many industrializing countries have experienced tremendous economic growth, which coincided with a substantial increase in the use of materials. That poses the question how a continued economic convergence of developing nations will affect the use of biomass, fossil fuels,...

Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

Research on economic growth suggests that the era of colonization has had an impact on the levels of economic development of countries around the globe. However, why some countries were colonized early, some late, and others not at all, and what effect these differences have had on current...