Accounting for India’s Forest Wealth

In this paper, we account for forest wealth in India. Changes in the timber and carbon wealth embodied in these forests are related to important green national accounting aggregates such as genuine saving and the change in wealth per capita. Important accounting issues include the timing of carbon releases, which occur when forests are disturbed, as well as the valuation of these releases. Our empirical findings suggest that while Indias forest wealth is substantial, net changes in this wealth are arguably not so large at least in relation to GNP. However, when viewed in the context of the wealth-diluting effects of population growth this implies a far larger additional savings effort is required to cover the (net) loss in forest values than otherwise appears to be the case. Finally, we examine ways in which the accounting approach that we adopt can be reconciled with approaches which stress conserving forest wealth.Forestry, India, Wealth, wealth-diluting effects

Measuring global human progress: are we on the right track?

As a metric for economic progress, gross domestic product (GDP) has been criticized for hiding the destruction of natural capital and failing to improve happiness/human well-being. Consequently, many studies unanimously argued for a beyond GDP approach, which led to a proliferation of ensuing metrics. However, the proliferation leads to confusion as it complicates matters for policymakers looking to these metrics to inform coherent development objectives and plans. Our article aims to assess theoretical and empirical efforts to measure human progress based on these notions of well-being and sustainability and critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We explore systematic trends in indicator activity in the related literature and, in doing so, organize our discussion around the distinct and prominent perspectives that can be identified. We illustrate with a case study on India how divergent matrices, though not beyond comprehension, increase the complexity

Distributional issues in natural capital accounting: an application to land ownership and ecosystem services in Scotland

Accounting for ecosystems is increasingly central to natural capital accounting. What is missing from this, however, is an answer to questions about how natural capital is distributed. That is, who consumes ecosystem services and who owns or manages the underlying asset(s) that give rise to ecosystem services. In this paper, we examine the significance of the ownership of land on which ecosystem assets (or ecosystem types) is located in the context of natural capital accounting. We illustrate this in an empirical application to two ecosystem services and a range of ecosystem types and land ownership in Scotland, a context in which land reform debates are longstanding. Our results indicate the relative importance of private land in ecosystem service supply, rather than land held by the public sector. We find relative concentration of ownership for land providing comparatively high amounts of carbon sequestration. For air pollution removal, however, the role of smaller to medium sized, mostly privately owned, land holdings closer to urban settlements becomes more prominent. The contributions in this paper, we argue, represent important first steps in anticipating distributional impacts of natural capital (and related) policy in natural capital accounts as well as connecting these frameworks to broader concerns about wealth disparities across and within countries

Sustaining wealth: simulating a sovereign wealth fund for the UK’s oil and gas resources, past and future

Exhaustible resources and the revenues they generate present a number of broad problems for macroeconomic management. For example, tax revenues can be large and highly volatile, and the stream of revenues is finite. An increasing number of countries now view resource funds and/or fiscal rules for resource revenues as the answer to these challenges. In this paper, we explore the consequences for the UK if past revenues arising from the depletion of subsoil assets had been channelled into a sovereign wealth fund. We show that had a decision been made to establish such a fund in 1975, this could have been substantial in size by 2018 (about GBP 354 billion) and, moreover, would have had a number of benefits such as a reduction in volatility of resource revenues flowing to the Treasury. Crucially, the fund’s value would have substantially boosted the size of the government balance sheet, yielding corresponding fiscal benefits. We argue this missed opportunity is underlined further by considering the current debate about shale gas development in the UK. Notwithstanding considerable un- certainties, favourable and optimistic projections for key parameters are required for any shale-based fund to match what we simulate based on past experience for conventional subsoil assets

Special issue on applied environmental economics : Editors’ introduction

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sustainability, natural capital and climate change in Kuwait

We explore the challenge of sustainability in Kuwait and, in doing so, explore three distinct (but related) questions surrounding this. First, we assess development prospects in Kuwait using metrics of national wealth and natural capital. Secondly, we construct a comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory for Kuwait. Third, we provide a risk assessment for Kuwait of climate change impacts by combining an economic model with different climate scenarios relevant to Kuwait’s food security. Our findings on wealth accounting and our GHG inventory point to the importance of strengthening, and extending, statistical systems in Kuwait. The benefits of this would be improved sustainability benchmarks (against which official national savings commitments can be evaluated) and a more robust basis for judging GHG reduction strategies (given our finding that existing data sources underestimate Kuwait emissions). Moreover, understanding climate risks for Kuwait is crucial to prudent assessment of development prospects. We show that food security is a useful starting point for this and investigate the impacts of changing world food prices on the cost of imports and scope for substituting for domestic activities in both the food. production and processing sector

Climate change and food security: assessing the prospect for Kuwait using an economy-wide model

This study is concerned with food security effects of global warming in Kuwait. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) approach to monitor impacts of human activities on climate change has essentially remained top-down. Hence, it fallen out of favour among end user communities. In this procedure, the needs of policymakers at national scale have been peripheral. Kuwait's food security is a good illustration of this. The study is implemented by applying a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model for Kuwait. The model was calibrated on Kuwaiti data to examine food security impacts of the five Shared Socio-economic Pathways. The simulation results indicate asymmetrical impacts on Kuwait's agriculture and food processing industries. Arid countries would benefit by enhancing national capacities to assess food security implications of global warming scenarios

Trade in'virtual carbon': empirical results and implications for policy

The fact that developing countries do not have carbon emission caps under the Kyoto Protocol has led to the current interest in high-income countries in border taxes on the"virtual"carbon content of imports. The authors use Global Trade Analysis Project data and input-output analysis to estimate the flows of virtual carbon implicit in domestic production technologies and the pattern of international trade. The results present striking evidence on the wide variation in the carbon-intensiveness of trade across countries, with major developing countries being large net exporters of virtual carbon. The analysis suggests that tax rates of $50 per ton of virtual carbon could lead to very substantial effective tariff rates on the exports of the most carbon-intensive developing nations.Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases,Environmental Economics&Policies,Climate Change Economics,Economic Theory&Research,Environment and Energy Efficiency

Environmental valuation and benefit-cost analysis in U.K. policy

This paper presents an evaluation of the use of environmental valuation – techniques to assign monetary values to environmental impacts of policies and projects, especially nonmarket impacts – in U.K. policy. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the debate, more generally, of the use and influence of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in national policy processes such as Impact Assessment. Specifically, our contribution in this paper is two-fold. First, we identify a number of trends that have characterized U.K. policy use of environmental valuation over the past two or so decades. While this has notably involved development of “sharable values” allowing more widespread uptake, it also seems that different branches of government have developed different traditions of use adding nuance to what, on the face of it, is otherwise a shared endeavor. Second, we evaluate the extent to which the use of environmental valuation can be said to have influenced policy decisions and the degree to which this is embedded by evolving policy processes. As such, we discuss two areas of environmental policy – water quality improvements and natural capital – which have entailed either substantial use of environmental valuation either in determining specific policy and investment project options or where this has helped shape the broader policy agenda. Our evaluation is not exhaustive; nor do our findings suggest that environmental valuation and BCA are necessarily the dominant driver of decisions, as we discuss. However, in recognizing this, we argue it is also important to consider a number of established or evolving cultural and legal institutional processes which broadly appear to support our assessment of such cases