Suchergebnisse

This article examines the impact of marine ecosystem quality on inbound coastal tourism in the Baltic, North Sea, and Mediterranean countries. Using marine protected areas (MPAs) and the fraction of overexploited species as a proxy for marine ecosystem quality, we apply an autoregressive distributed lag model in a destination-origin panel setup. The empirical findings suggest that the presence of MPAs and the fraction of overexploited species have a considerable impact on inbound coastal tourism. Moreover, the impact of the overexploitation index on tourism is persistent and its short-term (current) impact constitutes 65% of the long-term impact. The results underscore the importance of marine ecosystem quality for inbound coastal tourism and its overall impact that may exceed the impact of tourists' income. We also find that government performance is crucial for inbound tourism. © The Author(s) 2016.

Climate change impacts on coastal zones could be significant unless adaptation is undertaken. One particular macro-economic dimension of sea level rise (SLR) impacts that has received no attention so far is the potential stress of SLR impacts on public budgets. Adaptation will require increased public expenditure to protect assets at risk and could put additional stress on public budgets. We analyse the macroeconomic effects of SLR adaptation and impacts on public budgets. We include fiscal indicators in a climate change impact assessment focusing on SLR impacts and adaptation costs using a computable general equilibrium model extended with a detailed description of the public sector. Coastal protection expenditure is financed issuing government bonds, meaning that coastal adaptation places an additional burden on public budgets. SLR impacts are examined using several scenarios linked to three different Representative Concentration Pathways: 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5, and two Shared Socio-economic Pathways: SSP2 and SSP5. Future projections of direct damages of mean and extreme SLR and adaptation costs are generated by the Dynamic Interactive Vulnerability Assessment framework. Without adaptation, all world regions suffer a loss and public deficits increase respect to the reference scenario. Higher deficits imply higher government borrowing from household savings reducing available resources for private investments therefore decreasing capital accumulation and growth. Adaptation benefits result from two mechanisms: i) the avoided direct impacts, and ii) a reduced public deficit effect. This allows for an increased capital accumulation, suggesting that support to adaptation in deficit spending might trigger positive effects on public finance sustainability.

This paper proposes an operationally simple and easily generalizable methodology to incorporate climate change damage uncertainty into Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). First uncertainty is transformed into a risk measure by extracting damage distribution means and variances from an ensemble of socio economic and climate change scenarios. Then a risk premium is computed under different degrees of risk aversion, quantifying what society would be willing to pay to insure against the uncertainty of the damages. Our estimates show that the premium for the risk is a potentially significant addition to the "standard average damage", but highly sensitive to the attitudes toward risk. In the last research phase, the risk premium is incorporated into the climate change damage function of a widely used IAM which shows, consequently, a substantial increase in both mitigation and adaptation efforts, reflecting a more precautionary attitude by the social planner. Interestingly, adaptation is stimulated more than mitigation in the first half of this century, while the situation reverses afterwards.

Much research has been carried out on modelling soil erosion rates under different climatic and land use conditions. Although some studies have addressed the issue of reduced crop productivity due to soil erosion, few have focused on the economic loss in terms of agricultural production and gross domestic product (GDP). In this study, soil erosion modellers and economists come together to carry out an economic evaluation of soil erosion in the European Union (EU). The study combines biophysical and macroeconomic models to estimate the cost of agricultural productivity loss due to soil erosion by water in the EU. The soil erosion rates, derived from the RUSLE2015 model, are used to estimate the loss in crop productivity (physical change in the production of plants) and to model their impact on the agricultural sector per country. A computable general equilibrium model is then used to estimate the impact of crop productivity change on agricultural production and GDP. The 12 million hectares of agricultural areas in the EU that suffer from severe erosion are estimated to lose around 0.43% of their crop productivity annually. The annual cost of this loss in agricultural productivity is estimated at around €1.25 billion. The computable general equilibrium model estimates the cost in the agricultural sector to be close to €300 million and the loss in GDP to be about €155 million. Italy emerges as the country that suffers the highest economic impact, whereas the agricultural sector in most Northern and Central European countries is only marginally affected by soil erosion losses.