Wildfires necessitate complex and costly management decisions on the nation’s public lands. Suppressing wildfires is an important strategy for protecting resources and human well-being, yet it often comes at a significant cost, raising the question of whether such efforts are worth it. This article evaluates 18 historic wildfires to determine whether suppression efforts were an efficient use of public funds. This article assesses the costs and losses from the actual fires with suppression efforts, focusing on impacts on infrastructure, lands, and people. Using novel wildfire simulation modeling, this article then assesses the losses that would have been expected to occur in the absence of these suppression efforts. The results of this ex-post benefit–cost analysis suggest a net benefit of $333 million from suppression efforts. This analysis addresses recent calls for more comprehensive accounting of the costs and benefits of suppression activities and provides critical information for future wildfire management on federal lands.
In the United States, dams and reservoirs were constructed with the primary objectives of flood control, water storage, and hydroelectricity generation. However, recreation has grown in importance to be a major benefit of reservoirs. Agencies with traditional water storage and flood control objectives need to evolve or partner with other agencies. A dataset for recreation visitation was developed and analyzed. After controlling for reservoir size and facilities and other economic, geographic, and site-specific factors, reservoirs managed by the National Park Service did have significantly more visitation than Army Corps of Engineers managed sites. This research corresponds to concerns that current National Park Service sites are overcrowded and complements research that suggests that converting other recreation areas to be National Park Service sites would increase not only visitation, but local economic benefits.
Abstract Since the early 1900s, U.S. national, tribal, and state institutions have been addressing conflicts over water entitlements of Native American tribes. The resulting regional water agreements encompass ensuring tribal access to water, defining entitlements for reliable future access, and providing environmental and financial benefits. Identifying approaches to evaluating institutional success in these regional water agreements is useful for effectively addressing current and future water disputes. This article discusses characteristics of eight water agreements that have occurred in the Southwestern United States, applying five economic criteria to evaluate success. The evaluation suggests that newer agreements perform better on the economic criteria, implying that learning about effective agreements is occurring over time. As threats to water quality and quantity intensify worldwide, understanding what contributes to successful regional water agreements becomes increasingly urgent.
For more than 55 years, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) has been used to acquire land for outdoor recreation and conservation purposes. At the federal level, land has been added by all four federal land management agencies (Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and the Forest Service) and in all states across the country. Historical land use patterns, public attitudes, and management policy changes have all influenced the pattern of federal land acquisition under the LWCF over time. We model these acquisitions and compare them across agencies and within agencies over time. We find state population and the amount of existing public land in a state to be significant in explaining the geographic distribution of federal land acquisitions under the LWCF.
This study uses hedonic modeling to estimate the economic benefits of remediation in the Ashtabula River Area of Concern (AOC) in Ohio. Data from residential single-family housing sales between 1997 and 2020 are used in a spatial difference-in-difference (DiD) analysis. The analysis compares housing price differences pre- and post-remediation between houses sold within 2000 m of the AOC and houses sold outside of this area. Rather than a recovery of housing prices after remediation, results indicate additional losses of 14%. Total property losses amount to $40.2 million. Past studies conducted using benefit transfers prior to remediation had predicted property value benefits of as much as $35.6 million. The contrast between predicted and observed impacts on property value highlights the need for more retrospective analysis to identify actions that will yield better predictions and outcomes.
The primary policy instrument for promoting and regulating surface water quality in the United States is the Clean Water Act. Under a system of cooperative federalism, the implementation of this policy involves state and federal agencies. This article will review current controversies over the Clean Water Act, including the definition of the “waters of the USA,” and the use of narrative ambient water quality standards. The case studies of North Dakota and Minnesota are enlightening because they have distinct economies with different water management priorities. Minnesota demonstrates that local demands for water quality can lead to extra effort and innovation. North Dakota continues to be more concerned with water quantity issues and flood mitigation. Despite states’ efforts to manage water quality to suit their own needs, interstate water quality concerns, especially excess nutrients, remain a concern.
ABSTRACT The (un)successful implementation of local content policies (LCPs) is often attributed to the oil and gas industries’ corporate demands. Uganda discovered commercially viable oil and gas in 2006 and consequently adopted LCPs. However, limited research has looked at how private sector actors have responded to LCPs. This article analyzes how they have responded to the LCP requirements and to what effect. Sixty-seven key informant interviews with public, private, and civil society actors were conducted together with analysis of local content public and private sector reports and legal and policy documents. Findings indicate that local suppliers have adopted joint-venture mechanisms and enhanced their capacities through on-the-job training offered by international oil companies in response to both LCPs and industry corporate requirements. International companies have also changed their structures and policies to develop local suppliers’ capacities. I conclude by arguing for the establishment of all-inclusive local content development programs.
ABSTRACT The Multiple Streams Theory literature identifies mechanisms to open policy windows in the problem and political streams. A proposed policy deemed inevitable by stakeholders appears to open a policy window in the policy stream allowing policy entrepreneurs to successfully position the inevitable competing policy as the lesser of two evils. For over a decade, U.S. Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) unsuccessfully introduced legislation to create additional wilderness, solidify existing recreational uses, provide local economic relief, and provide relief for ranchers in the Boulder–White Cloud Mountains area in central Idaho. The Obama administration’s proposal of a competing policy, the unilateral creation of a national monument pursuant to the Antiquities Act, appears to have opened a policy window that allowed Simpson to successfully propose his policy solution as the lesser of two evils. Policy entrepreneurs may use this method when faced with a policy proposal seen as inevitable but not necessarily best.
ABSTRACT We present in this article estimates of the extent to which conservation cost-share programs and extension services are additional, using farm-level survey data from Louisiana. Farmers’ adoption decisions for 12 soil conservation practices on agricultural land are analyzed, using the propensity score matching approach. We find a varying impact of financial incentives and technical assistance across different soil management practices. Results reveal positive additionality for farm-specific conservation plans, conservation tillage, and zero-grade fields. Payment to avoid the burning of crop residue is nonadditional. These findings guide funding agencies in making conservation investments cost-effective while also attaining environmental goals.
ABSTRACT Adaptive institutional response is evident over the many decades in which Native American tribes in the western United States have sought to overcome persistent socioeconomic challenges to tribal economic development and improved standards of living. Thriving indigenous communities with active regional economic trade characterized much of North American prior to European colonization, but many tribes in the United States today struggle with poverty. In this study, U.S. Census Bureau data are linked with several other data sources to better understand how “tribal presence” and tribal water entitlements are related to economic well-being. This study finds that tribal land and Native American population are related to lower per capita income and higher poverty at western U.S. county spatial scales. Low educational attainment, limited Internet access, urban setting, and climate variability also are linked to lower income and increased household poverty. Counties with tribal presence and quantified tribal water rights tend to be poorer than counties with tribal presence and no quantified tribal water rights, suggesting poverty as a motivation for pursuing water entitlements.
ABSTRACT Beginning in 1985, remedial action plans were developed to restore any of 14 beneficial use impairments in Great Lakes areas of concern (AOCs). The designation of “loss of fish and wildlife habitat” as a beneficial use impairment helped elevate the priority for habitat restoration and helped focus AOC stakeholders on habitat restoration options and priorities. Funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) has been the critical factor in realizing habitat restoration in U.S. AOCs, with over $280 million allocated since the beginning of the GLRI in 2011. Together, habitat restoration and contaminated sediment remediation have been a springboard for local communities to convert areas that were once a detriment to economic growth into valuable waterfront economic assets (e.g., Buffalo River AOC, River Raisin AOC, Sheboygan River AOC). These communities are transforming formerly polluted rivers in the Rust Belt into healthier and more attractive waterfront destinations for businesses, recreation, and tourism.
ABSTRACT This work conducts a comparative analysis on how diamonds and petroleum produce differing types of economic inequality in resource curse states, contributing to institutional entropy. By arguing for the causal primacy of resources in types of eventuated curses, this approach posits the concept of a “resource class” in diamond- and petroleum-producing resource curse states. Strength tests of resource classes against a variety of independent variables finds that petroleum-based resource classes funnel revenues to fewer, more powerful individuals than diamond-based classes, at the expense of currency stability, equal opportunity for women and minorities, and competing interest groups. Conversely, diamond resource classes tend to be more egalitarian, yet a negative correlation is observed between the market economy and diamond production among cursed states.
ABSTRACT This article assesses the design, process flow, and impact of the Soil Health Card (SHC) scheme in India, which was introduced in 2015. Under this scheme, government mechanisms distribute SHCs to each farmer. The article examines the scheme using a nationally representative sample of farmers in 2017. Awareness of the SHC scheme among the farmers was high at 82%, but only 66% were able to understand the recommendations, and only 48% followed the recommended rate of fertilizer application. Literacy rates, irrigated area, contact with extension workers, subsidized micronutrients, and the infrastructure index had a positive influence on use of SHCs. The farmers benefited through optimal use of fertilizers and reduced cost of production. To replicate similar schemes in other developing countries, they have to enhance state capabilities in terms of soil sample collection and testing with the latest technologies such as GPS-enabled tablets and mass testing, along with better fertilizer subsidy policies.
ABSTRACT This article tests two hypotheses on whether forest fuel reduction treatments (prescribed burning and mechanical methods) reduce wildfire suppression costs and property damages. Data were collected on fuel treatments, fire suppression costs, and property damage associated with wildfires in United States National Forests over a five-year period throughout the continental United States. The continental U.S. pooled data model results show that overall, prescribed burning reduces suppression cost and both fuel treatment types reduce property damages. Further analysis was done to separate the data into seven geographic regions of the United States. Results of the multiple regressions show that in California and the northern Rockies, mechanical fuel treatments reduce wildfire suppression costs, while only in California did prescribed burning reduce the cost. The second hypothesis tested is that fuel treatments, by making wildfires less damaging and easier to control, may reduce property damage. This hypothesis is generally confirmed for hectares treated with prescribed burning in four out of five geographic regions that had a significant coefficient on prescribed fire. Mechanical fuel reduction had a significant effect in reducing property damage in two of the three regions.
Phosphorus (P) is an essential plant nutrient, but it can pollute rivers and lakes. State laws banning P in lawn fertilizer can reduce pollutant loads from urban areas. A random effects panel probit model using nationwide data from various sources was estimated to analyze factors affecting passage of these laws. To test hypotheses regarding alternative theories, we incorporated variables relating to public interest, private interest, ideology, and diffusion literatures and found support for all of them. States with higher percentages of water area were more likely to pass P-free laws, as were those with higher percentages of employment in water-related industries. Surprisingly, states with more fertilizer companies were more likely to pass P-free laws, but the effect was quadratic. We found an S-shaped diffusion curve as a function of time. No laws have been passed since 2013, when Scotts dropped P from their Turf Builder fertilizers.
This article presents an alternative framing of disasters as a form of structural violence resulting from the unequal distribution of structural power between various groups, organizations, institutions, and states in the contemporary global political economy. The article utilizes a theoretical framework that combines Johan Galtung’s typology of violence and Susan Strange’s conceptualization of structural power to open up new space for analysis in the disaster politics nexus. The article applies its framework to explore how an understanding of disasters as a form of violence problematizes trends within mainstream disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies. Specifically, the article examines the integration of financial risk-sharing mechanisms into the disaster politics nexus through new public–private partnerships between insurance and reinsurance firms, international financial institutions, and governments to transfer catastrophic risk to global capital markets. The article seeks to repoliticize these changes and bring questions of power back into the larger conversation surrounding DRR policies.
Abstract This article studies the divergence in the planning and equilibrium solutions for a multicell aquifer with heterogeneity in cell depths. A spatial model is developed that accounts for the lateral movement of water between cells. The optimal steady state of this problem is compared with the competitive equilibrium steady state. Studying the steady state conditions in the two outcomes allows the nature of the spatial externalities to be characterized and reveals the effects of varying cell depths. In a two-cell specification of the model, closed-form expressions are derived for the difference in optimal steady state water table elevations between the two cells. The two-cell model is then applied numerically to quantify the spatial externalities and asymmetry effects in Sheridan County, Kansas, which overlies the Ogallala aquifer. Simulated welfare losses in this model are relatively large and are sensitive to the asymmetry in cell depths.
This article compares and contrasts resilience frameworks to identify commonalities and gaps. It proposes use of a coupled human-natural systems framework (CHNS) to analyze community resilience to disasters. CHNS builds on the human ecosystem model that analyzes how institutions and social order shape fluxes and flows of resources between and within social and environmental systems. It expands on the model by including anthropological concepts of culture, agency, power, and discourse. The framework covers environmental and social legacies, pre-disaster trends and conditions, resilience measures, and system changes provoked by a disaster. The article proposes eleven categories of variables that affect resilience and discusses research steps for putting the framework into action. The CHNS framework can be used to predict system changes and identify resilience measures that allow communities to articulate and achieve their resilience goals.
For more than 20 years, economists have converted annual losses from injuries to natural resources caused by oil spills or hazardous-substance releases into their present-value equivalents using a 3% real discount rate. A 1999 technical paper from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provided three data series from 1981 through 1998 supporting a 3% real discount rate. However, data series for 1981 through 2016, which provide a proxy for the social rate of time preference for consumption by the public, support a lower discount rate. Furthermore, recent conceptual developments imply a lower discount rate for environmental services than for produced goods and services. We present several lines of evidence that support a real discount rate of not more than 2% for assessing intragenerational natural resource damages.
The economics of water trading in consumptive use has often overlooked the conservation incentives inherent in such trading when institutional rules like prior appropriation govern allocation of water. Utilizing an analytical framework of water trading between two irrigation water users employing irrigation techniques of similar efficiency, the study demonstrates how trade in consumptive use of water reduces incentives for greater diversion by users with prior claims to water, as compared with trade in water diverted. It also shows that such transfer increases the marginal value of water use for those users with junior (priority) claims to water rights. In addition, it explores the applicability of METRIC as a recent innovation in measuring consumptive water use at the field level, lowering the costs of water trading at a smaller spatial scale.
