Chapter 11: Conservation Economics and Sustainable Development Flashcards
Any discussion of economics in the context of conservation can be approached from two primary branches of study,
- Microeconomics is the study of individual economic units, such as households, firms, and industries, and how they make decisions regarding resources, goods, and services. It focuses on supply and demand, pricing, and the behavior of consumers and businesses within specific markets.
- Macroeconomics, on the other hand, looks at the economy as a whole, studying broader factors like national income, inflation, unemployment, and government policies that affect entire economies.
are combinations of interacting species and their environment. They do many things, not all of which are ecosystem services (e.g., a wetland).
Ecosystems
are the subset of these natural process
that actually generate benefits to people (e.g., water purification). Sometimes this is the production of a good.
Ecosystem services
are the actual things that increase human welfare (e.g., clean water).
Benefits
is the importance of a given benefit to a person or group, measured in dollars or other metrics (e.g., $30/gal/
year). This is often based on culture, market, norms, or other factors
Value
ecosystems also provide ___. It can suffer wear and tear
from a production process, but it does not become a part of
the thing it produces. Instead, the fund provides the service at
a fixed rate, so the service is best measured in some metric
that describes output over time.
fund-service resources. A fund-service resource
A is a tool we have explored earlier in regard to its role in ethic and value analysis, especially its use in evaluating
instrumental value
Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA)
Various techniques of ______, can be used to create “shadow markets” for nonmarket goods associated with ecosystem services by attempting to determine consumer and user preferences.
contingent valuation (CV)
The ____ approach is one form of CV that attempts to assign monetary worth to a non-use value (Chap. 10), such as a species existence value, by asking, usually through surveys, what a person would be willing to pay in exchange for the preservation of a given entity, such as a rare species, under specific circumstances
Willingness to Pay (WTP)
_____ to environmental policy use markets, price and other economic variables to incentivize actors to reduce negative environmental externalities or
enhance their contribution to social welfare.
Market-based approaches
Taxation imposed on undesirable activities follows the “____” and can be an effective mechanism for correcting market failure. When implemented, economic strategies following the “polluter pays principle” force polluters (rather than society) to pay for the pollution they create and prevent them from externalizing pollution costs.
polluter pays principle
is an arrangement in which some of the property rights normally associated with the individual owner of a
property are transferred to or held by the community in which the property is located, effectively restricting what
individual property owners can do on their property based on where the property is located.
Zoning
are a special case of land-use
zoning that have been developed to make the value of conservation on private land more explicit and profitable to landowners.
Conservation easements
is a measure of the amount of unusable energy in a system; as entropy increases, the amount of
energy available for work decreases.
Entropy
has been defined by its own practitioners, such as the International Ecotourism Society, as “travel to natural
areas that conserves the environment and sustains the wellbeing of local people”
Ecotourism