Elements in Environmental, Natural Resource and Sustainable Development Economic – serie

Environmental economics is growing rapidly. It is simply not sufficient to consider consumption, production, and welfare in isolation from the natural environment. Integrating ecological systems in economic analysis requires to take the possible occurrence of tipping points or regime shifts into account. This Element focuses on two recent developments in environmental economics theory. One is economic management of ecological systems with tipping points, with the lake as the classical example. The other one is investigating the consequences of uncertain possible shocks to parameters in economic models, with the carrying capacity in a fishery and total factor productivity (due to climate tipping) in Ramsey growth as examples. This Element provides a precise account of the concepts, techniques, and results in the analysis of these models, which shows the effects of tipping and allows for other applications. This Element starts with a broader list of examples and management options.

Environmental economics is growing rapidly. It is simply not sufficient to consider consumption, production, and welfare in isolation from the natural environment. Integrating ecological systems in economic analysis requires to take the possible occurrence of tipping points or regime shifts into account. This Element focuses on two recent developments in environmental economics theory. One is economic management of ecological systems with tipping points, with the lake as the classical example. The other one is investigating the consequences of uncertain possible shocks to parameters in economic models, with the carrying capacity in a fishery and total factor productivity (due to climate tipping) in Ramsey growth as examples. This Element provides a precise account of the concepts, techniques, and results in the analysis of these models, which shows the effects of tipping and allows for other applications. This Element starts with a broader list of examples and management options.

Although the spatial dimension is embedded in most issues studied by environmental and resource economics, its incorporation into economic models is not widespread. As a result, significant aspects of important problems remain hidden, which could lead to policy failures. This Element fills this gap by exploring how space can be integrated into environmental and resource economics. The emergence of spatial patterns in economic models through Turing's mechanism is explained and an extension of Pontryagin's maximum principle under spatial dynamics is provided. Examples of the use of spatial dynamics serve to illustrate why space matters in environmental policy design. Moreover, the differentiation of policy when spatial transport mechanisms are considered is made clear. The tools presented, along with their applications, provide foundations for future research in spatial environmental and resource economics in which the underlying spatial dimension - which is very real - is fully taken into account.