"Green Bonds" emerged as a new form of environmental financing in 2007. While most investors still view them as a niche product in the overall fixed income market, green bonds have grown rapidly to nearly $37 billion in issuance in 2014, with issuers from the World Bank to the State of Massachusetts.
The paper looks at the development of conservation policy since the mid-20th Century. It reviews how land conservation policy developed in the UK, and the ethical and policy design issues which emerged as the focus of conservation expanded. It then considers how the lessons learned may be applied to address environmental conservation needs in developing society situations.
The agglomeration bonus literature has not recognized the potential of conditional agreements to overcome the informational requirements, particularly those of landowners, necessary to induce spatially coordinated land conservation.
Until recently public efforts to encourage conservation on private land in many countries has primarily been through uniform payment policies. Auctions are increasingly used as a payment mechanism to acquire public benefits such as conservation actions that provide environmental improvements on private land (e.g. the US Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
Purchasing development rights is a major mechanism for the protection of environmental quality and landscape amenities. This paper provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that takes into account land costs and probability of land use conversion. We compare two strategies.
The dominant paradigm of conservation-reserve planning in economics is to optimize the provision of physical conservation benefits (measured in units like species protected) given a budget constraint. Large-scale biology-based priority setting implies that the value we place on biodiversity and ecosystem function is not affected by human proximity to that natural capital.
In many parts of the world, deteriorating environmental conditions have led policy makers to develop policies and programs aimed at promoting conservation practices on lands devoted to agriculture. Such programs have been studied by environmental economists, but little research has been done on the usefulness of strategically varying the conservation contract's length.
Temporal spillovers occur when a conservation program changes what happens to land outside the temporal window of the conservation contract. This may happen when conservation improves land so that returns to non-conservation uses are increased, or when landowners' preferences become more pro-conservation as they see land flourish under conservation, for example.
This special issue of Policy Matters focuses on the outreach and impact of Dr. Elinor Ostrom's groundbreaking research on common property (or commons) theory. Her work was instrumental in shaping contemporary analyses of resource management and conservation, especially at a local level.
We examine the role of spatial interactions in conservation easements placed on prairie pothole habitat in western Canada. One of the goals of the conservation easement program we study is to protect contiguous habitat.
