Combining revealed and stated preference methods to assess the private value of agrobiodiversity in Hungarian home gardens:

" Hungarian home gardens are small-scale farms managed by farm households using traditional management practices and family labor. They generate private benefits for farmers by enhancing diet quality and providing food when costs of transacting in local markets are high. Home gardens also generate public benefits for society by supporting long-term productivity advances in agriculture. In this paper, we estimate the private value to farmers of agrobiodiversity in home gardens. Building on the approach presented in EPTD Discussion Paper 117 (2004), we combine a stated preference approach (a choice experiment model) and a revealed preference approach (a discrete-choice, farm household model). Both models are based on random utility theory. To combine the models, primary data were collected from the same 239 farm households in three regions of Hungary. Combining approaches leads to a more efficient and robust estimation of the private value of agrobiodiversity in home gardens. Findings can be used to identify those farming communities, which would benefit most from agri-environmental schemes that support agrobiodiversity maintenance, at least public cost." Authors' abstractHome gardens, Small-scale farmers, Diet quality, Agricultural productivity, Agrobiodiversity, Household surveys, Private value, Choice experiment model, Farm household model, Revealed and stated preference methods,

Alternative Payment Vehicles in Contingent Valuation: The Case of Genetically Modified Foods

In this paper, a secondary consumer food survey is used to explore the role of the payment vehicle in contingent valuation. More specifically, the paper investigates the household willingness-to-pay in the UK for a GM and non-GM labelling program under two alternative payment vehicles: 1) a standard product tax, under which consumers must trade-off some of their personal income for the labelling program; and 2) a taxation reallocation scheme, whereby consumers must trade-off some amount of their household’s taxation money that is currently spent on other government-funded goods. Contrary to previous valuation research, the willingness-to-pay under each vehicle is not found to be statistically significantly different, suggesting that in the case study investigated here, the marginal values of private income and other public goods in the UK are approximately equal.Payment Vehicles; Contingent Valuation:

From ignorance to evidence? The use of programme evaluation in conservation: Evidence from a Delphi survey of conservation experts.

Persistent gaps in the evidence base regarding the performance of conservation policies has put pressure on the conservation policy field to adopt 'best practice' programme evaluation methods. These are methods that account for the counterfactual and are able to attribute causality between a conservation policy and specific observable environmental and social impacts. Despite this pressure, use of such methods continues to be rare. This paper uses the Delphi technique to provide the first systematic assessment of the reasons behind the apparent hesitation of conservation practitioners to adopt rigorous policy impact evaluation methods. The Delphi study consisted of two online questionnaires conducted on conservation policy experts. The results presented confirm that the use of rigorous impact evaluation methods in conservation is still very limited but this, crucially, is not because conservationists are ignorant of these methods or their advantages. In fact, considerable effort is being made to develop and improve evidence standards but these efforts have largely been thwarted by large financial and time related constraints that mean even elementary evaluations are hard to achieve. The results from this Delphi study allow us to provide more realistic recommendations on how impact evaluation studies can be more widely embraced and implemented in conservation practice.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.05.06

Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon

Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) has gained international attention over the past decade, as manifested in both United Nations policy discussions and hundreds of voluntary projects launched to earn carbon-offset credits. There are on-going discussions about whether and how projects should be integrated into national efforts under the Paris Agreement. One consideration is whether these projects have generated additional impacts over and above national policies and other conservation measures. To help inform these discussions, we compare the crediting baselines established ex-ante by voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon to counterfactuals constructed ex-post based on the quasi-experimental synthetic control method. We find that the crediting baselines assume consistently higher deforestation than counterfactual forest loss in synthetic control sites. This gap is partially due to decreased deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon during the early implementation phase of the REDD+ projects considered here. This suggests that forest carbon finance must strike a balance between controlling conservation investment risk and ensuring the environmental integrity of carbon emission offsets. Relatedly, our results point to the need to better align project- and national-level carbon accounting.German Federal Ministry of Education and Researc

Nuisance

Swanson y Kontoleon, a lo largo de este artículo, nos introducen al fenómeno llamado nuisance, y exponen y analizan las posturas y teorías más importantes respecto de este tema

High levels of air pollution reduce team performance

Teams play a key role in tackling complex societal challenges, such as developing vaccines or novel clean energy technologies. Yet, the effect of air pollution on team performance in non-routine problem-solving tasks is not well explored. Here, we document a sizable adverse effect of air pollution on team performance using data from 15,000 live escape games in London, United Kingdom. On high-pollution days, teams take on average 5% more time to solve a sequence of non-routine analytical tasks, which require collaborative skills analogous to those needed in the modern workplace. Negative effects are non-linear and only occur at high levels of air pollution, which are however commonplace in many developing countries. As team efforts predominantly drive innovation, high levels of air pollution may significantly hamper economic development

Alternative Payment Vehicles in Contingent Valuation: The Case of Genetically Modified Foods

In this paper, a secondary consumer food survey is used to explore the role of the payment vehicle in contingent valuation. More specifically, the paper investigates the household willingness-to-pay in the UK for a GM and non-GM labelling program under two alternative payment vehicles: 1) a standard product tax, under which consumers must trade-off some of their personal income for the labelling program; and 2) a taxation reallocation scheme, whereby consumers must trade-off some amount of their household’s taxation money that is currently spent on other government-funded goods. Contrary to previous valuation research, the willingness-to-pay under each vehicle is not found to be statistically significantly different, suggesting that in the case study investigated here, the marginal values of private income and other public goods in the UK are approximately equal

Chilling results: how explicit warm glow appeals fail to boost pro-environmental behaviour

We conducted a large-scale online experiment to examine whether climate change messaging can induce emotions and motivate pro-environmental action. We study how exposure to explicit positive (‘warm glow’) and negative (‘cold prickle’) emotional appeals as well as a traditional social norm communication affects pro-environmental action. We find that a simple call to take action to mitigate climate change is at least as affective as social norm message framing and emotional appeals. Our results highlight the difficulty of designing messaging interventions that effectively harness emotional incentives to promote pro-environmental action. Messages that explicitly emphasise the personal emotional benefits of contributing to environmental causes or the adverse emotional effects of not doing so seem to fall short of motivating pro-environmental effort. Our findings underscore the need for caution when incorporating emotive appeals into policy interventions

Chief for a Day: Elite Capture and Management Performance in a Field Experiment in Sierra Leone

We use a field experiment in Sierra Leone to examine how the identity of the manager influences rent seeking and performance in participatory development projects. Specifically, we vary the composition of a committee responsible for implementing a development project—local elites or randomly selected villagers. The design is unique in that it permits us to explore the effectiveness of two alternative local governance modalities and the extent of elite capture in community projects. We find little evidence that local elites capture project resources. We do observe they are better managers of development projects. Improved performance covaries with a proxy for power of the local chief.This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [N.W.O. Grants 453-10-001 and 45-14-001], the Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, and the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant ES/J017620/1]

Environmental Implications of Increased US Oil Production and Liberal Growth Agenda in Post -Paris Agreement Era

Contextualising on the internationally low oil prices era and historically high oil production in USA and refusal to honour the commitments under Paris Agreement (COP: 21), this study investigates the role of education, oil prices and natural resources on CO2 emissions and energy demand in the USA for the period of 1976-2016. In so doing, we employed a bounds testing approach to cointegration which also accounts for the structural breaks. Key findings suggest the presence of a long-run association between underlying variables. The abundance of natural resources and economic growth of the US economy seem to weigh on environmental quality by increasing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Oil prices show a negative association with energy consumption as well as carbon emissions suggesting that a low oil price regime can lead to an increase in carbon emissions and energy consumption. Interestingly, education seems to play an important role by reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, resultantly improving the US environmental quality. Our findings have profound environmental implications in terms of efforts to tackle climate change and meeting the Paris agreement (COP: 21) ambitions with reality and USA policy stance