Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether community-based wildlife conservation can potentially be added in rural farmers’ investment portfolio to diversify and consequently reduce agricultural risk.

Design/methodology/approach – The correlation coefficient is computed from national data on the rates of return on agricultural production and wildlife conservation, to find out whether wildlife conservation is a feasible hedge asset.

Twenty years ago, governments gathered for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. The “Rio Declaration” laid out several principles of sustainable development, including the central role of policy instruments. In this article, we take stock of where we stand today in implementing sound and effective environmental policy instruments throughout the world, particularly in developing and transitional economies.

This paper investigates the role of comparative advantage on biofuel policy adoption.

Results show that different countries have different drivers to create biofuel policies. GDP proves to be more significant for OECD countries, while arable land and feedstock prices are more significant for non-OECD countries. Land allocation may also be of importance. We speculate that a naturally endowed comparative advantage may not necessarily equate to a successful biofuel industry.

Global climate change stands out from most environmental problems because it will span generations and force us to think in new ways about intergenerational fairness. It involves the delicate problem of complex coordination between countries on a truly global scale. As long as fossil fuels are too cheap, climate change policy will engage all major economies.

This paper takes as its starting point the observation that fuel prices – and thus taxes – are important for good management of climate change and other environmental problems. To economists this should be no surprise yet it seems that the role of fuel taxation as an instrument of climate policy has not been fully appreciated. It is however one of the few policy instruments that, since several decades, has actually reduced fuel consumption appreciably.

In this study we seek to explain the determinants of catches for the Nile perch and tilapia fisheries of Uganda’s section of Lake Victoria. Production functions are estimated from data collected from a survey of 100 boats engaged in fishing of Nile perch, and 150 boats fishing tilapia, in 3 districts along Lake Victoria.

Global climate is changing. This fact is supported by robust scientific evidence, and there is no real doubt that the main reason is the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human activity, primarily related to the combustion of fossil fuels.

Using a choice experiment, we investigated preferences for distributing the economic burden of decreasing CO2 emissions in the two largest CO2-emitting countries: the United States and China. We asked respondents about their preferences for four burden-sharing rules to reduce CO2 emissions according to their country’’s 1) historical emissions, 2) income level, 3) equal right to emit per person, and 4) current emissions.

Unique survey data from a contingent valuation study conducted in three different countries (China, Sweden, and the United States) were used to investigate the ordinary citizen’s willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing CO2 emissions. We found that a large majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over the last 100 years and that humans are responsible for the increase.

This paper uses a choice experiment to study citizens' preferences for effort-sharing rules for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. For a given global cost and level of emission reduction, we study the willingness to pay for various rules that imply different distributions of the cost between EU, the US, China and Africa.