Climate change is likely to affect water availability and therefore hydropower generation in many regions of the world. In drying regions, hydropower generation may be impaired, creating a need for new power investments that would otherwise have been unnecessary. In this study we apply two partial equilibrium models (GCAM and TIAM-ECN) and two general equilibrium models (MEG4C and Phoenix) to identify possible pathways of power sector adaptation for Colombia under climate change.

Highlights

Expected mainstreaming of the Ecosystem Services Approach (ESA) has not been fulfilled.

Sectors involved in ESA and their relationships drive pathways of mainstreaming in Latin America.

Incorporation of knowledge and consensus over values are key factors for mainstreaming.

Researchers need to adopt new roles for an effective mainstreaming of ESA.

Opportunities for new roles lay in the interfaces among sectors involved in ES management.

We analyze whether the decisions made by university students in a framed threshold public good game meet what artisanal gold miners decided in a lab-in-the-field experiment. This work contrasts with current literature in which the comparison between lab and lab-in-the-field has considered context-free situations. In general, we find more behavioral convergences than divergences between students and miners. Similar to a set previous literature, these results show lab experiments on social dilemmas can be externally valid.

A number of studies show that large-scale deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is necessary to limit the increase in global average temperature to less than 2 °C by 2100. However, some experts and citizens worry about the integrity of carbon dioxide storage sites due to the possibility of future leakage.

Managing natural-resource allocation and environmental externalities is a challenge. Institutional designs are central when improving water quality for downstream users, for instance, and when reallocating water quantities including for climate adaptation. Views differ on which institutions are best: states; markets; or informal institutions. For transfers of ecosystem services, we compare informal trust-based institutions to enforced contracts, both being institutional types we observe commonly in the field.

Small-scale gold mining is important to rural livelihoods in the developing world but also a source of environmental externalities. Incentives for individual producers are the classic policy response for a socially efficient balance between livelihoods and the environment. Yet monitoring individual miners is ineffective, or it is very costly, especially on frontiers with scattered small-scale miners. We ask whether monitoring at a group level effectively incentivizes cleaner artisanal mining by combining lower-cost external monitoring with local collective action.

Human behaviour is of profound significance in shaping pathways towards sustainability. Yet, the approach to understanding human behaviour in many fields remains reliant on overly simplistic models. For a better understanding of the interface between human behaviour and sustainability, we take work in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology as a starting point, but argue for an expansion of this work by adopting a more dynamic and systemic understanding of human behaviour, that is, as part of complex adaptive systems.