Toward a joint modeling of land-use, transport and economy

It is widely accepted that spatial settlement and transportation are closely related: land use changes have impacts on the performance of the transportation network and changes in the transport system have impacts on settlement behavior. In a recent workshop on evaluation of large transport related infrastructure projects, in which research findings in The Netherlands and the UK were compared, it was concluded that determination of indirect effects related to a new spatial equilibrium, remains a challenge in project evaluation. Indirect effects related to large infrastructure projects may well exceed the direct effects. A research project has started at Delft University of Technology to develop a suitable model instrument for a dynamic modeling of the land-use and transportation system and assessment of economic impacts. The research will use and extend the existing MOBILEC model of the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management in the Netherlands. The MOBILEC model is an interregional model that describes the relationship between economy, mobility and infrastructure. The model is a neoclassical growth model and uses macroeconomic relationships on the level of regions. In the paper a short overview will be presented of the overall framework for the modeling. Incorporation of the mutual influences of the economy, land-use and transport sectors receive special emphasis in this framework. The economy, transport system, labor market and housing market are endogenous in the modeling. The particular contribution of this dissertation research is the development of a model for the labor and housing market and the integration of these markets in the MOBILEC framework. In the current modeling the scale level of the COROP-regions (40 economical zones in the Netherlands) is used to determine of the real geographic product. In the new version the determination of the real geographic product will remain at the COROP-level, but for the housing an labor market a more detailed scale level will be used. At this detailed scale level the potential or attractiveness of zones for settlement of particular functions will be derived from the characteristics of the location itself and the accessibility to facilities in the region (employment, recreational, etc.). Discrete choice techniques will be used to determine the user preferences for settlement. The labor and housing market module will operate in a dynamic environment with a long term perspective, time increments of 3 years will be used. In the MOBILEC model an extended Cobb-Douglas production function is used to calculate the real geographic product of a region. One of the factors in the function concerns productive traffic. In this way the impact of the productive mobility (freight transport and business traffic) on the regional geographic product can be calculated. The inclusion of the housing market and labor market in the framework creates extra opportunities to analyze land-use and transport related issues, such as: indirect economical impacts as agglomeration effects or labor market imperfections. In the first version the agglomeration effects will be included in the real geographic product. analysis of spatial - and transport policies in an integrated way. analysis of commuter traffic in more detail.

Approaches to integrated strategic/tactical forest planning

Traditionally forest planning is divided into a hierarchy of planning phases. Strategic planning is conducted to make decisions about sustainable harvest levels while taking into account legislation and policy issues. Within the frame of the strategic plan, the purpose of tactical planning is to schedule harvest operations to specific areas in the immediate few years and on a finer time scale than in the strategic plan. The operative phase focuses on scheduling harvest crews on a monthly or weekly basis, truck scheduling and choosing bucking instructions. Decisions at each level are to a varying degree supported by computerized tools. A problem that may arise when planning is divided into levels and that is noted in the literature focusing on decision support tools is that solutions at one level may be inconsistent with the results of another level. When moving from the strategic plan to the tactical plan, three sources of inconsistencies are often present; spatial discrepancies, temporal discrepancies and discrepancies due to different levels of constraint. The models used in the papers presented in this thesis approaches two of these discrepancies. To address the spatial discrepancies, the same spatial resolution has been used at both levels, i.e., stands. Temporal discrepancies are addressed by modelling the tactical and strategic issues simultaneously. Integrated approaches can yield large models. One way of circumventing this is to aggregate time and/or space. The first paper addresses the consequences of temporal aggregation in the strategic part of a mixed integer programming integrated strategic/tactical model. For reference, linear programming based strategic models are also used. The results of the first paper provide information on what temporal resolutions could be used and indicate that outputs from strategic and integrated plans are not particularly affected by the number of equal length strategic periods when more than five periods, i.e. about 20 year period length, are used. The approach used in the first paper could produce models that are very large, and the second paper provides a two-stage procedure that can reduce the number of variables and preserve the allocation of stands to the first 10 years provided by a linear programming based strategic plan, while concentrating tactical harvest activities using a penalty concept in a mixed integer programming formulation. Results show that it is possible to use the approach to concentrate harvest activities at the tactical level in a full scale forest management scenario. In the case study, the effects of concentration on strategic outputs were small, and the number of harvest tracts declined towards a minimum level. Furthermore, the discrepancies between the two planning levels were small

The role of economics in ecosystem based management:The case of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive; first lessons learnt and way forward

The EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) sets out a plan of action relating to marine environmental policy and in particular to achieving ‘good environmental status’ (GES) in European marine waters by 2020. Article 8.1 (c) of the Directive calls for ‘an economic and social analysis of the use of those waters and of the cost of degradation of the marine environment’. The MSFD is ‘informed’ by the Ecosystem Approach to management, with GES interpreted in terms of ecosystem functioning and services provision. Implementation of the Ecosystem Approach is expected to be by adaptive management policy and practice. The initial socio-economic assessment was made by maritime EU Member States between 2011 and 2012, with future updates to be made on a regular basis. For the majority of Member States, this assessment has led to an exercise combining an analysis of maritime activities both at national and coastal zone scales, and an analysis of the non-market value of marine waters. In this paper we examine the approaches taken in more detail, outline the main challenges facing the Member States in assessing the economic value of achieving GES as outlined in the Directive and make recommendations for the theoretically sound and practically useful completion of the required follow-up economic assessments specified in the MSFD

Addressing Uncertainty in TMDLS: Short Course at Arkansas Water Resources Center 2001 Annual Conference

Management of a critical natural resource like water requires information on the status of that resource. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported in the 1998 National Water Quality Inventory that more than 291,000 miles of assessed rivers and streams and 5 million acres of lakes do not meet State water quality standards. This inventory represents a compilation of State assessments of 840,000 miles of rivers and 17.4 million acres of lakes; a 22 percent increase in river miles and 4 percent increase in lake acres over their 1996 reports. Siltation, bacteria, nutrients and metals were the leading pollutants of impaired waters, according to EPA. The sources of these pollutants were presumed to be runoff from agricultural lands and urban areas. EPA suggests that the majority of Americans-over 218 million-live within ten miles of a polluted waterbody. This seems to contradict the recent proclamations of the success of the Clean Water Act, the Nation\u27s water pollution control law. EPA also claims that, while water quality is still threatened in the US, the amount of water safe for fishing and swimming has doubled since 1972, and that the number of people served by sewage treatment plants has more than doubled

SOCIAL/ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

In this paper, we focus upon information needs for implementing public programs of resource use and control. Economic models for producing the needed data are presented as activity components of an extensive computer modeling capability. The activity components are building blocks in the construction of a workable system for relating research findings to management and policy questions in regional development.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Regional carbon dioxide permit trading in the United States: coalition choices for Pennsylvania

An overview is given of the growing number of regional associations in which states have entered into voluntary arrangements to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In particular, in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a number of northeastern states have joined to create a regional GHG cap and trade program, beginning with the utility industry. Analysis is made of the five key issues relating to these current and potential climate action associations: the extent of the total and individual state mitigation cost-savings across all sectors from potential emission permit trading coalitions; the size of permit markets associated with the various coalitions; the relative advantages of joining various coalitions for swing states such as Pennsylvania; the implications of the exercise of market power in the permit market; and the total and individual state/country cost-savings from extending the coalition beyond US borders. It is shown that overall efficiency gains from trading with a system of flexible state caps, with greater overall cost savings increasing with increasing geographic scope.Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative; Cap and trade program; Market power in the permit market; Mitigation costs; The size of permit market; Coalition choices for Pennsylvania

Development of a conceptual framework for integrated analysis and assessment of agricultural systems in SEAMLESS-IF

Production Economics,

Efficiency Gains from "What"-Flexibility in Climate Policy: An Integrated CGE Assessment

We investigate the importance of ?what?-flexibility on top of ?where?- and ?when?-flexibility for alternative emission control schemes that prescribe long-term temperature targets and eventually impose additional constraints on the rate of temperature change. We find that ?what?-flexibility substantially reduces the compliance costs under alternative emission control schemes. When comparing policies that simply involve long-term temperature targets against more stringent strategies that include additional constraints on the rate of temperature increase, it turns out that the latter involve huge additional costs. These costs may be interpreted as additional insurance payments if damages should not only dependent on absolute temperature change but also on the rate of temperature change. --Climate policy,Integrated Assessment,What-flexibility

Sharing the Burden of GHG Reductions

Abstract and PDF report are also available on the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://globalchange.mit.edu/).The G8 countries propose a goal of a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050, in an effort that needs to take account of other agreements specifying that developing countries are to be provided with incentives to action and protected from the impact of measures taken by others. To help inform international negotiations of measures to achieve these goals we develop a technique for endogenously estimating the allowance allocations and associated financial transfers necessary to achieve predetermined distributional outcomes and apply it in the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model. Possible burden sharing agreements are represented by different allowance allocations (and resulting financial flows) in a global cap-and-trade system. Cases studied include agreements that allocate the burden based on simple allocation rules found in current national proposals and alternatives that specify national equity goals for both developing and developed countries. The analysis shows the ambitious nature of this reduction goal: universal participation will be necessary and the welfare costs can be both substantial and wildly different across regions depending on the allocation method chosen. The choice of allocation rule is shown to affect the magnitude of the task and required emissions price because of income effects. If developing countries are fully compensated for the costs of mitigation then the welfare costs to developed countries, if shared equally, are around 2% in 2020, rising to some 10% in 2050, and the implied financial transfers are large—over $400 billion per year in 2020 and rising to around$3 trillion in 2050. For success in dealing with the climate threat any negotiation of long-term goals and paths to achievement need to be grounded in a full understanding of the substantial amounts at stake.Development of the EPPA model used has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. National Science Foundation, and by a consortium of industry and foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change