Socioeconomic Impact Assessment of the Red Palm Weevil in NENA Countries (The Case of Egypt and Saudi Arabia) Ex-post impact assessment (impact evaluation of the proposed interventions)

Date palms are trees of high importance across the NENA region due to their economic and cultural importance, and also for their importance as a renewable natural resource and as a provider of other ecosystem services. Since its arrival in the NENA region, a main date palm production region, RPW is causing widespread damage to date palm and affecting date palm production, which is having a significant impact on the livelihoods of farmers as well as the environment

Modelling for Pest Risk Analysis: Spread and Economic Impacts

The introduction of invasive pests beyond their natural range is one of the main causes of the loss of biodiversity and leads to severe costs. Bioeconomic models that integrate biological invasion spread theory, economic impacts and invasion management would be of great help to increase the transparency of pest risk analysis (PRA) and provide for more effective and efficient management of invasive pests. In this thesis, bioeconomic models of management of invasive pests are developed. The models are applied to three cases of study. The main case looks at the invasion in Europe by the western corn rootworm (WCR), Diabrotica virgifera ssp. virgifera LeConte (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae). A range of quantitative modelling approaches was employed: (i) dispersal kernels fitted to mark-release-recapture experimental data; (ii) optimal control models combined with info-gap theory; (iii) spatially explicit stochastic simulation models; and (iv) agent-based models. As a result of the application of the models new insights on the management of invasive pests and the links between spread and economic impacts were gained: (i) current official management measures to eradicate WCR were found to be ineffective; (ii) eradication and containment programmes that are economically optimal under no uncertainty were found out to be also the most robustly immune policy to unacceptable outcomes under severe uncertainty; (iii) PRA focusing on single invasive pests might lead to management alternatives that dot not correspond to the optimal economic allocation if the rest of the invasive pests sharing the same management budget are considered; (iv) the control of satellite colonies of an invasion occurring by stratified dispersal is ineffective when a strong propagule pressure is generated from the main body of the invasion and this effect is increased by the presence of human-assisted long-distance dispersal; and (v) agent-based models were shown to be an adequate tool to integrate biological invasion spread models with economic analysis models

Economic impact assessment of invasive plant pests in the European Union

According to the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) and the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures (SPS Agreement) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), phytosanitary measures should be economically justifiable. The economic impact assessments within a pest risk analysis are currently based on a framework with qualitative questions and not on an explicit quantification of costs. Available quantitative methodologies to assess plant health risks, and in particular economic impacts, are currently hardly applied in the assessment of plant health risks for the EU, restricting the economic justification of plant health policies