This book, based on lectures on natural and environmental resource economics, offers a nontechnical exposition of the modern theory of sustainability in the presence of resource scarcity. It applies an alternative take on environmental economics, focusing on the economics of the natural...

1 The Classical Roots of Resource Economics -- 2 Optimal Depletion of Exhaustible Resources -- 3 Renewable Resources -- 4 Environmental Resources: Dynamics, Irreversibility and Option Value -- 5 Resources, Growth and Sustainability -- 6 Climate: The Ultimate Resource?.

We analyze in this chapter decision-making when costs and benefits of an action are uncertain, that is, when future preferences are uncertain. We begin, in Section 2, with the classical analysis by Krutilla et al. (1972) of whether the expected consumer's surplus is a correct measure of the net...

This paper develops two-period analytical and numerical models to study the question: given a stock of greenhouse gases that poses a risk of future damages of unknown magnitude, and the possibility of learning about damages, how do sunk abatement capital and a nondegradable stock of greenhouse...

The research questions and topics most likely to emerge in the near term future are assessed. A common theme is that policy issues will be an important driving force, as has generally been true in the past. More specifically, future theoretical advances are expected to occur in the treatment of...

We consider the problem of efficiency and existence of a competitive equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets where extraction costs are nonconvex. Nonconvexity is shown to imply that (1) (efficient) extraction ceases to the left of the minimum efficient scale, i.e., where average costs...

We analyze in this chapter decision-making when costs and benefits of an action are uncertain, that is, when future preferences are uncertain. We begin, in Section 2, with the classical analysis by Krutilla et al. (1972) of whether the expected consumer's surplus is a correct measure of the net...

Among others who point to environmental variability and managerial uncertainty as causes of fishery collapse, Roughgarden and Smith (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 93 (1996) 5078) argue that three sources of uncertainty are important for fisheries management: variability in fish dynamics, inaccurate...