This article examines how the Supreme Court and appellate courts have taken into account developments in natural science and economics in evaluating Commerce Clause challenges to environmental laws, and applies this examination to the context of wetlands regulation. I present a descriptive...

In this note we discuss two alternative ways of undertaking a social cost-benefit analysis. One approach is the conventional one where benefits and costs are expressed in monetary units. The other approachuses an environmental asset as the payment vehicle. The properties of the two approaches...

Economic analyses of nature must somehow define the “environmental commodities” to which values are attached. This paper articulates a set of principles to guide the choice and interpretation of nonmarket commodities. We describe how complex natural systems can be decomposed consistent with...

Climate change scenarios predict an increase of extreme rain events, which will increase the risk of wastewater flooding and of missing legal water quality targets. This study elicits the willingness to pay to reduce ecological and health risks from combined sewer overflows (CSOs) in rivers and...

In this work, we solve a real-world facility location problem by means of a mixed integer linear programming model. The problem is faced by an Italian multi-utility company operating in the sector of waste management. The company works in several Italian regions to collect and treat the urban...

Calculation of vegetation indices, especially Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), has become one of the most successful, popular and traditional attempts in biogeographical research methods, because NDVI has certain advantages over other vegetation indices or band combinations. The...

Sixteen oil spills occurred in Korea between 1995 and 2010, including the Hebei Spirit oil spill (HSOS) in 2007, the largest (77,857 barrels) in Korean history. Yet compensation for environmental damages has never been claimed under the International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund for any of...

This chapter explores the theory and practice of measuring the economic costs and benefits of environmental changes that influence production, both in the context of firms and of households. The theory uses models of household and firm decision making to map the influence of environmental...

Conventional cost-benefit rules typically assume that the alternative to the project under evaluation is 'doing nothing' or 'business as usual'. In this note we contrast this approach to one where the alternative is to provide another environmental good or service. We show that this approach,...

By using ad hoc value transfer protocols, this paper offers a methodological contribution and provides accurate per hectare estimates of the economic value of some selected ecosystem services for all forest biomes in the world, identified following the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment taxonomy...