Ecological Economics

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) suffer from several structural characteristics that jeopardize their ability to achieve a sustainable energy future. Their reliance on imported fossil fuels exacerbates their exposure to external threats on international energy markets. Their energy systems are also exposed to internal disturbances that disrupt the proper production, transmission and distribution of energy. The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which island energy systems are vulnerable to shocks and internal dysfunctions over which they have no control. For this purpose, we build a composite index of energy vulnerability using the Multi-Layer Benefit-of-the-Doubt approach. Such an approach enables the identification of economic, environmental and social dimensions that play an important role in the relative energy vulnerability of SIDS. Ultimately, we shed light on the priority areas requiring immediate attention in order to mitigate energy vulnerability in SIDS.

The literature investigating the relationship between natural hazards and individuals' subjective well-being has so far focused on industrialized countries. Using the life-satisfaction approach, this paper is the first to study the link between natural hazards, in particular heavy storms and droughts, and subjective well-being for a small-scale island society in the Pacific Ocean. Results indicate that the experience of drought markedly diminished life satisfaction, whereas the experience of storms had only somewhat negative impact. The primary driver of the negative well-being impact appeared to be damage experience for both storms and droughts. Since regular cash-income did not exist for the majority of the population, the marginal effect could not be calculated in monetary terms. To account for differences in wealth across respondents, we developed a wealth index in the form of a simple ‘asset score’. Comparing the marginal effect of the hazard variables with our measure of wealth, the positive marginal effect of doubling the number of household assets was significantly smaller than the negative impact of drought experience on subjective well-being.

We investigate the interplay between individual's intrinsic motivation and green incentives on stated climate change adaptive behavior. Using experimental and survey data in the Fiji Islands, we find that intrinsic motivations favoring pro-environmental [beliefs] positively influence the intention to adapt. Moreover we find that green incentives crowd-in intrinsic pro-environmental motivations and further facilitate the uptake of adaptive investments. Demographic factors of ethnicity, occupation, participation in and access to credit also influence cognitive and behavioral constructs to varying degrees.

The existence of an unequal exchange between rich and poor countries has been well studied in the literature, explained by differences in labour costs that were reflected in the prices of traded goods. Research has also demonstrated that the failure to include environmental impacts in prices of traded goods concealed an ecologically unequal exchange. This paper contributes to the discussion with the newly coined concept of caloric unequal exchange that defines the deterioration of terms of trade in food in units of calories. Exports and imports to and from Latin America and the Caribbean are analysed for the period 1961 through 2011 in volume, value, and calories, for different groups of products. The study concludes that although calories exported by the region to the rest of the world are more expensive than those imported, the ratio is deteriorating over time. This trend is found to be dependent of the trading partner involved. The region is helping the rest of the world in supplying their diets at a lower cost. A side result is that globalisation is homogenising diets over time, concentrating most food consumption in a reduced number of products, and therefore increasing interdependency among countries and affecting food security.

Researchers from multiple disciplines point to the link between fossil fuel consumption and socio-ecological deterioration. Studying the energy metabolism of the Balearic Islands (1986–2012) gives insights on the ecological, economic and social consequences of regional specialization in mass tourism. The methodology applied, Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM), has been developed in the last decades to analyze societal metabolism from the perspective of complex systems. This study has allowed us to see that since the entry of Spain in the European Economic Community in 1986, the real-state/tourism business model has been reinforced giving place to a higher level of consumption of fossil fuels, an increase in work instability and a diminishing of labor productivity.

Physical economy research has, thus far, focused on the throughput of materials that underpin economic development. The role of stocks of buildings and infrastructure has remained underexplored, yet it is the physical stock that provides service to society. To fill this gap, this research investigates stock dynamics in Japan in relation to population and economic drivers using panel regression and IPAT analyses for the past five decades. We recognize characteristic changes in the strength and relative influence of the drivers throughout time, in different subnational regions, and on the dynamics of buildings compared to transportation infrastructure. We find that material stock accumulation mainly occurred due to growth in economic activity, specifically by tertiary sector demand. Apart from a period of government-driven stock accumulation in the 1990s to stimulate economic growth, as economic and population growth slowed stock accumulation dynamics also changed signaling a new stock saturation trend. Migration from rural to urban areas has recently become an influential driver, leaving behind underused buildings and roads. This analysis provides a case study on how socio-economic drivers and stock accumulation interacted and changed while the country matured, which may have implications for understanding stock dynamics in rapidly industrializing economies.

Different world regions have followed very different trajectories for natural resources use over the recent decades. Latin America has pursued a development path based largely on exports of primary resources. Adopting this path has characteristic environmental and social impacts. In this paper, we provide the first broad based estimate of material use and material efficiency for the region, beginning in 1970 and extending to the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. The results show a region with rapidly growing primary materials consumption, which is simultaneously becoming less efficient at converting those resources into national income. Using an IPAT framework, we found that population growth and rising per-capita incomes made comparable contributions to growing material use, while technological change as reflected in material intensity, did not moderate consumption. Increasing materials intensity, observed for the region as a whole, is also observed for most individual countries. This contrasts with some other world regions, and implies that many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will confront higher environmental pressures than expected when expanding their extractive industries to take advantage of new demand from other world regions, while simultaneously supplying the requirements for their own domestic industrial transformations and urbanization.

In this paper, we explain how the latest international handbook on environmental accounting, the System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting or SEEA (United Nations, European Commission, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and World Bank (2003). Handbook of National Accounting, Studies in Methods. New York, United Nations.), can be used to measure weak and strong sustainability. We emphasise the importance of understanding the conceptual differences between weak and strong sustainability. We then outline what we consider to be current best practice in measurement, all the time flagging the relationship between our discussion and that of the SEEA-2003. This is an important task in our view, because, despite covering a very wide range of relevant conceptual and empirical issues, the handbook is by design not meant to provide clear guidelines for the purpose of measuring sustainability in either its weak or strong version.

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is a highly developed modern city where technical and economic advances have made it possible to support 7 million people on 120 km2 of built-up land, resulting in 58 000 people per km2, one of the highest population densities in the world. This population depends on a continual supply of materials, energy and information to function, and these resources are mainly supplied from outside Hong Kong's own geographical boundaries. The ecological footprint (EF) of Hong Kong due to its direct and indirect consumption of renewable resources and waste generation is presented. Additionally, the paper traces the spatial patterns of Hong Kong's EF and examines the implications of this ecosystem appropriation. The study finds an EF for Hong Kong of about 6 ha per capita, with the largest appropriation occurring for marine ecosystems. If the impacts of fish farming are included, Hong Kong appropriates a marine area nearly 2000 times its own built-up city area. Current resource consumption and waste generation patterns in Guangdong, China — where much of Hong Kong's terrestrial ecosystem appropriation occurs — are also discussed.

There is a growing consensus among natural and social scientists that sustainability depends on maintaining natural capital. However, progress to put this ecological condition to practice has been slow, not least because of the inability of making these objectives measurable. Therefore, to overcome this obstacle, assessment frameworks for natural capital are needed. This study presents a simple framework for national and global natural capital accounting. It demonstrates, using the example of Italy, an accounting framework which tracks national economies’ energy and resource throughput and translates them into biologically productive areas necessary to produce these flows. This calculation has been applied to over 52 countries. With this framework, based on the ecological footprint concept, human consumption can be compared with natural capital production at the global and national level, using existing data. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.