The EfD Initiative welcomes Franklin Amuakwa-Mensah as Research Manager. Dr. Amuakwa is an economist with a strong background in environmental and natural resource economics, agricultural economics & development economics.
Cape Town made international news during the three-year drought which threatened to shut down the city’s water supply at the height of the crisis in January 2018.
As part of its institutionalization, EfD is now proud to announce its new strategic board. ‘This board is constituted of my dream-team’, says Director, Gunnar Köhlin. Each of the board members brings deep professional knowledge, a passion for sustainable development and the capacity to elevate EfD so that we can make a difference at the global level.
Over the past three decades, marine resource management has shifted conceptually from top-down sectoral approaches towards the more systems-oriented multi-stakeholder frameworks of integrated coastal management and ecosystem-based conservation. However, the successful implementation of such frameworks is commonly hindered by a lack of cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer, especially between natural and social sciences. This review represents a holistic synthesis of three decades of change in the oceanography, biology and human dimension of False Bay, South Africa.
Cape Town made world headlines in 2018 as a major city on the brink of seeing its taps run dry. Its predicament drew attention to the challenge that water scarcity presents for cities in the 21st century. Globally, over four billion people face severe freshwater shortages and this number is expected to rise (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2016). The Water Resources Group (2017) predicts that by 2030 there will be a 40% gap between freshwater supply and demand if business-as-usual water management continues.
We use a eld experiment to identify how dierences in preferences and autonomy in decision-making result in sub-optimal adoption of technologies that can maximize the welfare of all members of the household. We create income-earning opportunities to empower subjects and elicit their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for improved cookstoves through a real stove purchase experiment with randomly chosen wives, husbands and couples.
Open access post-harvest grazing is widespread in mixed crop-livestock systems. This discourages conservation agriculture, which depends on keeping the soil surface covered with crop residues. One way to reduce open access grazing is through restricting communal grazing access to allow rights of exclusion, while simultaneously improving the production of livestock feeds.
Ocean Acidification (OA) has become one of the most studied global stressors in marine science worldwide during the last fifteen years. Despite the variety of studies on the biological effects of OA with marine commercial species, estimations of these impacts over consumers’ preferences have not been studied in detail, compromising our ability to undertake an assessment of some market and economic impacts resulting from OA at local scales. Here, we use a novel and interdisciplinary approach to fill this gap.
We investigate the behavioural responses of resource users to two policy interventions: sanctioned quotas and information provisioning. We do so in a context in which multiple resources (pastures and wild animal stocks) are connected and could substantially and drastically deteriorate as a result of management. We perform an experimental study among communities that are managing common pool wildlife in Zimbabwe.
It is widely accepted that energy use contributes to climate change, but, in turn, climate change can also affect energy demand. Plenty of literature proves the existence of this feedback mechanism, but there is still no consensus on its exact operation. This needs to be studied in detail in China, which is the largest electricity consumer in the world. One particularly interesting question is how the increasing income of China’s residents affects the climate sensitivity of electricity demand.
This study develops an integrated framework to evaluate the relative effectiveness of alternative land use policies that target the management of natural resources in the face of climate change pressures. This framework is then applied to evaluate the relative performance of three different land use regulations that protect natural resources and alter current trends of urbanization using data from three rapidly urbanizing coastal counties in the southeastern United States facing growing risks of flooding.
Local people’s perceptions about protected areas are important determinants of the success of conservation efforts in Southern Africa, as their perceptions affect their attitude and behaviour towards conservation. As a result, the involvement of local communities in transboundary wildlife conservation is now viewed as an integral part of regional development initiatives involving several countries.
There is an ongoing reform in coal taxation in China, from a quantity-based to a pricebased approach. While the coal tax could play an important role in resource conservation and air pollution reduction, its distributional effect is not well studied. This paper investigates the distributional effect of China’s coal taxes on households before and after the reform.