Natural capital is the world's stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms. Some natural capital assets provide people with free goods and services, often called ecosystem services. All of these underpin our economy and society, and thus make human life possible.
Environmental economics is a sub-field of economics concerned with environmental issues. It has become a widely studied subject due to growing environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. Environmental economics "undertakes theoretical or empirical studies of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies around the world. ... Particular issues include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming."
Ecological economics, bioeconomics, ecolonomy, eco-economics, or ecol-econ is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially. By treating the economy as a subsystem of Earth's larger ecosystem, and by emphasizing the preservation of natural capital, the field of ecological economics is differentiated from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment. One survey of German economists found that ecological and environmental economics are different schools of economic thought, with ecological economists emphasizing strong sustainability and rejecting the proposition that physical (human-made) capital can substitute for natural capital.
Free-market environmentalism argues that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best means of preserving the environment, internalizing pollution costs, and conserving resources.
Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the crop yield while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy.
Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of externalities like pollution. While these resources do give people utility, certain aspects of them do not have a market price as they are not directly sold – for example, people receive benefit from a beautiful view of a mountain, but it would be tough to value using price-based models. Contingent valuation surveys are one technique which is used to measure these aspects. Contingent valuation is often referred to as a stated preference model, in contrast to a price-based revealed preference model. Both models are utility-based. Typically the survey asks how much money people would be willing to pay to maintain the existence of an environmental feature, such as biodiversity.
Environmental resource management is the management of the interaction and impact of human societies on the environment. It is not, as the phrase might suggest, the management of the environment itself. Environmental resources management aims to ensure that ecosystem services are protected and maintained for future human generations, and also maintain ecosystem integrity through considering ethical, economic, and scientific (ecological) variables. Environmental resource management tries to identify factors affected by conflicts that rise between meeting needs and protecting resources. It is thus linked to environmental protection, sustainability, integrated landscape management, natural resource management, fisheries management, forest management, and wildlife management, and others.
Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta is an Indian-British economist who is Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.
In economics, a common-pool resource (CPR) is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system, whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. Unlike pure public goods, common pool resources face problems of congestion or overuse, because they are subtractable. A common-pool resource typically consists of a core resource, which defines the stock variable, while providing a limited quantity of extractable fringe units, which defines the flow variable. While the core resource is to be protected or nurtured in order to allow for its continuous exploitation, the fringe units can be harvested or consumed.
Clement Allan Tisdell was an Australian economist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland. He was best known for his work in environmental and ecological economics.
The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) was founded in 1979 in the United States as a means of exchanging ideas, stimulating research, and promoting graduate training in environmental and natural resource economics. The majority of its members are affiliated with universities, government agencies, non-profit research organizations, and consulting firms. Many of AERE's members hold graduate degrees in economics, agricultural economics, or related fields, but there are numerous student members as well. The organization also serves many non-specialist members with environmental policy interests. The United States is the country with the largest single share of AERE members, but the organization welcomes members from all countries. Annual individual memberships currently number approximately 800. AERE is generally acknowledged as the primary professional organization for Environmental and Natural Resources economists in the USA. The European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists is its European equivalent.
Daniel W. Bromley is an economist, the former Anderson-Bascom Professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and since 2009, Emeritus Professor. His research in institutional economics explains the foundations of property rights, natural resources and the environment; and economic development. He has been editor of the journal Land Economics since 1974.
Marine Resource Economics is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the economics of natural resource use in the global marine environment. It is published by the University of Chicago Press in affiliation with the North American Association of Fisheries Economists and the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade. The current editor is Joshua K. Abbott of Arizona State University. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 1.851.
David Zilberman is an Israeli-American agricultural economist, professor and Robinson Chair in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Zilberman has been a professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley since 1979. His research has covered a range of fields including the economics of production technology and risk in agriculture, agricultural and environmental policy, marketing and more recently the economics of climate change, biofuel and biotechnology. He won the 2019 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, was the President of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and is a Fellow of the AAEA and Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. David is an avid blogger on the Berkeley Blog and a life-long Golden State Warriors fan.
William Michael Hanemann is an economist who is a major academic contributor to the fields of environmental and resource economics. Hanemann is currently Julie A. Wrigley Professor at the School of Sustainability and Department of Economics of Arizona State University. He has been married to Mary Hanemann for more than four decades.
The Hastings Environmental Law Journal is a student-run law review published at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Founded in 1994, the journal primarily covers environmental law and policy and related subjects with a regional focus in California, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Hawai'i.
George Stanford Tolley was an agricultural economist at the University of Chicago. Along with the faculty at the University of Chicago, he has worked on the faculty of North Carolina State University. In 1965–1966, he was Director of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture, and in 1974–1975 he was Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of Treasury.
Gilbert E. Metcalf is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and a professor of economics at Tufts University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a University Fellow at Resources For The Future. Under the Obama Administration, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the U.S. Department of Treasury where he was the founding U.S. Board Member for the UN based Green Climate Fund. His research interests are in the areas of energy, environmental, and climate policy.
Natural resource valuation is a process of providing of benefits, costs, damage of or to natural and environmental resources. It has a fundamental role in the practice of cost-benefit analysis of health, safety, and environmental issues.
