The Economic Value of Environmental Services on Indigenous-Held Lands in Australia

Australians could be willing to pay from $878m to$2b per year for Indigenous people to provide environmental services. This is up to 50 times the amount currently invested by government. This result was derived from a nationwide survey that included a choice experiment in which 70% of the 927 respondents were willing to contribute to a conservation fund that directly pays Indigenous people to carry out conservation activities. Of these the highest values were found for benefits that are likely to improve biodiversity outcomes, carbon emission reductions and improved recreational values. Of the activities that could be undertaken to provide the services, feral animal control attracted the highest level of support followed by coastal surveillance, weed control and fire management. Respondents' decisions to pay were not greatly influenced by the additional social benefits that can arise for Indigenous people spending time on country and providing the services, although there was approval for reduced welfare payments that might arise

Bark: Use, Management and Commerce in Africa

ln his introduction, Tony Cunningham invites the reader “to get to know trees – and the landscapes they characterize – through a botany that uses all your senses.” Science offers a succinct description of baobab tree bark, for example, but those who accept Cunningham’s invitation will also observe it “gleaming silvery-gray in the morning sun; the sweet taste of the inner bark (bast), chewed by elephants and thirsty people, or the white edible fruit pulp, tart on the tongue.” More effective conservation and resource management need good science, of course; but the emotional ties forged by direct experience, Cunningham says, are what allow us to augment the ability of science to induce policymakers and the general public to pay attention to what we need to do to keep bark safe

Communication and competition in environmental studies

Environmental studies, Environmental sciences, Forestry, Geology, Geography, Signs, Symbols, Science of communications,

From the environmental debt to the environmental loan: trends and future challenges for intergenerational discounting

It is well known that the incorporation of the intergenerational equity objective has turned the traditional Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) approach into an obsolete tool for the evaluation of certain types of projects, particularly those exhibiting many environmental externalities and those whose effects extend throughout a long period of time. Two main changes are taking place in CBA in order to adapt this methodology to the sustainable development paradigm: (a) the development of new tools for the economic valuation of environmental externalities that were traditionally left out of the analysis; and (b) an in-depth revision of the theoretical foundations underlying the traditional approaches to discounting, since the repercussions of decisions that are presently being debated will extend to a distant future (in some cases for centuries), whereas in the classical CBA, we deal with few decades at best. This paper aims at investigating the discounting operation in CBA, trying to summarize the main approaches available in the literature, with specific reference to the tools which allow future generations to be included in the analysis. In order to support the theoretical explanation, a real case study is analysed concerning the evaluation of a waste incinerator that has been constructed in the Province of Turin (Italy)