Simulating the Impact on the Local Economy of Alternative Management Scenarios for Natural Areas

This working paper estimates the impact on the local economy of the High Garda Natural Park of alternative management scenarios for the West Garda Regional Forest. The local economy is specialized in tourist services and strongly linked to the tourist presence and their level of expenditure. We wish to investigate the effects of the participative management strategy, which takes into account users preferences and the non-participative strategy, using the SAM multiplier analysis. The local SAM has been constructed considering three sectors: agriculture, tourism and a third aggregate sector including all the other activities. The resident population has been divided into two categories: residents employed in the tourist sector and the remaining resident population. The SAM analysis shows that the accounting representation of the local economy is meaningful and that the participative program, if chosen by the central regional management, would be the most desirable program also at the local level

A continental-scale hydro-economic model for integrating water-energy-land nexus solutions

This study presents the development of a new bottom‐up large‐scale hydro‐economic model, Extended Continental‐scale Hydro‐economic Optimization (ECHO), that works at a sub‐basin scale over a continent. The strength of ECHO stems from the integration of a detailed representation of local hydrological and technological constraints with regional and global policies, while accounting for the feedbacks between water, energy and agricultural sectors. In this study, ECHO has been applied over Africa as a case study with the aim of demonstrating the benefits of this integrated hydro‐economic modeling framework. Results of this framework are overall consistent with previous findings evaluating the cost of water supply and adaptation to global changes in Africa. Moreover, results provide critical assessments of future investment needs in both supply and demand side water management options, economic implications of contrasting future socio‐economic and climate change scenarios, and the potential tradeoffs among economic and environmental objectives. Overall, this study demonstrates the capacity of ECHO to address challenging research questions examining the sustainability of water supply, and the impacts of water management on energy and food sectors and vice versa. As such, we propose ECHO as useful tool for water‐related scenario analysis and management options evaluation

Research priorities for global food security under extreme events

International audienc

Social Carrying Capacity of Mass Tourist Sites: Theoretical and Practical Issues about its Measurement

Congestion is an important management problem at mass tourist sites. This essay focuses on the social carrying capacity (SCC) of a tourist site as indicator of residents and visitors perception of crowding, intended as the maximum number of visitors (MNV) tolerated. In case of conflict between the residents MNV tolerated and the visitors MNV tolerated, the policy-maker has to mediate. We consider the case in which the residents SCC is lower than the visitors SCC, and the site SCC is the result of a compromise between these two aspects of the SCC. This can be measured by making reference to two criteria of choice: the utility maximisation criterion and the voting rule. The use of one method rather than the other depends on the data available about the individual preferences on crowding. Assuming that individual preferences are known, a maximisation model for the computation of the site SCC is conceived. It represents the case in which the residents SCC is the limiting factor. The site SCC is intended as the number of visitors which maximises the social welfare function. Because a local policy-maker maximises the welfare of residents, in this model visitors are represented by those residents whose welfare wholly depends on the tourism sector, while the social costs due to crowding are borne by those residents who are partially or totally independent from tourism. Nevertheless, in practice, the individual preferences about crowding are not always known. In this case, the MNV tolerated can be computed by applying the majority voting rule. It is shown that, under certain conditions, the optimum number of visitors, obtained through a maximisation model, is equal to the MNV tolerated by the majority of voters

Risk Management of Daily Tourist Tax Revenues for the Maldives

International tourism is the principal economic activity for Small Island Tourism Economies (SITEs). There is a strongly predictable component of international tourism, specifically the government revenue received from taxes on international tourists, but it is difficult to predict the number of international tourist arrivals which, in turn, determines the magnitude of tax revenue receipts. A framework is presented for risk management of daily tourist tax revenues for the Maldives, which is a unique SITE because it relies entirely on tourism for its economic and social development. As these receipts from international tourism are significant financial assets to the economies of SITEs, the time-varying volatility of international tourist arrivals and their growth rate is analogous to the volatility (or dynamic risk) in financial returns. In this paper, the volatility in the levels and growth rates of daily international tourist arrivals is investigated

Mitigation Strategies and Costs of Climate Protection: The Effects of ETC in the Hybrid Model MIND

MIND is a hybrid model incorporating several energy related sectors in an endogenous growth model of the world economy. This model structure allows a better understanding of the linkages between the energy sectors and the macro-economic environment. We perform a sensitivity analysis and parameter studies to improve the understanding of the economic mechanisms underlying opportunity costs and the optimal mix of mitigation options. Parameters representing technological change that permeates the entire economy have a strong impact on both the opportunity costs of climate protection and on the optimal mitigation strategies, e.g. parameters in the macro-economic environment and in the extraction sector. Sector-specific energy technology parameters change the portfolio of mitigation options but have only modest effects on opportunity costs, e.g. learning rate of the renewable energy technologies. We conclude that feedback loops between the macro-economy and the energy sectors are crucial for the determination of opportunity costs and mitigation strategies