Suchergebnisse

"This ninth edition of Economics and the Environment is the third to include Dr. Stephen Polasky as a coauthor, who has brought to the text a reworked and stronger focus on natural resource economics and ecosystem services. This book was first published almost 30 years ago in 1992, as the Rio Earth Summit was concluding. Global warming had been brought to national and global attention only 4 years previous by James Hansen's famous congressional testimony. The first President Bush would soon sign the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the time, in the atmosphere stood at 356 parts per million. Twenty-five years later, levels are over 410 parts per million and climbing. Climate change remains front and center, now understood less as an environmental problem than as a challenge to civilization. As in the first edition, global warming remains the topic that launches the book and provides the framing example for a comprehensive look at environmental economics. With Steve's help, the book now provides a stronger resource and ecosystem processes lens for exploring climate change and other critical environmental issues."

Climate change incurs costs, but government adaptation budgets are limited. Beyond a certain point, individuals must bear the costs or adapt to new circumstances, creating political-economic tipping points that we explore in three examples. First, many Alaska Native villages are threatened by erosion, but relocation is expensive. To date, critically threatened villages have not yet been relocated, suggesting that we may already have reached a political-economic tipping point. Second, forest fires shape landscape and ecological characteristics in interior Alaska. Climate-driven changes in fire regime require increased fire-fighting resources to maintain current patterns of vegetation and land use, but these resources appear to be less and less available, indicating an approaching tipping point. Third, rapid sea level rise, for example from accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet, will create a choice between protection and abandonment for coastal regions throughout the world, a potential global tipping point comparable to those now faced by Arctic communities. The examples illustrate the basic idea that if costs of response increase more quickly than available resources, then society has fewer and fewer options as time passes.