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AbstractEconomic research and frameworks, comprehensively synthesized in "The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review" (Dasgupta 2021), can do much to help stem global biodiversity loss. However, ingrained features of economics as a discipline often produce explanations and solutions for environmental problems that advantage wealthy and powerful entities in our global society rather than those who are poor or otherwise marginalized. This paper highlights two dimensions of economic research related to biodiversity where disciplinary bias can lead to ineffective and inequitable work: biodiversity valuation, and targeting causes of biodiversity loss to be changed. First, it shows how valuation approaches can best be used to inform actions that capture both use and non-use values and include the perspectives and needs of people who are typically marginalized in governance processes. Second, it discusses how global action to preserve biodiversity will be cost-ineffective and inequitable unless we take at least some steps to identify and correct actions taken by wealthy countries and large-scale producers that contribute much to the biodiversity crisis, rather than focusing policy primarily on the behavior of low-income individuals and households.

When natural resource damages are caused by releases of hazardous materials into the environment, government trustees must conduct Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDAs) to support claims to recover the value of lost or damaged resources. This article sets forth theoretical arguments that support efforts to develop unbiased simplified NRDA methods for use by government trustees and proposes a set of criteria that can be used to evaluate the quality of any such simplified method. The authors then describe the simplified methods being used by five states across the country, affording academic economists a rare view of the kinds of methods state agencies use in‐house. The article evaluates those methods against the criteria set forth and discusses the potential of other nonstate‐specific simplified NRDA methods (benefit transfer and Type A models) to do the job better. The new framework established can guide future research to design simplified methods that are less biased than the simplified methods currently in use by some states without compromising ease of implementation. (JEL Q5, K32)

This article sets forth a framework for evaluating the environmental costs and benefits associated with agricultural genetically modified organisms (GMOs), including impacts on plants, humans, animals, and the environment at large. The authors build on this knowledge to explore how and why GMOs should be regulated, highlighting the need for policy makers to bear in mind that genetically modified seeds might substitute for traditional agricultural practices which themselves have detrimental impacts on the environment. To guide regulation formation, the authors present a review of the literature in environmental economics on optimal and second-best regulation, where the latter is used in the face of real-world complications. They then evaluate how current regulations measure up to those theoretical ideals. Finally, the authors provide some insight into what GMO crop regulation might accomplish by reviewing the evidence on the effects of pesticide regulations.