A global analysis of the break-even prices to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide via forest plantation and avoided deforestation

A cross-country assessment of the cost of carbon sequestration in the forest sector is needed for planning and achieving climate commitments, such as the Paris Agreement, at global, regional, national, or sectoral scales. We provide a global and bottom-up assessment of the break-even carbon price to undertake forest plantation and forest conservation at a country level for 166 nations. We construct a global dataset of key cost factors, examine their global distributions, and undertake a cross-country assessment of cost differences with alternative forest programs (plantation and conservation). Our bottom-up approach is also calibrated to sub-national case studies to investigate the average cost of forest carbon in Australian states and Canadian provinces. We find that the break-even carbon price varies by countries, locations within a country, forest programs and co-benefits. Our estimates provide an approximation of the cost-effectiveness of forest carbon sequestration relative to non-forest climate mitigation approaches

Reforming the Eastern Australian gas market

10.1002/app5.244Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies53641-65

India's depleting groundwater: When science meets policy

10.1002/app5.269Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies61108-12

Environmental offsets, resilience and cost-effective conservation

10.1098/rsos.140521Royal Society Open Science2714052

Ex ante evaluation of the costs and benefits of individual transferable quotas: A case-study of seven Australian commonwealth fisheries

Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) have been introduced in a number of different countries, including Australia. Using seven Australian commonwealth fisheries the paper undertakes an ex ante cost-benefit analysis whether to introduce ITQs into these fisheries. The analysis uses five cost-benefit criteria, and in particular the gross value of production (GVP), to evaluate whether ITQs should be introduced or not. For fisheries where the net benefits do not currently justify ITQs, a pathway is provided to improve management outcomes with the use of individual transferable efforts units (ITEs).Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) Individual transferable effort (ITEs) units Australian fisheries

Resilience, Decision-making, and Environmental Water Releases

10.1029/2018EF000879Earth's Future66777-79

Development impeding institutions : The political economy of Haiti

The paper develops the concepts of development impeding institutions and exclusive development, and examines their interrelationship. Haiti is used as a case study to illustrate how the two can interact to form a "trap" in which exploitive institutions and severe inequities become mutually reinforcing. The implications of this institutional approach provide a strong justification for development policies which target institutional reform and empoiverment jointly

Collaborative flood and drought risk management in the Upper Iskar Basin, Bulgaria

International audienceThis chapter outlines a recent collaborative water management project in the Upper Iskar Basin in Bulgaria, Europe, entitled ‘Living with Floods and Droughts’. Based on a participatory modelling methodology, the project aimed to build the collective capacity of the region's stakeholders to manage flood and drought risks. The chapter starts by presenting the regional water management context and how the project was designed to manage some of the key issues identified by the region's stakeholders. This is followed by a description of the implemented participatory process, including descriptions of the methods used and analyses of the content elicited and examined in the process. Lessons learnt from evaluation of the participatory process are presented and discussed, along with some considerations for future initiatives. Regional water management context Extreme climatic conditions such as large floods and extended drought periods have increasingly occurred over recent years in Bulgaria, including in the Upper Iskar Basin in the region of Sofia. Since the early 1990s, serious water shortages have led to rationing of water, and there were severe floods in 2005 and 2006. There is now debate on whether these ‘new’ conditions are a consequence of global climate change or merely normal climate variability (Knight et al., 2004; Kundzewicz and Schellnhuber, 2004). Water management in the Upper Iskar Basin presents many challenges, not just due to extreme flood and drought events or seemingly natural hazards, but also due to the transitory nature of the country's social and political spheres following the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 and the need to deal with its legacy of heavy industry, widespread pollution, and infrastructural system issues