Multi-Market Trading for Cooperative Resource Management: An Application to Water Pollution and Fisheries

Increasingly, environmental problems are recognized to involve linkages across multiple environmental variables (e.g., pollution and a fishery). Prior work on managing these complex, linked systems generally focuses on efficiency rather than implementation. However, implementation is important and will generally involve changing human behaviors within the multiple economic sectors that impact upon the multiple environmental variables. Tradable permit markets are generally seen as a coordinating mechanism, within a particular regulated sector, that enhances efficiency by incentivizing agents to respond to behavioral choices of others within the sector. However, prior work stops short of coordinating behaviors across multiple sectors for cases where society benefits from regulation in both sectors and one sector harms the other. We analyze a multi-sector permit market involving both the externality-generating sector and the affected sector. This multi-sector market provides a mechanism for agents in one sector to respond to environmental behaviors made within the other sector. Moreover, unlike traditional permit markets in which the regulated externality sector incurs only costs, we show that the multi-sector market generates efficiency gains that may be redistributed using appropriate allocations of initial endowments. Accordingly, the multi-sector market may generate gains that benefit both sectors, resulting in a win-win outcome for both sectors. We use a simple example of a polluted fishery to illustrate the approach.Permit trading, fisheries, pollution, Shapley values, bioeconomics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The Coordination and Design of Point-Nonpoint Trading Programs and Agri-Environmental Policies

Agricultural agencies have long offered agri-environmental payments that are inadequate to achieve water quality goals, and many state water quality agencies are considering point-nonpoint trading to achieve the needed pollution reductions. This analysis considers both targeted and nontargeted agrienvironmental payment schemes, along with a trading program which is not spatially targeted. The degree of improved performance among these policies is found to depend on whether the programs are coordinated or not, whether double-dipping (i.e., when farmers are paid twice-once by each program-to undertake particular pollution control actions) is allowed, and whether the agri-environmental payments are targeted. Under coordination, efficiency gains only occur with double-dipping, so that both programs jointly influence farmers' marginal decisions. Without coordination, doubledipping may increase or decrease efficiency, depending on how the agri-environmental policy is targeted. Finally, double-dipping may not solely benefit farmers, but can result in a transfer of agricultural subsidies to point sources.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Agri-environmental Policies for the Chesapeake Bay

Water Quality, Nonpoint Source Pollution, Policy Instrument, Chesapeake Bay, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q25, Q58,

THE VALUE OF ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC INFORMATION IN WATER QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/25/03.Environmental Economics and Policy,

THE DESIGN AND COMPARATIVE ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE OF ALTERNATIVE SECOND-BEST POINT/NONPOINT TRADING MARKETS

There is considerable interest in the use of pollution trading between point and nonpoint sources to improve the cost-effectiveness of water pollution control, but little literature to guide the design of trading systems involving nonpoint sources. We explore the design of two types of trading systems that would allow trading among and between point and nonpoint sources.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Highly Sideophile Element Abundance Constraints on the Nature of the Late Accretionary Histories of Earth, Moon and Mars

The highly siderophile elements (HSE) include Re, Os, Ir, Ru, Pt and Pd. These elements are initially nearly-quantitatively stripped from planetary silicate mantles during core segregation. They then may be re-enriched in mantles via continued accretion sans continued core segregation. This suite of elements and its included long-lived radiogenic isotopes systems (Re-187 (right arrow) Os-187; Pt-190 (right arrow) Os-186) can potentially be used to fingerprint the characteristics of late accreted materials. The fingerprints may ultimately be useful to constrain the prior nebular history of the dominant late accreted materials, and to compare the proportion and genesis of late accretionary materials added to the inner planets. The past ten years have seen considerable accumulation of isotopic and compositional data for HSE present in the Earth's mantle, lunar mantle and impact melt breccias, and Martian meteorites. Here we review some of these data and consider the broader implications of the compiled data

Observations of Milky Way Dwarf Spheroidal galaxies with the Fermi-LAT detector and constraints on Dark Matter models

We report on the observations of 14 dwarf spheroidal galaxies with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope taken during the first 11 months of survey mode operations. The Fermi telescope provides a new opportunity to test particle dark matter models through the expected gamma-ray emission produced by pair annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the largest galactic substructures predicted by the cold dark matter scenario, are attractive targets for such indirect searches for dark matter because they are nearby and among the most extreme dark matter dominated environments. No significant gamma-ray emission was detected above 100 MeV from the candidate dwarf galaxies. We determine upper limits to the gamma-ray flux assuming both power-law spectra and representative spectra from WIMP annihilation. The resulting integral flux above 100 MeV is constrained to be at a level below around 10^-9 photons cm^-2 s^-1. Using recent stellar kinematic data, the gamma-ray flux limits are combined with improved determinations of the dark matter density profile in 8 of the 14 candidate dwarfs to place limits on the pair annihilation cross-section of WIMPs in several widely studied extensions of the standard model. With the present data, we are able to rule out large parts of the parameter space where the thermal relic density is below the observed cosmological dark matter density and WIMPs (neutralinos here) are dominantly produced non-thermally, e.g. in models where supersymmetry breaking occurs via anomaly mediation. The gamma-ray limits presented here also constrain some WIMP models proposed to explain the Fermi and PAMELA e^+e^- data, including low-mass wino-like neutralinos and models with TeV masses pair-annihilating into muon-antimuon pairs. (Abridged)Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ, Corresponding authors: J. Cohen-Tanugi, C. Farnier, T.E. Jeltema, E. Nuss, and S. Profum

Long-term monitoring of the TeV emission from Mrk 421 with the ARGO-YBJ experiment

ARGO-YBJ is an air shower detector array with a fully covered layer of resistive plate chambers. It is operated with a high duty cycle and a large field of view. It continuously monitors the northern sky at energies above 0.3 TeV. In this paper, we report a long-term monitoring of Mrk 421 over the period from 2007 November to 2010 February. This source was observed by the satellite-borne experiments Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and Swift in the X-ray band. Mrk 421 was especially active in the first half of 2008. Many flares are observed in both X-ray and gamma-ray bands simultaneously. The gamma-ray flux observed by ARGO-YBJ has a clear correlation with the X-ray flux. No lag between the X-ray and gamma-ray photons longer than 1 day is found. The evolution of the spectral energy distribution is investigated by measuring spectral indices at four different flux levels. Hardening of the spectra is observed in both X-ray and gamma-ray bands. The gamma-ray flux increases quadratically with the simultaneously measured X-ray flux. All these observational results strongly favor the synchrotron self-Compton process as the underlying radiative mechanism.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figure