Understanding Evaluations of Environmental Education Programs

This article provides instruction on how to read and interpret an evaluation of an environmental education program. Topics include the benefits of conducting a sound evaluation and finding programs with similar goals as examples. Recommendations include understanding the program description, target population, methods of measurement, and the reliability and validity of the evaluation, and making use of findings and conclusions. Some examples of program evaluations are included. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Ecology and Environment: They\u27ve Been Integrated into J-Education Thinking

The article focuses on the impact of ecology and the environment on journalism education. Environmental concerns have measurably affected curricula, internships, public service programs and professional liaisons in journalism education. Environmentally-related breadth courses are required or primarily, optional in 28 percent of the programs, with about 68 percent of those programs requiring or recommending traditional, natural science-oriented environmental courses, and 45 percent including those with social science orientation, perhaps reflecting the social overtones of environmental problems made salient by the environmental era

Coming of Age in Boston: Out-of-School Time Opportunities for Teens

Synthesizes findings from interviews, surveys, a literature review, and new research on current out-of-school time programs, what teens need and seek, and elements of effective programs. Includes a case study of environmental youth development programs

Production Effects of Agri-environmental "Green Box" Payments: Empirical Results from the EU

Agri-environmental programs are part of the green box of the GATT Uruguay Round and are supposed to "have no, or at most minimal trade distorting effects or effects on production." In addition, "the amount of payment shall be limited to the extra costs or loss of income involved in complying with the government programme." Utilizing farm accounting data we estimate the effects on yields for ten agri-environmental programs in Austria, which account for 12% of EU's budget expenditures for agri-environmental programs. Only three out of these ten programs have significant negative effects on yields, while one program has a significant positive impact and the rest has no significant impact. These results suggest that there are serious windfall profits associated with some of these programs.agri-environmental programs, Green box, WTO, Common Agricultural Policy, decoupling, Environmental Economics and Policy, F16, Q56,

Summary of Coastal and Estuarine Monitoring Programs in New Hampshire (2004), Trowbridge, P

The New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP) compiles data from many coastal and estuarine monitoring programs to assess the status and trends of environmental indicators in the Great Bay and Hampton/Seabrook Harbor. The full list of NHEP environmental indicators has been published in the NHEP Monitoring Plan. http://www.state.nh.us/nhep/publications/pdf/nhepmonitoringplan-nhep-04.pdf The following catalog is a summary of the coastal and estuarine monitoring programs that provide data for NHEP indicators or for State water quality assessments. This list is limited to long-term monitoring programs that do not have an end date

Environmental Services Programs for the Chesapeake Bay

Ecosystem Services, Payment for Ecosystem Services, Water Quality, Chesapeake Bay, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q25, Q28, Q53, Q57,

Environmental Mechanism Designs in a New Order of Regulatory Capitalism

Complexity of environmental programs is most apparent with information asymmetries, making the design of efficient mechanisms particularly challenging. As developed theoretically in this paper, a new regulatory capitalism paradigm mating voluntary agreements with environmental education can produce outcomes at least as efficient as voluntary agreements alone. Such a design exploits a key difference between voluntary agreements versus educational programs in terms of their impact on agents' incentive compatibilities. Specifically, in a principal-agent model, voluntary agreements are associated with an incentive-compatibility constraint, whereas educational programs are not. The efficient bundle will likely consist of a set of education programs and voluntary agreements. With the new order of regulatory capitalism, it is time to concentrate on removing barriers yielding inefficient mono-mechanism design and start constructing multidimensional incentives to efficiently allocate effort toward environmental and economic goals.Command and control, environmental education, environmental policy, voluntary agreements, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Status, environmental externality, and optimal tax programs

This paper studies the designs of optimal tax programs in OLG economies when first, consumption of one household lowers (status) utility of others, and second, consumption harms the environment. Status seeking raises optimal consumption tax rates, and lowers optimal tax rates on capital income.consumption tax

Summary of Coastal and Estuarine Monitoring Programs in New Hampshire (2005)

The New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP) compiles data from many coastal and estuarine monitoring programs to assess the status and trends of environmental indicators in the Great Bay and Hampton/Seabrook Harbor. The full list of NHEP environmental indicators has been published in the NHEP Monitoring Plan. The following catalog is a summary of the coastal and estuarine monitoring programs that provide data for NHEP indicators or for State water quality assessments. This list is limited to long-term monitoring programs that do not have an end date

Auctioning Conservation Payments using Environmental Indices

A framework for analyzing conservation programs that rank applications using environmental indices is presented. We derive the optimal bid from the farmer's perspective for both land retirement and working lands agri-environmental payment programs and we analyze how these solutions depend on program design parameters. The distinction is made between environmental objectives based on whether the farmer exercises control or not over the level proposed in a bid to participate in a program. The optimization model is solved analytically for two cases - a land retirement and a working lands program - highlighting the differences in the results. For land retirement programs we conclude that, for the cases considered, the exogenous environmental performance does not affect the endogenous environmental performance offered in a bid, but it does impact the rental rate requested. For working lands payments programs we find there is no interior solution to the decision problem, which generates a dichotomy between sets of parameters that either favor bidding based on past stewardship and low payments, or favor providing bids with higher endogenous environmental performance but requesting the maximum allowable payment. A sufficient condition is derived for the latter case to apply. A simulated auction example highlights for a working lands program that changing the objective weights can have more than proportionate impacts on the endogenous environmental performance offered by farmers. This result is in strong contrast with the relative stability of the outcome of the simulated auction for the land retirement program.environmental payments, program design, participation incentives, D8, H5, Q28, Environmental Economics and Policy,