Paper 5 - Environmental Economics, law and policy

Dr. Unai Pascual

(Lent 2010)

Lecture material

· Lecture 1: What is sustainable development and how can we measure it?

· Lecture 2-3: Fundamentals of natural resource economics

· Lecture 4: Valuation of the environment

Supervision assignments

· Assignment for Supervision 1

· Assignment for Supervision 2

E-mails of supervisors:

Unai Pascual: up211@cam.ac.uk

Maria Teresa Ruiz-Tagle: mtr21@cam.ac.uk

Mei Wang: mw442@cam.ac.uk

Kanittha Tambunlertchai: kt289@cam.ac.uk

Reading

Lecture 1 on Sustainable Development Indicators

· ‘'Sustainability: An Economists’ Perspective' by Robert Solow

· '‘Viewpoint: Weak versus strong sustainability' by Robert Ayres, Jeroem Van den Bergh and John Gowdy

· ‘Capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development: an indicator of "weak" sustainability' by David Pearce and Giles Atkinson

· “If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?” by Cobb et al (1995)

· '‘Measuring sustainability: A time series of alternative indicators for Scotland’, by Nick Hanley end others

· Is contemporary economic development sustainable? By Partha Dasgupta

· Nature in economics. By Partha Dasgupta (2008)

Lecture 2-3 on Natural Resource Management

· Introductory article: the view of environmental economics about the need of public policy by Aart deZeeuw

· The Mutual Inter-temporal Benefits from Depletable Resource Use, by Clark Wiseman (2002)

· On The Economics Of Non-Renewable Resources, In Economics Interactions With Other Disciplines, [Ed. John M. Gowdy], in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). By Neha Khanna, (2003).

· The Economics of Fisheries Management: A Survey; Chapter by Bjorndal and G. Munro, 1998

· The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery (a classical paper by Scott Gordon, 1954)

· Hardin’s (1968) seminal paper “The Tragedy of the Commons”

· Revisiting the commons: local lessons, global challenges. By Elinor Ostrom et al (1999)

· Big Laws, Small Catches: Global Ocean Governance and the Fisheries Crisis, by Edward Allison (2001)

· Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse? By Costello et al. 2008.

Lectures 3 and 4

· Audacious bid to value the planet whips up a storm

· Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Ethical Critique (with replies)

· The total economic value of Amazonian deforestation

· The Benefits and Costs of the Somerset Levels and Moors ESA and a reply to this study by Ian Hodge

· Contingent Valuation: Is Some Number better than No Number?

· Comprehensive web resource on valuation methods: www.ecosystemvaluation.org

(if you find a broken link, please let me know up211@cam.ac.uk)