Lecture notes on resource and environmental economics (Q779473)

The book is the 16th volume of the series The Economics of Non-Market Goods and Resources and it is based on lectures, seminars and conference presentations gave over the past 40+ years by the author. Chapter I ``The Classical Roots of Resource Economics'' try to answer to the question ``Why Do We Study Resource Economics'' starting from classical economists Robert Malthus, David Ricardo and John Stuart. Chapter II ``Optimal Depletion of Exhaustible Resources'' presents the extraction of an exhaustible resource as the tradeoff between benefits and costs associated with extraction today and benefits and costs of extraction in the future. Both ``reserves'' and ``resources'' issues are addressed by formal derivation of optimal depletion and the welfare theorem. Optimal depletion is also addressed by optimal control. Chapter III ``Renewable Resources'' develops a model in which the new feature is a process for regeneration, accomplished by introducing a biological growth function, the widely applicable logistic low, into the optimal control model. For optimal timber harvesting the authors introduce four models, one of it being the maximum sustainable yield (MSY). The optimal as result of MSY stock, in absence of discounting the bio-economic optimum, is equivalent to what the authors denominate as the purely biological optimum. Chapter IV ``Environmental Resources: Dynamics, Irreversibility and Option Value'' has an introduction for the transition from extractive to in situ resources. Speaking about the irreversibility in economics and in environmental processes, the author evaluates irreversible investments, or investments under uncertainty and irreversibility. The application presented is about valuation and management of tropical forests, not originally, for a forest area in Thailand. Chapter V ``Resources, Growth and Sustainability'' ``returns to the Malthusian question: are we running out of resources, whether due to population growth or rates of use of both exhaustible and renewable resources?'' For the answer, the author spikes about resource scarcity, about physical measures of scarcity and economic measures of scarcity. It is presented a rigorous formulation and preliminary empirical results. Chapter VI ``Climate: The ultimate Resource?'' presents some climate change projections, but the author considers that the IPC 2013 is too low, for different motives, also presented in the book. It is mentioned the importance of non-linearity in modeling climate change impacts, the irreversibility and catastrophic change in context, and implications for climate policy and some policy instruments.