KEY MESSAGES
Sustainable and efficient governance and utilization of natural resources requires:
1. Transparency, accountability, rule of law, inclusive participation and cooperation of all stakeholders and actors in natural resources. 2. Balancing economic, social and environmental goals in all government programs and plans including private investments.
KEY MESSAGES
Lake Victoria Basin is facing a number of challenges:
We examine whether the adoption of global voluntary environmental management systems - United Nations Global Compact and ISO 14001 - lead to more effective environmental performance. Previous studies have presented inconclusive findings of voluntary environmental management systems on environmental performances. Possible reasons for conflicting results are the influence of observable and unobservable factors that affect environmental performance as well as the use of different measures of environmental performance indicators.
It is widely believed that forests help improve water quality by reducing soil erosion (and hence reducing silt) as well as filtering out nutrients and pollutants carried in water, which allows the municipal drinking water supply sector to simplify or expedite many costly water treatment procedures and thereby save on operating costs. This study statistically quantifies such cost savings in the contexts of China’s Sichuan province, by analyzing how drinking water treatment costs change in response to changes in upstream forest cover.
Municipal solid waste management is a challenging issue in developing countries. An unclean neighborhood could have a significant negative impact on housing property values too as it may lead to numerous diseases in addition to diminished aesthetic value. This study examines the effects of municipal solid waste collection services at the neighborhood level on housing property values using the hedonic price model. We use a sub-sample of nationally representative household survey data from urban areas as well as primary data collected from one of the metropolitan cities in Nepal.
We calculate the first distributional statistics for municipal water supply deliveries using 14.9 million monthly billing records for a half-million households in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2014-2018. These years span a historic drought and a multi-faceted package of conservation programs that achieved a 50% city-wide drop in consumption. We find that the top 10% of households consumed 31% of water deliveries before the drought, with the Gini coefficient
This paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China’s water quality monitoring system. Because water quality readings are important for political evaluations, and the monitoring stations only capture emissions from their upstream regions, local government officials are incentivized to enforce tighter environmental standards on firms immediately upstream of a monitoring station, rather than those immediately downstream.