OFF-SITE COSTS OF SOIL EROSION: A CASE STUDY IN THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY

This study attempts to provide relative magnitudes of average and marginal costs of off-site sediment-related costs in OregonÂ’s Willamette Valley. Water treatment; road, river channel, and dam maintenance; and hydroelectric generation are examined. Road maintenance and water treatment are nonnegligible average cost items. These costs should not be interpreted as justification for erosion control as marginal cost estimates for water treatment indicate the controls on the margin would yield roughly one-third the average cost.Land Economics/Use,

Controlling Groundwater Exploitation Through Economic Instruments: Current Practices, Challenges and Innovative Approaches

Groundwater can be considered as a common-pool resource, is often overexploited and, as a result, there are growing management pressures. This chapter starts with a broad presentation of the range of economic instruments that can be used for groundwater management, considering current practices and innovative approaches inspired from the literature on Common Pool Resources management. It then goes on with a detailed presentation of groundwater allocation policies implemented in France, the High Plains aquifer in the USA, and Chile. The chapter concludes with a discussion of social and political difficulties associated with implementing economic instruments for groundwater management

Cost Effectiveness in River Management: Evaluation of Integrated River Policy System in Tidal Ouse

The River Ouse forms a significant part of Humber river system, which drains about one fifth the land area of England and provides the largest fresh water source to the North Sea from UK. The river quality in the tidal river suffered from sag of dissolved oxygen (DO) during last few decades, deteriorated by the effluent discharges. The Environment Agency (EA) proposed to increase the water quality of Ouse by implementing more potent environmental policies. This paper explores the cost effectiveness of water management in the Tidal Ouse through various options by taking into account the variation of assimilative capacity of river water, both in static and dynamic scope of time. Reduction in both effluent discharges and water abstraction were considered along side with choice of effluent discharge location. Different instruments of environmental policy, the emission tax-subsidy (ETS) scheme and tradable pollution permits (TPP) systems were compared with the direct quantitative control approach. This paper at the last illustrated an empirical example to reach a particular water quality target in the tidal Ouse at the least cost, through a solution of constrained optimisation problem. The results suggested significant improvement in the water quality with less cost than current that will fail the target in low flow year

Evidence-based Kernels: Fundamental Units of Behavioral Influence

This paper describes evidence-based kernels, fundamental units of behavioral influence that appear to underlie effective prevention and treatment for children, adults, and families. A kernel is a behavior–influence procedure shown through experimental analysis to affect a specific behavior and that is indivisible in the sense that removing any of its components would render it inert. Existing evidence shows that a variety of kernels can influence behavior in context, and some evidence suggests that frequent use or sufficient use of some kernels may produce longer lasting behavioral shifts. The analysis of kernels could contribute to an empirically based theory of behavioral influence, augment existing prevention or treatment efforts, facilitate the dissemination of effective prevention and treatment practices, clarify the active ingredients in existing interventions, and contribute to efficiently developing interventions that are more effective. Kernels involve one or more of the following mechanisms of behavior influence: reinforcement, altering antecedents, changing verbal relational responding, or changing physiological states directly. The paper describes 52 of these kernels, and details practical, theoretical, and research implications, including calling for a national database of kernels that influence human behavior

An Economic Assessment of Soil Carbon Sequestration with Biochar in Germany

Biochar is a carbon-rich solid obtained from the heating of biomass in the (near) absence of oxygen in a process called pyrolysis. Its soil incorporation is increasingly discussed as a means to sequester carbon in soils and, thus, to help mitigate climate change. When deployed in agricultural soils in Germany, it has been found by Teichmann (2014a, b) that slowpyrolysis biochar from a wide variety of feedstocks - together with the use of the pyrolysis by-products (liquids and gases) as renewable sources of energy - could lead to an annual mitigation of up to 10.2 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalents by 2030 and of up to 10.6 million tonnes by 2050. To analyze whether this technically feasible greenhouse-gas mitigation potential is also economically viable, we calculate the corresponding greenhousegas mitigation costs and construct so-called marginal abatement cost curves. Thereby, we find that about 3.1 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalents could be abated in 2030 at costs below €201245 per tonne of carbon dioxide and nearly 3.8 million tonnes in 2050 at costs below €201275 per tonne of carbon dioxide

A philosophical case for process-based modelling of land use change

Modelling is used to describe, explore and predict changes in land use and other human systems. ‘Top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ modelling approaches are both popular, and each has important philosophical implications that correspond closely to major debates in social science. We outline some key contributions to these debates and argue that social processes such as those underlying land use decisions are fundamentally determined by individual intentionality, interacting with social norms of language, culture and institutions, rather than by general and predictable ‘laws’. Therefore, bottom-up models that reflect these processes offer far more informative accounts of system development. However, prediction remains outside the scope of either approach, and methods of validation based on tests of historical predictive ability risk over-fitting to trends and underestimating uncertainties. We explore the implications of these arguments for model design and use, and for general understanding of such fundamentally complex, spontaneously evolving systems

Transition, Integration and Convergence. The Case of Romania

This volume comprises several studies and papers published in the last decades. They have been selected and ranged so that to provide a minimum of coherence concerning the phases which Romania has crossed in her way to the advanced socio-economic system of European type: transition to the market economy, accession to the EU, the economic convergence in the three fundamental domains: institutions, real economy, and nominal economy. The readers may find in this volume a description of debates, difficulties and solutions adopted for building-up the market economy by a state being in a profound transformation from weak transition institutions towards hard democratic institutions. Because the transition to the market economy and the association of Romania with the EU and then the integration presenting strategic political decisions, I have included in this work two studies devoted to the political forces state and political parties that elaborated and applied these strategic decisions underlining their structure, role and function and their transformation. Integration into the EU of a country like Romania, which emerged from a different system comparing with the West-European one, has proved to be difficult and lasting many years because of the structural transformations. In five chapters I am referring to the essential characteristics of the integration process, such as: market liberalization, competitiveness of the local (national) firms on the national and EU markets, institutional reforms so that the institutions of candidate countries have to become compatible with those of the EU and finally the perspective assessment to find out the real and nominal convergence. Putting into practice the EU competitivity and cohesion principles, Romania has good prospects to close, in a reasonable time, the economic gap and to be admitted into the Euro Zone. Although the real convergence of Romania with the EU requires higher growth rates for the former, a new approach is compulsory to take into consideration the environment quality, the natural resources and the equity between the present and the future generations as natural resource consumers. Just these problems have determined me to include in this volume the last two chapters which, on the one hand, try to prove the necessity of the economy growth harmonization with the environment evolution as well as the saving of the energy resources, and, on the other hand, to point out the main ways to be followed and instruments to be used