The eco-towns agenda is intended to address social and environmental concerns through facilitating exemplar new sustainable settlements. Sustainable development, which traditionally combines environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability, has recently been adopted as a cogent...

One of the cheapest ways to reduce CO2 emissions is thermal renovation of existing homes. Germany is a world leader in this project, with a strict building code, generous state subsidies, and an advanced renovation infrastructure. The effects of its policies are explored here in the light of...

German state subsidies for photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation now amount to over 200 million euros per month. Yet PV in Germany is only 30% as economically efficient as wind power, while up to 19 times as much energy would be saved if the same funds were used to thermally renovate homes....

The paper considers methodological issues pertinent to the economic assessment of ecosystem services. It is primarily written for a natural science audience however it also proposes a methodology which is intended to be of interest to economists charged with undertaking valuation work for...

Several experimental studies have reported that an otherwise robust regularity - the disparity between Willingness-To-Accept and Willingness-To-Pay - tends to be greatly reduced in repeated markets, posing a serious challenge to existing reference-dependent and reference-independent models...

We present an experiment designed to investigate the presence and nature of ordering effects within repeated response stated preference studies. We formulate a general structural model of such effects and use this to isolate signature patterns for position-dependent effects (learning about...

We develop and test guidance principles for benefits transfers. These argue that when transferring across relatively similar sites, simple mean value transfers are to be preferred but that when sites are relatively dissimilar then value function transfers will yield lower errors. The paper also...

Sustainable consumption demands radical changes to the socio-economic and socio-technical systems of provision in society, in order to realign development goals towards quality of life rather than material consumption. Complementary currencies (CCs - parallel media of exchange which run...

The paper presents results from a four year study of the economic and ecological potential for implementation of conservation schemes within the rapidly expanding palm oil plantations of South East Asia. Unparalleled access to financial records combined with a highly intensive ecological data...

This paper seeks to address the problem of conveying changes in open-water quality to the public within surveys such as within stated preference valuation studies. This is achieved through the creation of a new water quality ladder designed to address both the use value issues which have...