The Economics of the Environment and Natural Resourcescovers the essential topics students need to understandenvironmental and resource problems and their possible solutions.Its unique lecture format provides an in-depth exploration ofdiscrete topics, ideal for upper-level undergraduate, graduate ordoctoral study. Each chapter depicts the key theoretical insights,major issues, and real-life problems that motivate the subject. Inaddition, the chapters feature practical applications and casestudies, a list of annotated further reading, and extensivereferences. Offers broad treatment of issues in Environmental and ResourceEconomics. Provides in-depth exploration of a wide range of topics withits unique lecture format. Depicts key theoretical insights, major issues, and real-lifeproblems for each subject. Features case studies, annotated further reading, extensivereferences, and a detailed glossary.

A Dictionary of Climate Change and the Environment bridges the gap between the many disciplines encompassing climate change, environmental economics, environmental sciences, and environmental studies. It defines a comprehensive set of over 3700 words used across these fields to help policy makers, students, and professionals achieve a holistic view of environmental issues. The Dictionary also features: introductory primers to major topic areas; recommended reading for particular topics and specific words or concepts; and seven appendices, including a catalog of scientific symbols, units, and conversions, as well as an expansive listing and description of selected environmental treaties. The extensive and accessible nature of the content renders this book an indispensible reference for practitioners requiring an informed and balanced description of key concepts and issues. This resource will be extremely valuable to policymakers and professionals working on climate change and other environmental issues, and to postgraduate and undergraduate students in climate change and environmental studies, as well as to academics and other practitioners working on multidisciplinary environmental issues outside their areas of expertise.

The objective of this book is to analyze the institutional barriers to implementing market-based climate policy, as well as to provide some opportunities to overcome them. The approach is that of institutional economics, with special emphasis on political transaction costs and path dependence. Instead of rejecting the neoclassical approach, this book uses it where fruitful and shows when and why it is necessary to employ a new or neo-institutionalist approach. The result is that equity is considered next to efficiency, that the evolution and possible lock-in of both formal and informal climate institutions are studied, and that attention is paid to the politics and law of economic instruments for climate policy, including some new empirical analyses. The research topics of this book include the set-up costs of a permit trading system, the risk that credit trading becomes locked-in, the potential legal problem of grandfathering in terms of actional subsidies under WTO law or state aid under EC law, and the changing attitudes of various European officials towards restricting the use of the Kyoto Mechanisms.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the best gift of the United Nations and its main human rights organ, the Human Rights Commission to “We, the Peoples of the World”. But that powerful instrument is often rendered powerless by the behaviour of individuals running the institutions and the states, arguably the most powerful institution conceptualised by human mind so far. In the process, the UN comes under serious criticism and its most important organ which helped give the UDHR was dissolved for “failing to live up to its ideals”. Ironically, the same states and their representatives most instrumental in creating the UN institutions, including the Human Rights Commission first but later vilifying it and leading the campaign for its replacement by the Human Rights Council are now once again attacking it as “hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights” and the most powerful member state feels compelled to walk out of the Council. Where does the world, the UN and “we the peoples” stand in the search for greater freedom from want and fear, better enjoyment of dignity and rights? Travelling through an extraordinary journey of life, academic pursuits and expeditions of professional and diplomatic mountain climbing, including the Chairmanship of the 56th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights and its 5th Special Session on the Human Rights of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Palestine Territories, Shambhu Ram Simkhada presents a scholarly, diplomatic, advocate and defender perspectives on the contemporary state of human rights and human wrongs in the scale of his own human conscience. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This book examines water management integration in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland, based on the European research project EUWARENESS. Coverage includes 12 country-specific case studies, examining theory on water governance, institutional regimes, and property rights, resulting in a tool for monitoring the progress of integrated water management at the basin level in EU member states or other countries.

“Human beings have been smart enough to turn nature to their ends, generate vast wealth for themselves, and double their average life span. But are they smart enough to solve the problems of the 21st century?” -- Thomas Homer-Dixon In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon, "global guru" (the Toronto Star), asks: is our world becoming too complex, too fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing us converge, intertwine, and remain largely beyond our ken. Most of suspect the "experts don't really know what's going on; that as a species we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. We are fast approaching a time when we may no longer be able to control a world that increasingly exceeds our grasp. This is "the ingenuity gap" -- the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon -- the critical gap between our need for practical, innovative ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Through gripping narrative stories and incidents that exemplify his arguments, he takes us on a world tour that begins with a heartstopping description of the tragic crash of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago and includes Las Vegas in its desert, a wilderness beach in British Columbia, and his solitary search for a little girl in Patna, India. He shows how, in our complex world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are not immune, and we are caught between a requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. When the gap widens, political disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in subtle ways. In compelling, lucid, prose, he makes real the problems we face and suggests how we might overcome them.

Regardless of where we live, the management of the public sector impacts on our lives. Hence, we all have an interest, one way or another, in the achievement of efficiency and productivity improvements in the activities of the public sector. For a government agency that provides a public service, striving for unreasonable benchmark targets for efficiency may lead to a deterioration of service quality, along with an increase in stress and job dissatisfaction for public sector employees. Slack performance targets may lead to gross inefficiency, poor quality of service, and low self-esteem for employees. In the case of regulation, inappropriate policies can lead to unprecedented disasters. Examples include the decimation of fish stocks through mismanagement of fisheries, and power blackouts through inappropriate restrictions on electricity generators and distributors. Efficient taxation policies minimise the tax bill for citizens. In all of these cases, efficient management is required, although it is often unclear how to assess this efficiency. In this volume, several authors consider various aspects and contexts of performance measurement. Hence, this volume represents a unique collection of advances in efficiency assessment for the public sector by leading researchers in the field. Efficiency in the Public Sector is divided into two sections. The first is titled "Issues in Public Sector Efficiency Evaluation" and comprises of chapters 1-4. The second section is titled "Efficiency Analysis in the Public Sector - Advances in Theory and Practice." This division is somewhat arbitrary, in the sense there are significant overlapping themes in both sections. However, it serves to separate chapters that can be characterised as dealing with broader issues (Section I), from chapters that can be characterised as focusing on specific theoretical problems and empirical cases (Section II).

The session was closed with papers that provided a prognosis on the future development of property rights in fisheries management. Thus, the conference papers addressed the theory and application of property.

Environmental Economics: Theory and Applications is a comprehensive treatise on environmental economics with special focus on theories of collective action, environmental policy and management. A balanced blend of theory and practice, this book outlines the basic concepts, theories, tools and techniques of environmental economics, which not only enable the reader to diagnose the root causes of environmental problems and identify practicable solutions, but also facilitate the design of environmental policy and management strategies. The book combines: - innovative synthesis of concepts, ideas and theories; - presentation in a simple, easy-to-comprehend language and style; - illustrations and examples from real life situations; - latest available research data on various environmental problems, including global warming, acid rain and depletion of the ozone layer; and - special focus on environmental policy and management. Useful as a textbook at graduate and post-graduate levels, it caters to the needs of students, teachers, researchers, environment managers and policy-makers in India.