A Policy Maker’s Guide to Designing Payments for Ecosystem Services

Over the past five years, there has been increasing interest around the globe in payment schemes for the provision of ecosystem services, such as water purification, carbon sequestration, flood control, etc. Written for an Asian Development Bank project in China, this report provides a user-friendly guide to designing payments for the provision of ecosystem services. Part I explains the different types of ecosystem services, different ways of assessing their value, and why they are traditionally under-protected by law and policy. This is followed by an analysis of when payments for services are a preferable approach to other policy instruments. Part II explains the design issues underlying payments for services. These include identification of the service as well as potential buyers and sellers, the level of service needed, payment timing, payment type, and risk allocation. Part II contains a detailed analysis of the different types of payment mechanisms, ranging from general subsidy and certification to mitigation and offset payments. Part III explores the challenges to designing a payment scheme. These include the ability to monitor service provision, secure property rights, perverse incentives, supporting institutions, and poverty alleviation

Climate Change Meets the Law of the Horse

The climate change policy debate has only recently turned its full attention to adaptation - how to address the impacts of climate change we have already begun to experience and that will likely increase over time. Legal scholars have in turn begun to explore how the many different fields of law will and should respond. During this nascent period, one overarching question has gone unexamined: how will the legal system as a whole organize around climate change adaptation? Will a new distinct field of climate change adaptation law and policy emerge, or will legal institutions simply work away at the problem through unrelated, duly self-contained fields, as in the famous Law of the Horse? This Article is the first to examine that question comprehensively, to move beyond thinking about the law and climate change adaptation to consider the law of climate change adaptation. Part I of the Article lays out our methodological premises and approach. Using a model we call Stationarity Assessment, Part I explores how legal fields are structured and sustained based on assumptions about the variability of natural, social, and economic conditions, and how disruptions to that regime of variability can lead to the emergence of new fields of law and policy. Case studies of environmental law and environmental justice demonstrate the model’s predictive power for the formation of new distinct legal regimes. Part II applies the Stationarity Assessment model to the topic of climate change adaptation, using a case study of a hypothetical coastal region and the potential for climate change impacts to disrupt relevant legal doctrines and institutions. We find that most fields of law appear capable of adapting effectively to climate change. In other words, without some active intervention, we expect the law and policy of climate change adaptation to follow the path of the Law of the Horse - a collection of fields independently adapting to climate change - rather than organically coalescing into a new distinct field. Part III explores why, notwithstanding this conclusion, it may still be desirable to seek a different trajectory. Focusing on the likelihood of systemic adaptation decisions with perverse, harmful results, we identify the potential benefits offered by intervening to shape a new and distinct field of climate change adaptation law and policy. Part IV then identifies the contours of such a field, exploring the distinct purposes of reducing vulnerability, ensuring resiliency, and safeguarding equity. These features provide the normative policy components for a law of climate change adaptation that would be more than just a Law of the Horse. This new field would not replace or supplant any existing field, however, as environmental law did with regard to nuisance law, and it would not be dominated by substantive doctrine. Rather, like the field of environmental justice, this new legal regime would serve as a holistic overlay across other fields to ensure more efficient, effective, and just climate change adaptation solutions

Host Genes Related to Paneth Cells and Xenobiotic Metabolism Are Associated with Shifts in Human Ileum-Associated Microbial Composition

The aim of this study was to integrate human clinical, genotype, mRNA microarray and 16 S rRNA sequence data collected on 84 subjects with ileal Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis or control patients without inflammatory bowel diseases in order to interrogate how host-microbial interactions are perturbed in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Ex-vivo ileal mucosal biopsies were collected from the disease unaffected proximal margin of the ileum resected from patients who were undergoing initial intestinal surgery. Both RNA and DNA were extracted from the mucosal biopsy samples. Patients were genotyped for the three major NOD2 variants (Leufs1007, R702W, and G908R) and the ATG16L1T300A variant. Whole human genome mRNA expression profiles were generated using Agilent microarrays. Microbial composition profiles were determined by 454 pyrosequencing of the V3–V5 hypervariable region of the bacterial 16 S rRNA gene. The results of permutation based multivariate analysis of variance and covariance (MANCOVA) support the hypothesis that host mucosal Paneth cell and xenobiotic metabolism genes play an important role in host microbial interactions

Expression of two barley proteinase inhibitors in tomato promotes endogenous defensive response and enhances resistance to Tuta absoluta

[EN] Background: For as long as 350 million years, plants and insects have coexisted and developed a set of relationships which affect both organisms at different levels. Plants have evolved various morphological and biochemical adaptations to cope with herbivores attacks. However, Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae) has become the major pest threatening tomato crops worldwide and without the appropriated management it can cause production losses between 80 to 100%. Results: The aim of this study was to investigate the in vivo effect of a serine proteinase inhibitor (BTI-CMe) and a cysteine proteinase inhibitor (Hv-CPI2) from barley on this insect and to examine the effect their expression has on tomato defensive response. We found that larvae fed on the double transgenic plants showed a notable reduction in weight. Moreover, only 56% of the larvae reached the adult stage. The emerged adults showed wings deformities and reduced fertility. We also investigated the effect of proteinase inhibitors ingestion on the insect digestive enzymes. Our results showed a decrease in larval trypsin activity. Transgenes expression had no harmful effect on Nesidiocoris tenuis (Reuter) (Heteroptera: Miridae), a predator of Tuta absoluta, despite transgenic tomato plants attracted the mirid. We also found that barley cystatin expression promoted plant defense by inducing the expression of the tomato endogenous wound inducible Proteinase inhibitor 2 (Pin2) gene, increasing the production of glandular trichomes and altering the emission of volatile organic compounds. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the usefulness of the co-expression of different proteinase inhibitors for the enhancement of plant resistance to Tuta absoluta.This work was partly supported by grants BIO2013-40747-R and AGL2014-55616-C3 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)Hamza, R.; Pérez-Hedo, M.; Urbaneja, A.; Rambla Nebot, JL.; Granell Richart, A.; Gaddour, K.; Beltran Porter, JP.... (2018). Expression of two barley proteinase inhibitors in tomato promotes endogenous defensive response and enhances resistance to Tuta absoluta. BMC Plant Biology. 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-018-1240-6S18Oerke EC. Crop losses to pests. J Agric Sci. 2005;144(01):31.Jouanin L, Bonadé-Bottino M, Girard C, Morrot G, Giband M. Transgenic plants for insect resistance. Plant Sci. 1998;131(1):1–11.Markwick NP, Docherty LC, Phung MM, Lester MT, Murray C, Yao JL, Mitra DS, Cohen D, Beuning LL, Kutty-Amma S, et al. 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In Defense of Regulatory Peer Review

article published in law reviewThe debate over application of peer review to the regulatory decisions of administrative agencies has heated up in the last year. Part of the larger and controversial sound science movement, mandating peer review for certain types of agency decisions has recently been championed by the White House and proponents in Congress. Indeed, this past January the Office of Management and Budget finalized guidelines requiring peer review for large classes of agency activities. These initiatives have not gone unchallenged, and a fierce debate has resulted between those who claim peer review will strengthen the scientific basis of agency decisions and those who contend that peer review will politicize and burden agency activities. While peer review is fast becoming an integral and controversial part of agency behavior, it has received remarkably little scholarly attention. This article presents a comprehensive and current examination of peer review and is supported by new empirical data. To help sharpen our analysis, we conducted a nationwide survey of environmental law practitioners - lawyers who regularly practice on behalf of or before agencies with substantial regulatory missions. Most advocates of regulatory peer review argue that agencies regularly overstate the extent of scientific support for their policy decisions and that peer review will help correct that problem. Its critics contend it will unduly slow down agency decision-making. Our survey results suggest that those who actually practice regulatory law believe both of those propositions are likely. The challenge, therefore, is how to derive the benefits of regulatory peer review while minimizing its costs. Based on our survey, our evaluation of research from a wide variety of fields, and our own experience, which includes co-author J.B. Ruhl's tenure as the lawyer on a National Academy of Sciences committee that conducted the first high-profile peer review under the Endangered Species Act, we believe that peer review can assist the transparency and legitimacy of agency decisions by sharpening the line between scientific support and policy judgment in agency decision-making. Yet neither we nor anyone else who has entered the debate can say whether this benefit outweighs the costs that would result from adding such a procedure to agency processes, for the simple reason that nobody has produced robust empirical evidence to answer three basic questions - do agencies regularly overstate the scientific support for their decisions; if so, does this practice make a difference in terms of the policy merits of their decisions; and if so, does regulatory peer review provide a cost-effective means of correcting the practice? This gap in empirical data points to our proposed solution. We argue that regulatory peer review should take advantage of another practice of science - random sampling - in order to serve a diagnostic function in addition to its quality improvement function. By applying rigorous peer review to the science component of a small number of selected regulatory decisions, regulatory peer review could (a) help in defining the scope of the problem of agency overstatement of scientific support and (b) induce agencies to pay more attention to clearly articulating where science ends and policy judgment begins in the justification of their decisions. We provide the details of the proposal in the closing section of the manuscript

Mozart and the Red Queen: The Problem of Regulatory Accretion in the Administrative State

Since the New Deal, and even before, regulatory law has grown relentlessly ever more massive, detailed, and encompassing. The sentiment, "there's too much law", surely rings true on a daily basis to both practitioners and regulated parties, but there is remarkably little scholarship delving beneath this glib cliche. Scholarly elaborations on "optimal precision" and "mud and crystals" explore the design of individual regulations, and are valuable in that sense, but they do not examine the systemic implications of regulatory accretion. As easy as it is to find quips in the literature decrying the accumulation of "too many rules", one searches in vain for principled analysis of the problem and its solutions. We argue that regulatory accretion warrants serious consideration in its own right. Accretion presents a different kind of problem than the traditional critiques of inefficiency, complexity, or democratic accountability. It creates a separate type of challenge that has not, and will not, be addressed adequately by many of the entries in the current parade of proposed reforms. Part I of the Article describes the phenomenon of regulatory accretion from several perspectives. We define a range of metrics, showing that over the last 50 years, regulatory growth has been the rule rather than the exception using virtually any measure. We also show why regulatory law theory suggests we should expect accretion to be the dominant dynamic in regulatory systems, overwhelming any forces of regulatory "erosion". We close Part I with evidence that the regulatory community - both regulators and the regulated - perceives regulatory accretion as a significant factor in the prevalence of noncompliance and the fulfillment of policy objectives. Part II lays out our theory of how regulatory accretion, even of perfect rules, increases noncompliance by changing the very quality of how the regulatory system operates. The conventional view is that compliance is simply a matter of investing the appropriate level of resources toward gathering the information needed to perform the tasks required to comply (information burden), and then performing them (effort burden). Accretion of rules adds a third challenge to compliance, however, which we call system burdens. These burdens arise from the operation of the collection of rules as a system. Overlooked in regulatory law theory, system burdens can confound compliance even when sufficient resources are devoted to meeting all the effort and information burdens. In Part III we explore the practical implications of system burdens. There is always bound to be some residual or background noncompliance, what regulatory law theory calls "slippage". Additional investment in enforcement and compliance behavior may chip away at this residual, but will not do so with equal success across the three forms of compliance burdens. Noncompliance stemming from system burdens will be much harder to resolve than will noncompliance associated with effort and information, because it is not associated with discrete rules. In regulatory fields that experience high levels of system burdens, such as environmental law, there will be high rates of noncompliance and, more important, compliance itself may be difficult to translate into a tangible policy goal "payoff". This combination can lead the regulated community to question the legitimacy of the system in general, and value compliance behavior less. In Part IV we offer observations about how regulatory law can respond to the problem of accretion. We describe the fallacy of rule-specific solutions, positing instead that any meaningful response must tap into system level behaviors. Because of the focus in regulatory law and theory on efficiency, clarity, and accountability, conventional policy approaches generally describe problems in rule-specific terms. Although the number of rules in the administrative state may trigger system burdens that interfere with the very goals of regulation, the solution is not, it cannot be, to reduce the number of rules. Rather, as we go on to explain, the best strategy for managing system burdens is to evolve with them. Rather than myopic attention to each rule, the focus should be on building adaptive structures in the administrative system itself, so as to take advantage of the system-wide nature of large rule-based regimes. We show that the emerging body of literature on regulatory reform adopts this approach through its focus on market-based, information-based, and performance-based regulatory instruments. Our model of regulatory accretion offers original insights into not only why deregulation offers little promise in addressing system burdens but, more important, a central principle on which to design the next generation of regulation

The Practice and Policy of Environmental Law. 2nd Edition

More than any other environmental law survey casebook, this book conveys the substantive material in real-world practice contexts, with significant chapters on permitting and rulemaking, enforcement, compliance counseling, business transactions, and private litigation. Changes made for the second edition provide a more streamlined and coordinated presentation of the major environmental laws and programs.https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_books/1071/thumbnail.jp