Mid Sweden University

Both in the United States and in Europe there is ongoing work on reversing habitat fragmentation and the attendant loss in biodiversity in river systems caused by hydropower and other developments. Fish ladders and other measures are being introduced to restore the connectivity in river systems. In this paper, we set up a theoretical model to investigate what the conditions are for such an investment to be socially profitable. We find that, even in cases where it would have been socially preferable not to build hydropower installations in the first place, connectivity-restoring measures affecting the installations are not necessarily socially beneficial. This is the case for a wide range of plausible assumptions about discount rates, investment costs and productivity losses. Recommendations for Resource Managers: Even in situations where it would have been socially preferable not to build hydropower plants in a river, carrying out measures now to reconnect different parts of the river and re-establish ecological connectivity may not be socially desirable. Any economic analysis of the value of re-establishing ecological connectivity needs to consider the time lags involved until the river ecology is restored. Reducing the time lags by actively resettling species does not necessarily improve the overall social profitability of reconnecting the different parts of the river.

We study Swedish implementation of the European Union’s Water Framework Directive, and compare the current implementation strategy with more flexible ‘bubble’ schemes, where measures can be traded among various locations within the same river system to reach the overall environmental target. Two different Swedish river systems, the Mörrum system with small-scale hydropower plants, and the Ångerman system with larger plants, are studied. We find that the environmental benefits that current policies are likely to accomplish could be achieved at well under half the cost in the Mörrum system, and at less than a tenth of the cost in the Ångerman system.

In this paper, we discuss the beginning of Rwanda's current work on natural capital accounts. Many developing countries began similar work on environmental satellite accounts in the 1990s and early 2000s, only to abandon them a few years later when the initial political interest waned. The question arises, therefore, as to whether renewed interest in these accounts has the potential to have a longer-lasting impact on national accounting practices. In Rwanda's case, the decision was to begin satellite accounting work by focusing on resources where key economic trade-offs between different uses had already begun to be identified by policymakers, and where the gathering of economic statistics had already been improved as a result. It seems likely that this approach could lead to more durable satellite accounts, and that a similar approach would be feasible in many other countries.

We describe a public good experiment, a type of economic experiment commonly used to examine feelings of prosocialitythat is, behaviour which is positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and friendshipand community cohesion, carried out in Rwanda. Contributions in different parts of the country are affected by the local intensity of the 1994 genocide, with more generous contributions being made in areas where violence was greater. This supports earlier research indicating that conflict experience leads to greater prosociality. However, we also find that people who have not, themselves, been targets of violence give lower contributions than people who have. The considerable group-related and regional differences in social behaviour may have implications for the country's policies to deal with social cohesion.

The paper analyzes the economic impacts of climate change-induced fluctuations on the performance of Ethiopia's agriculture, using a countrywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. We model the impacts on agriculture using a Ricardian model, where current agricultural production is modelled as a function of temperature and precipitation, among other things, and where future agriculture is assumed to follow the same climate function. The effect of overall climate change is projected to be relatively benign until approximately 2030, but will become considerably worse thereafter. Our simulation results indicate that, over a 50-year period, the projected reduction in agricultural productivity may lead to reductions in average income of some 20 per cent compared with the outcome that would have prevailed in the absence of climate change. This indicates that adaptation policies – both government planned and those that ease autonomous adaptation by farmers – will be crucial for Ethiopia's future development.

In Rwanda, rural water supply is not uniformly distributed. Rural areas are characterized by differences in the distance to the nearest water point and in water quality for domestic water, by watering frequency and water availability for irrigation water, and by the price for both. A household's perception of further improvements in water supply will, therefore, depend heavily on the situation it currently faces. The authors used a choice experiment to model how the individual status quo (SQ) affects preferences. Accounting for individual SQ information improves model significance relative to simply using the generic SQ parameter in the model, and the willingness to pay increases. Not using this information leads to a downward bias - and, in some cases, statistical insignificance - in estimates of households' valuation of health improvements linked to improved domestic water availability, as well as of increased watering frequency linked to the improved availability of irrigation water.

Sweden and other European Union countries are currently carrying out extensive work aimed at improving the marine and freshwater environment. The adaptive management approaches typically used for this require the development of new policy instruments and measures when needed, but also evaluations of instruments and measures already in use or under way. This paper reports on a study of the Swedish individual transferable quota system introduced in 2009 for the pelagic fishery. The new system was motivated mainly by economic arguments and, thus, the need to get incentives right. Despite this, the design of the Swedish system weakened the intended incentive effects in several ways, compared with the foreign systems that served as models. Moreover, the information needed for future evaluations was not collected, even though the need for future evaluations had been expressed explicitly and the data needs for this could be identified at the time that the system was introduced.

Given the considerable popularity of community-based wildlife management as a conservation tool, it is of interest to assess the long-run sustainability of this policy not only in conservation terms, but also in financial terms. In this paper, we use cost–benefit analysis to study the social and financial sustainability of a large set of community conservancies in Namibia, one of the few countries where community-based wildlife management policies have been in place long enough to assess their long-term viability. We find that, although the social sustainability is generally good, the financial sustainability is problematic – especially for the younger conservancies: there is no real link between conservation achievements and financial success. This calls into question the long-term sustainability of many of these conservancies: if they are unable to generate enough revenue to pay for their running expenditure, they will eventually fail – even if they are successful from a conservation point of view. Similar problems, linked to the way in which external funders have pushed for additional conservancies to be established regardless of financial considerations, are likely to be present in other countries that have implemented such programmes.

Read the Feature Paper: Community-based wildlife management failing to link conservation and financial viability and the Commentaries on this Feature Paper: Wildlife conservation without financial viability? The potential for payments for dispersal areas' services in Namibia; Achieving ecological conservation impact is not enough: setting priorities based on multiple criteria Animal Conservation.

Traditional sectors such as agriculture and fishing often receive special treatment from policymakers because such sectors are perceived to be associated with traditional cultural public good values. However, these values are often difficult to measure and few attempts have been made to do so. The recent European Union eel management directive creates an unusually clear-cut trade-off between eel fishing and other agents affecting the European eel population. It is possible, therefore, to measure directly the perceived public good value of the eel fishery in terms of other economic costs that policymakers are willing to incur in order to maintain eel fishing. Using Swedish data, we find that Swedish policymakers value the public good aspect of the remaining Swedish eel fishery at at least SEK 34 million (approximately EUR 3.4 million) annually, which is more than the commercial eel fishery’s actual production value.