Environmental Economics Papers

Barbier (2021)

Title: “The Evolution of Economic Views on Natural Resource Scarcity”

Eras:

• Resource Depletion(1950-70): physical limits of natural resources

• Environmental Public Goods (1970-2000): Loss of non-market environmental goods

• Ecological Scarcity(2000-now): planetary boundaries, absolute scarcity

Scarcity: 

• Absolute = Physical limits constrain growth

• Relative = Scarcity relative to other inputs leads to price signals, substitution, and innovation

Sustainability: 

• Weak: Human-made capital can substitute for natural capital

• Strong: Some natural capital is essential and irreplaceable

Kenter et al. (2025)

Title: “Ten principles for transforming economics in a time of global crises” 

Principles that provide a cohesive narrative to unite diverse economic alternatives

Holistic:

• Social–ecological embeddedness and holistic well-being

• Interdisciplinary and complexity thinking

Ecological: 

• Limits to growth

• Limited substitutability of natural capital

• Regenerative design

Social:

• Holistic perspectives of people and values

• Equity, equality, and justice

Political Economy:

• Relationality and social enfranchisement

• Participation, deliberation, and cooperation

• Post-capitalism and decolonization

Dasgupta & Levin (2023)

Title: “Economic factors underlying biodiversity loss"

• GDP is misleading → ignores depreciation of natural capital 

• Inclusive Wealth: GDP alternative, sum of produced, human, and natural capital valued by their accounting prices

Nature’s Services: 

• Provisioning goods 

• Maintenance and Regulating Services 

Natural Capital Traits: 

• can collapse abruptly 

• damage is irreversible 

• cannot be replicated or stored as spare

→ demand for nature’s services exceeds what the biosphere can sustainably supply by 1.7 Earths.

Failures:

• missing markets (ecosystem services unpriced)

• tragedy of the commons

• wealth transfer (poor to rich countries)

Policy Recs.:

• price natural capital 

• tax global commons 

• remove harmful subsidies

• reform trade 

Boyd et al. (2018)

Title: “Tragedy Revisited”

Defying Hardin: 

• Hardin argues: when a resource is shared and open to all, individuals acting rationally in their own self-interest will inevitably destroy the shared resource, and only top-down coercion or privatization can prevent this tragedy

• Hardin is wrong: culturally evolved moral norms help solve collective action problems without formal police or courts

Water: 

• a common pool resource 

• cooperation is possible

• Ostrom's design principles (clear boundaries, local adaptation, monitoring, etc.) are key

• polycentric governance helps manage complex water systems

Historical resilience of common pool resources: 

•  European commons were dynamic, resilient institutions with continuous rule-making

• sanctions were rare in commons that survived for centuries

• investment in communication

Addressing conflict: 

• political challenges

• coupling issues: packaging an issue where a group loses with another where they gain

Ocean: 

•  declining resources and pervasive pollution

• management is fragmented, enforcement is weak

• solution: UN treaty for biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction

Knowledge: 

• public good 

• risk is underproduction due to free riders

Antimicrobial resistance: 

• individual use of antibiotics benefits the user, but overuse destroys the resource for all

Illich (1983)

Title: “Silence is a Commons”

• Electronic communication technologies are destroying human commons

Commons vs resources:

• Commons: Aspects of the environment that are shared, managed by custom, and accessible to all for subsistence and social life

• Resources: Elements of the environment turned into commodities for economic production, controlled by few and requiring regulation

Silence:

• Silence was a commons—everyone had an equal voice. Now, access to a microphone or loudspeaker determines who is heard

Rockstrom et al. (2023)

Title: “The planetary commons: A new paradigm for safeguarding Earth-regulating systems in the Anthropocene”

• Human pressures have pushed the planet beyond safe limits (6 of 9 planetary boundaries crossed)

Traditional Global Commons:

• high seas, Antarctica, outer space, atmosphere) are governed as shared resources beyond national jurisdiction

• Issue with this framework is it focuses on resource access and use, not on safeguarding critical Earth-regulating functions. And excludes vital biophysical systems within national borders

New Planetary Commons:

• Include all critical biophysical systems and their functions that regulate Earth’s resilience and livability, regardless of location

• They add: Tipping elements (e.g., ice sheets, monsoon systems, rainforests). And other vital systems (e.g., wetlands, soil carbon, blue carbon ecosystems) to the Global Commons

Governance Approaches: 

• An overarching global institution

• Specific regimes for each Earth system sphere

• Recognition of Indigenous and local knowledge

Aldy et al. (2021)

Title: “Keep climate policy focused on the social cost of carbon”

SCC: measures the monetized value of avoided economic damages from emitting one additional ton of CO₂

Used in: cost-benefit analysis to compare the benefits of reduced climate damages against the costs of emission reductions

Target-Consistent Carbon Price Alternative:

• reflects the marginal cost of meeting a political climate target, not the benefits of reducing emissions

• Politically Driven, Not Science-Based

• Highly Dependent on Uncertain Assumptions

• Legal Incompatibility

• Inward-Looking and Non-Reciprocal

Conclusion: better to keep using SCC

Nordhaus (2019)

Title: “Climate Change: The ultimate challenge for economics” 

• Nordhaus developed DICE

• IAMs help analyse the costs and benefits of climate policies in a consistent, interdisciplinary framework

Strategies to slow Climate Change: 

• Abatement

• Carbon Removal

• Geoengineering

Discounting: 

• Lower discount rates lead to much higher estimates of the SCC and justify more aggressive climate action

International Agreements: 

• Past agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Accord have failed to significantly reduce global emissions.

Climate Club:

• Coalition of countries that agree on a common carbon price and impose tariffs on non-members → reduces free-riding

• Current policies are insufficient to meet international climate targets

Polasky & Dampha

Title: “Discounting and global environmental change” 

• discounting heavily influences policies on climate change

Ramsey’s Discounting Equation: 

r = ηg + δ

• r: discount rate

• η: elasticity of marginal utility of consumption

• g: growth rate of consumption

• δ: pure rate of time preference

→ a lower discount rate should be applied to environmental benefits than to financial flows because environmental benefits may not be substitutable 

Descriptive vs Prescriptive Rate 

• descriptive: based on observed market rates (Nordhaus) → higher and favoring gradual action

• prescriptive: based on ethical principles (Stern) → lower and favoring immediate aggressive action

Equity, uncertainty, and non-substitutability of ecosystem services support lower discount rates for climate policy.

Kallis et al. (2025)

Title: “Post growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries”

Post growth:

• challenges the pursuit of GDP growth as a primary economic goal

• shifting focus to improving human wellbeing while staying within planetary boundaries

Motivations for Post-Growth:

• Ecological Limits: Limits to Growth model and the planetary boundaries framework highlight the risks of ecological overshoot

• Social Limits: GDP growth does not significantly improve wellbeing beyond a certain level (Easterlin Paradox), uneconomic growth

• Economic limits: slowing growth or stagnation in many countries

Green growth: DGP can be absolutely decoupled from resource use. Relative decoupling is common, but sustained absolute decoupling at a global scale is not supported by data.

Post-Growth Policies: 

• Reducing working hours

• Universal basic services

• Job guarantees and universal basic income

• Wealth and carbon taxes (redistributive)

North-South dynamics: high-income countries overshoot planetary boundaries, while many low-income countries still need to improve wellbeing

Lenzen et al. (2013)

Title: “International trade drives biodiversity threats in developing nations”

• 30% of global species threats are linked to international trade

• Consumers in developed countries drive biodiversity loss in developing nations

Net Importers vs. Exporters 

• Developed countries are net importers of biodiversity threats — up to 44% of their biodiversity footprint comes from imports

• Developing countries are net exporters — up to 35–60% of their domestic species threats are linked to export production

Policy Implications: 

• Shared responsibility between producers and consumers

• Supply-chain certification and biodiversity labelling for consumers

• Extending regulations to cover not only trade in endangered species but also trade in commodities that cause species threats.

Rammelt et al. (2013) 

Title: “Impact of meeting minimum access on critical Earth systems amidst the Great Inequality”

Great Inequality: The period of human impact known as the "Great Acceleration" is characterized by extreme inequality in resource use and environmental damage

• small wealthy minority is responsible for the majority of resource consumption and ecological damage, while billions lack basic access to essentials

• If just access had been met in 2018 the additional environmental impacts would have been modest compared to current total impacts, but significant in the context of already exceeded planetary boundaries 

Wealthy vs. poor: 

• The additional impacts from lifting ~30% of humanity out of deprivation are equivalent to the current impacts of the wealthiest 1–4%

• authors argue for radical redistribution of resources and limits on overconsumption by the wealthy

Costanza (2024)

Title: “Misconceptions about the valuation of ecosystem services” 

• Valuation of Ecosystem Services is not commodification of privatisation 

• Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes often function as stewardship incentives, not market exchanges

• Monetary units are a common denominator for comparing trade-offs, not a market price

Implicit Valuation: is implied by all decisions involving ecosystems. Ignoring valuation does not prevent it from happening—it only hides the trade-offs.

Values of nature: 

• Intrinsic value: the right of nature to exist for its own sake

• Instrumental value: the relative contribution of nature to human well-being

Frank & Sudarshan (2024

Title: “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India”

Context: 

• vulture populations declined by 95% due to diclofenac, a common painkiller used in livestock which causes kidney failure in vultures when they consume treated carcasses

Key Findings: 

• The loss of vultures led to a 4.7% increase in all-cause human death rates

• Economic cost: value of statistical life ($665,000), the annual mortality cost is estimated at $69.4 billion.

• Mechanisms: decline in sanitation services, increased rabies risk, water pollution

Conclusion on Keystone Species: 

• they provide critical ecosystem services whose loss has large, measurable human costs.

• are costly to replace

• in the case of vultures, recovery is slow

• conservation policies should prioritise keystone species based on their ecological and social value

Pascual et al. (2023)

Title: “Diverse Values of Nature for Sustainability”

• "Values crisis" — the failure to recognise and integrate the full range of nature’s values into decision-making

• Current policies often prioritise market-based instrumental values and ignore relational, intrinsic, and non-material values

Topology for Understanding Nature’s Values: 

1. Worldviews & Knowledge Systems: how people perceive their relationship with nature 

2. Broad Values:Guiding principles like justice, stewardship, responsibility.

3. Specific values: 

• Instrumental: Nature as a means to an end.

• Intrinsic: Nature valued for its own sake.

• Relational: Values derived from relationships with nature

4. Value Indicators: Quantitative or qualitative measures

Families of valuation methods:

1. Nature-based (e.g., ecosystem mapping)

2. Statement-based (e.g., surveys, deliberative processes)

3. Behaviour-based (e.g., observed actions)

4. Integrated valuation (combining multiple approaches)

Many values cannot be easily compared → they are incommensurable 

Different sustainability pathways are linked to different value priorities

Abson et al. (2017)

Title: “Leverage points for sustainability transformation”

Most interventions target shallow leverage points—easy to implement but with limited transformational impact. The authors argue for a shift toward deep leverage points that address the root causes of unsustainability.

Leverage Points: 

• Places in a system where small interventions can lead to significant change. They are categorised into four levels: 

1. Parameters (e.g., taxes, subsidies)

2. Feedbacks (e.g., reinforcing or balancing loops)

3. Design (e.g., system rules, information flows)

4. Intent (e.g., goals, paradigms, values)

Realms of deep leverage: 

1. restructure 

2. reconnect 

3. rethink 

Buscher et al. (2017)

Title: “Half-Earth of Whole Earth? Radical ideas for conservation and their implications” 

Criticisms of Half-Earth:

• Ignores Root Causes of Biodiversity Loss: resource extraction and overconsumption. The “human half” would continue to exert ecological pressure through pollution, climate change, and resource use

• Significant Social Impacts: Expanding strict protected areas would lead to widespread displacement, conflict, and violence

• Equity and Justice Concerns: new protected areas would be concentrated in biodiversity-rich, low-income countries, placing the burden of conservation on the poor

• Neglects Human-Nature Relationships: successful conservation requires local support and integration of human needs

• No Vision for the “Human Half”: no plan for managing biodiversity in the human-dominated half of the planet

Alternative: Whole Earth

• Addressing the Global Economic System: consider degrowth or post-growth models. Reduce resource consumption and extraction 

• Tackling Inequality: Focus on the overconsumption of the wealthy, not population growth in poor regions

• Promoting Socio-Ecological Justice: democratic, equitable conservation movements that see people as part of nature, not separate from it.

Chawla (2020) 

Title: “Childhood nature connection and constructive hope: A review of research on connecting with nature and coping with environmental loss”

Importance of childhood nature connection:

1. Declining Contact: children moved indoors, reducing their direct, free-ranging experiences with nature.

2. Lifelong Impact: experiences in nature are crucial for developing a lifelong care for the environment

3. Dual Benefit: well-being and future conservation

Key Influences: Connection is stronger with:

• More access to and time in nature.

• Younger age (connection often declines in adolescence).

• Supportive family and social contexts.

Constructive Hope: The capacity to face environmental threats with a belief that personal and collective action can make a difference

Conclusion: Fostering a deep, emotional connection with nature in childhood—while also acknowledging and addressing the painful emotions associated with environmental loss—can build a foundation for constructive hope