Safe climate policy is affordable – 12 reasons

There is a widespread sense that a sufficiently stringent climate mitigation policy, that is, a considerable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to avoid extreme climate change, will come with very high economic costs for society. This is supported by many cost-benefit analyses (CBA) and policy cost assessments of climate policy. All of these, nevertheless, are based on debatable assumptions. This paper will argue instead that safe climate policy is not excessively expensive and is indeed cheaper than suggested by most current studies. To this end, climate CBA and policy cost assessments are critically evaluated, and as a replacement twelve complementary perspectives on the cost of climate policy are offered. © 2009 The Author(s)

The role of material/energy resources and dematerialization in economic growth theories

The nature of energy and material resources in an endogenous growth theory framework is clarified. This involves three modifications of the conventional theory. Firstly, multiple feedback mechanisms or “growth engines ” are identified. Secondly, a production function distinguishes between resource use, technical efficiency and value creation. Thirdly, the impact of the cost of production through demand on growth is accounted for. A formal model is analytically solved under a condition of a constant growth rate. Given model complexity, numerical experiments are performed as well, providing relevant insights to the academic and political debates on ‘environmental Kuznets curves’ and ‘dematerialization’

Sustainable nations: What do aggregate indexes tell us? Environment, development and sustainability

What is a 'sustainable nation' and how can we identify and rank 'sustainable nations?' Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Although several aggregate indexes have been proposed to answer such questions, comprehensive and internationally comparable data are not available for most of these. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indexes of sustainability: the World Bank's 'Genuine Savings' measure, the 'Ecological Footprint,' and the 'Environmental Sustainability Index.' These three indexes are available for a large number of countries and also seem to be the most influential among the aggregate indexes. This paper first discusses the main limitations and weaknesses of each of these indexes. Subsequently, it shows that rankings of sustainable nations and aggregate assessments of unsustainable world population and world GDP shares vary considerably among these indexes. This disagreement leads to suggestions for analysis and policy. One important insight is that climate change, arguable the most serious threat currently faced by humanity, is not or arbitrarily captured by the indexes. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

The Role of Land in Economic Theory

Changes in land use and land cover are among the issues central to the study of global environmental change. In addition to their cumulative long-term global dimensions, such changes can have profound regional environmental implications during the life span of current generations. A better understanding of the dynamics in land and water use is thus critical for an informed debate of sustainability. Land use represents a critical intersection of economic and ecological systems. Land-use changes are most often directly linked with economic decisions. This recognition has led LUC to choose an economic framework as the organizing principle, resulting in a broad set of project activities geared towards providing a biophysical and geographical underpinning to the representation of land-based economic sectors in modeling land and water use decisions. This report addresses foremost researchers outside economics and should be viewed as a modest step towards reducing the deficit in transdisciplinary research, which, until now, has permitted only modest advances in closing the gaps between environment and economic analysis. The role of land in economic theory is surveyed, both from a conceptual and historical perspective. Land has been incorporated in economic theories in various ways. Originally, land used by agriculture was the main motivation for an economic treatment of land. This was gradually extended with various other land use categories. Neoclassical core economic theory gave less attention to land use, generally regarding it as a production factor of relatively little importance. Nevertheless specialized sub-fields within economics such as regional and urban economics met the demand for explicit spatial analysis including land use considerations. More recently, attention for environmental and resource problems has provided incentives for new perspectives on, and conceptualization of, land in economic analysis. To some extent, this is based on an interaction with other disciplines as well as on the use of spatially disaggregate methods of analysis