The presence of weeds which have developed resistance to chemical herbicides is a problem of rapidly growing importance in Australian agriculture. We present an optimal control model of herbicide resistance development in ryegrass, the weed for which resistance is most commonly reported. The...

The Murray Darling Basin Current is currently in drought. There are low water levels in most dams, and increased uncertainty about future rainfall. As a result management of the ecosystems in the basin that depend on river flows involves some hard decisions about what assets to save and what...

The use of market-based instruments (MBIs) to provide and protect ecosystem services has gained significant attention in Australia. Despite their popularity, MBIs are not appropriate for the provision of all ecosystem services. Rather, MBIs must be carefully designed given the ecosystem service...

Making conservation program payments conditional on outcomes offers potential efficiency and innovation improvements over input based contracts. This paper explores the trade-offs involved in choosing the payment criteria for biodiversity tenders. A model where the budget for a conservation...

A bioeconomic model of reservoir aquaculture in northern Vietnam is used toinvestigate the impacts of price and yield risk on the level, variability and skewness ofexpected net revenue and utility. Prices and yields are assumed to follow lognormaland beta distributions, respectively. Net revenue...

This paper develops methods to quantify weather derivatives and yield index insurance. These are exotic options that differ from financial options in several ways. The underlying random variable is not a price but a quantity such as millimeters of rainfall. Instead of option "pricing", a method...

A bioeconomic model of reservoir aquaculture in northern Vietnam is used to investigate the impacts of price and yield risk on the level, variability and skewness of expected net revenue and utility. Prices and yields are assumed to follow lognormal and beta distributions, respectively. Net...

Harold Hotelling proposed the first method for non-market valuation. Most of us believe this is the Travel Cost Method. In this paper I argue that the first method is from Hotelling's seminal study on the extraction of exhaustible resources. The first method is dynamic optimisation as applied to...