We explore poor farmers' incentives to adopt production systems that increase soil carbon sequestration, focusing on the impact of risk. A dynamic optimization model of conservation agriculture adoption is presented, where farmers optimize over expected utility of profits from agriculture and...

This paper explores the potential impacts of payments for agricultural soil carbon sequestration on poverty of farm households and on the sustainability of agricultural systems, using economic theory combined with evidence from three case studies in Kenya, Peru, and Senegal. The case studies...

Based on observations from all three tropical continents, there is good reason to believe that poor service providers can broadly gain access to payment for environmental services (PES) schemes, and generally become better off from that participation, in both income and non-income terms....

This paper gives an ecologist's overview of the deteriorating environmental situation. It then describes areas where the activities of ecological economists seem appropriate (e.g., ecosystem service valuation, trade) and others requiring more attention (e.g., definitions of utility, social...

The costs of living with wildlife are assessed using Namibian subsistence farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for deterrents to attacks on crops and livestock. A utility-theoretic approach jointly estimates household WTP for deterrent programs in two ‘currencies’: maize and cash. This has a...

We develop a bioeconomic model to gain insight into the challenges of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as applied to protect endangered species given wildlife-livestock disease risks and habitat fragmentation. We show how greater connectivity of habitat creates an endogenous trade-off....

The exact specification and motivation for an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is the subject of a vast literature in environmental economics. A remarkably diverse set of econometric approaches and candidate regressors have been proposed, which highlights the degree of model uncertainty...

Sustainable use of humid forest resources as a source of fertile land for cultivation requires long periods of fallow and the ability to move the zone of active cultivation from one location to another over time. At the individual field level, shifting cultivation is essentially a resource...