Edward B. Barbier

Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Economics

Over the coming decades, global freshwater withdrawals are expected to grow, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Unless there are significant improvements in the efficiency of water use by economies, freshwater stress, crises, and scarcity will worsen. This paper explores further the economic relationship between water use efficiency an...

Over the coming decades, global freshwater withdrawals are expected to grow, especially in low and middle-income countries. Unless there are significant improvements in the efficiency of water use by economies, freshwater stress, crises and scarcity will worsen. This paper explores further the economic relationship between water use efficiency and...

Water withdrawals are expected to continue growing, further straining available freshwater resources for economies. This review focuses on two key relationships between water and economic growth for developed and developing countries. Rising freshwater withdrawals and stress are directly related to how our economies use water to develop and grow. T...

Despite some progress, the Group of 7 (G7) have yet to act collectively to foster a low-carbon transition of their economies. This paper outlines such a strategy, which would also encourage other economies to follow suit. This strategy has three elements: fossil fuel pricing reforms; recycling revenues to fund green innovation and to offset any adv...

As sea-level rise (SLR) accelerates due to climate change, its multidisciplinary field of science has similarly expanded, from 41 articles published in 1990 to 1475 articles published in 2021, and nearly 15,000 articles published in the Web of Science over this 32-year period. Here, big-data bibliometric techniques are adopted to systematically ana...

Whether environmental impacts, natural capital depreciation, and effective governance have impacted progress in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN Agenda 2030 has become a significant policy topic. We determine estimates of the changes in net welfare that indicate prog...

The rapid spread of information and communication technology (ICT) in Asia offers the promise of a “digital revolution” for agriculture. But realizing such gains will depend on overcoming digital poverty traps, whereby significant numbers of poor smallholders inhabiting remote regions are unable to take advantage of the benefits of ICT for agricult...

The growing risk of water crises, including drought, is one of the greatest challenges in the coming decades. Averting such crises will be especially daunting, given that they are just as much a failure of water management as they are a result of scarcity. A major shortcoming is the persistent underpricing of water . The increasing environmental an...

Mangroves have been converted and degraded for decades. Rates of loss have declined over the past decades, but achieving resilient coastlines requires both conservation and restoration. Here, we outline the challenges for the global restoration of mangroves and what actions could enhance restoration. Ambitious global targets for mangrove restoratio...

As sea-level rise (SLR) accelerates due to climate change, its multidisciplinary field of science has similarly expanded, from about 50 documents in 1990 to nearly 15,000 documents from 1990 to 2021. Here, big data, bibliometric techniques are adopted to systematically analyse this growing, large-scale literature. Four main research clusters (theme...

Rural transformation is a process of comprehensive societal change whereby countries diversify their economies and reduce their reliance on agriculture and other primary product industries. “Greening” rural transformation implies making this process of structural change and economic diversification less environmentally damaging, including reducing...

The “Dasgupta Review” of the economics of biodiversity (Dasgupta 2021) identifies many factors that threaten the ecological sustainability of our economies. This article examines how two policy failures - the underpricing and underfunding of nature – influence global land use change and terrestrial biodiversity loss. If natural areas are priced too...

We use childhood exposures to disasters as natural experiments inducing variations in adulthood outcomes. Following the fetal origin hypothesis, we hypothesize that children from households with greater exposure will have poorer health, schooling, and consumption outcomes. Employing a unique dataset from Bangladesh, we test this hypothesis for the...

In a world of growing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, ensuring a safe Anthropocene for humankind is essential. Managing an increasingly "fragile" planet requires new thinking on markets, institutions and governance built on five principles: ending the underpricing of nature, fostering collective action, accepting absolute limits, att...

Chapter 9 examines the evidence of growing adoption and initiatives by corporations, businesses and the financial system to incorporate actions to mitigate environmental risks and improve the global environment, and look in particular at the possibility of private sector action to move toward better environmental stewardship. Firms increasingly fin...

Land use change has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change that could be potentially catastrophic for both humankind and the environment. Chapter 5 explores how this threat is related to the underpricing of natural landscape in all economies, and how addressing this critical problem is es...

The need to curb human activities threatening critical Earth system processes, resources and sinks is an important starting point for thinking how best to manage our planet in an efficient, sustainable and inclusive manner. Chapter 3 explains how this can form the basis for an “economics for a fragile planet.” This perspective began with Kenneth Bo...

In a world of growing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, ensuring a safe Anthropocene for humankind is essential. This introductory chapter outlines five key principles of an "economics" for a fragile planet: ending the underpricing of nature; fostering collective action; accepting absolute limits; attaining sustainability; and promotin...

Chapter 4 focuses on addressing climate change. International action is failing to deliver on slowing greenhouse gas emissions to keep the planet from warming dangerously, yet considerable progress is occurring by some countries, companies, states or provinces, and even cities. The chapter argues that ending the underpricing of fossil fuels is esse...

Chapter 7 argues that, if we are to halt humankind’s unrelenting exploitation of marine sources and sinks, we need to change our economic approach to oceans and coasts. It begins with addressing the underpricing of marine capital and their services and the underfunding of ocean and coastal conservation. Addressing these challenges must also be the...

The concluding chapter brings together the main themes and messages of the book. Chapter 10 argues that the economics for a “fragile planet” is about ensuring that our economies can attain a “safe,” as opposed to “catastrophic” or “uncertain” Anthropocene. To be successful, such a transition must transform our markets, institutions and governance t...

In a world of growing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, ensuring a safe Anthropocene for humankind is essential. Managing an increasingly "fragile" planet requires new thinking on markets, institutions and governance built on five principles: ending the underpricing of nature, fostering collective action, accepting absolute limits, att...

Chapter 2 reviews the mounting scientific evidence of the growing “fragility” of the Earth system and its implications for the planet. It traces the long history of how humans have exploited nature to create wealth, starting with the Agricultural Transition 10,000 years ago up to the Fossil Fuel Age and its global consequences. The chapter then foc...

Rising freshwater scarcity is a present-day danger that is likely to worsen as supplies become increasingly scarce. Chapter 6 takes the view that the current overuse of freshwater supplies worldwide is as much a failure of water management as it is a result of scarcity. Outdated governance structures and institutions, combined with continual underp...

Chapter 8 elaborates further on the public policies needed for “greening” economic activity and promoting better stewardship of the environment. The focus is primarily on strategies that governments might adopt to achieve economy-wide green transformation for more efficient, sustainable and inclusive development. The chapter explores what these sho...

Whether institutional quality and governance help or hinder progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of UN Agenda 2030 is an important issue to consider. These fundamental social structures are generally under-represented among the SDGs, but institutional quality and governance often have an important role in supporting or const...

This chapter explores further the policy implications of our analyses conducted in previous chapters. The discussion highlights the areas of progress needed to achieve the SDGs and also points to key policies and investments needed to attain the overall objective of sustainable development. The need for such policies is especially critical in a pos...

This chapter explores how we can enhance and better employ our welfare analysis of the 17 SDGs to account for any environmental impacts, institutional effectiveness, and inclusivity of progress towards sustainability. We apply this analysis to the world, low-income countries, and our nine representative countries. Our results suggest that progress...

The aim of the SDGs is to provide guidance to countries in attaining key economic, environmental, and social benchmarks that are considered essential to sustainable development. In this chapter, we address an important question: is progress towards the SDGs sufficient to ensure sustainability? Addressing the continuing environmental costs of global...

This chapter discusses our selection of key indicators for assessing progress towards each SDG and its associated target. We begin by discussing the relationship between SDGs, targets, and indicators. We then explain the criteria for choosing our representative indicators for assessing progress towards each SDG, and our representative selection of...

Using a representative indicator for each goal, this chapter conducts a quantitative assessment of current progress over 2000 to 2018 for each of the 17 SDGs. This assessment is applied to all countries of the world, to low-income countries, and our nine selected countries. Based on our measure of quantitative change, we then assess whether the rep...

This chapter explains our economic method for assessing whether or not success towards implementing all 17 SDGs is being achieved. We show that it is possible to measure the welfare effects of an increase in one SDG that takes into account any interactions with any other SDG. The welfare analysis that we develop in this chapter can then be applied...

This chapter applies our theoretical framework to assess progress in attaining the 17 SDGs since 2000, using a representative indicator for each goal. We use No Poverty (SDG 1) as our benchmark indicator, and we estimate the per capita welfare change of reductions since 2000 in poverty rates net of any gains or losses in attaining each of the remai...

This concluding chapter summarizes the key themes of the book, and discusses key areas of future research in assessing progress towards the SDGs. In a post-pandemic world, we will need policies that accelerate attainment of the 17 SDGs as well as the rising threats of global environmental risks and the growing wealth gap between rich and poor.

Evidence suggests that mangroves protect economic activity in coastal areas. We estimate this protection from mangroves and coastal elevation globally, examining both “direct” and “indirect” exposure events (< 100 km vs. ≥ 100 km distance from a cyclone’s “eye”, respectively). We find that higher elevation (≥ 50 m) or wide mangroves (≥ 10 m seaward...

This introductory chapter describes briefly the UN 2030 Agenda and 17 Sustainable Development Goals and provides an overview of the book. The chapter also elaborates on the novel and unique contribution of the book to the sustainability literature, and explains how an economic approach to “putting the sustainable development goals into practice” is...

This chapter relates the current SDGs to their forerunner, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the systems approach to sustainability. We illustrate how each of the 17 SDGs can be characterized as a goal primarily attributed to the environmental, economic, or social system, as suggested by the basic principles of sustainability science. The...

In outlining how “valuing the environment as input” could be applied to a number of contexts in low and middle-income countries, Karl-Göran Mäler laid the foundation for many additional applications of the production function approach as reported (Mäler in Valuing environmental benefits in developing countries. Special Report 29, Michigan State Uni...

One of the earliest attempts in economics to operationalize sustainable development was the systems approach, which characterizes sustainability as the maximization of goals across environmental, economic and social systems. This paper explores the link between the systems approach to sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whi...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03271-2.

We examine the effectiveness of sub-national actions to control a novel disease, such as COVID-19, in the absence of national policy. Evidence shows that countries where sub-national governments have undertaken unilateral social distancing measures to combat the pandemic with little or no coordination have performed less well in controlling the spr...

Evidence suggests that emerging infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, originate from wildlife species, and that land-use change is an important pathway for pathogen transmission to humans. We first focus on zoonotic disease spillover and the rate at which primary human cases appear, demonstrating that a potential outbreak is directly related to th...

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on conservation policies and practice at multiple scales, including protected and conserved areas (PCAs). There is a need to understand the implications for PCAs of recent actions, enacted or promoted in the wake of COVID-19. To fill this knowledge gap, we reviewed economic stimulus packages and other...

Evidence suggests that climate change will increase the frequency of intense storms. Mangroves may protect economic activity in coastal areas. We develop a model that illustrates protections from mangroves and coastal elevation and estimate the impacts of cyclones on coastal economic activity. We find that higher elevation or expansive mangroves al...

Many of the environment and natural resources that constitute key “safe operating spaces”, as designated by planetary boundaries, are being exploited by a handful of large firms with considerable market share. In this paper, we discuss how the environment and natural resources that occur within a safe operating space can be treated as an exploitabl...

This is the first book that employs economics to develop and apply an analytical framework for assessing progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors explore the historical context for the underlying sustainability concept, develop an economics-based analytical framework for assessing progress towards the SDGs, and discuss...

Over past decades, low and middle‐income countries have experienced considerable expansion of agricultural land, yet this effect on growth has not been examined The following paper shows that the Solow‐Swan growth model can be extended to the case whereby arable land is expanding, as originally suggested by Solow (1956). This extension indicates th...

The rapid loss of estuarine and coastal ecosystems (ECEs) in recent years has raised concerns over their role in protecting coastal communities from storms that damage property, cause deaths, and inflict injuries. This paper reviews valuation studies of the protective service of ECEs in terms of reducing flood damages. Although the number of studie...

The poster demonstrates how to combine Bow-Ties and BBN methodology to inform environmental decision-making in coastal areas. The poster is part of the the international research project Land2Sea, where the focus is how to do integrated modelling of the consequences of terrestrial activities and climate change for aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem...

Earth’s ecosystems, upon which all life depends, are in a severe state of degradation. The upcoming UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration aims to “prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.” These Voices articulate why and what action is urgently needed.

For centuries, mangrove forests and adjacent ecosystems have been cast in a negative light due to their (often perceived) ecosystem disservices. We give contemporary examples of how such viewpoints about mangroves continue to be communicated today, with potentially adverse consequences for mangrove conservation and public support. Since public perc...

Rebuilding G20 economies after the COVID-19 pandemic requires rethinking what type of economy we need and want in the future. Simply reviving the existing ‘brown’ economy will exacerbate irreversible climate change and other environmental risks. For G20 economies, investing in a workable and affordable green transition is essential. A good place to...

Although national commitments to the Paris Climate Accord have waned, carbon mitigation by sub-national entities is on the rise globally. We examine the effectiveness of sub-national jurisdictions (e.g., states, provinces, cities) in collectively enacting greenhouse gas abatement strategies. We develop a simple model to explore the conditions under...

Green transformation offers the promise of attaining increased productivity, higher incomes and wealth creation through structural change while simultaneously reducing overexploitation of natural resources and environmental degradation. This promise, however, does not materialize automatically. The key question addressed by this article is how a gr...

Developing countries are highly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to the lack of international support for ensuring progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet the mounting financial burden faced by all countries means that additional support is unlikely to be forthcoming in the near future. It is critical that...

Sustainable Development Goal 14 of the United Nations aims to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”. Achieving this goal will require rebuilding the marine life-support systems that deliver the many benefits that society receives from a healthy ocean. Here we document the recovery of marine...

Agricultural land expansion is a prominent feature in today’s developing countries. It is associated with a structural pattern of land use in many remote land-abundant regions where large-scale commercial primary product activities coexist with increased concentration of smallholders in more marginal areas. The result may be boom-bust cycles of dev...

A levy on fossil fuels can support and restore ecosystems that help to stem climate change. A levy on fossil fuels can support and restore ecosystems that help to stem climate change. A man rides a horse through rainforest in the Bribri indigenous territory in the Talamanca mountains, Costa Rica

Scientists suggest placing planetary boundaries on human-induced threats to key Earth system sinks and resources. Such boundaries define a “safe operating space” on depletion and pollution. Treating any remaining “space” as a depletable economic asset allows derivation of optimal and actual rules for depletion. We apply this analysis to natural for...

Remote less-favored agricultural lands (LFAL) are regions in developing countries that face severe biophysical constraints on production and are in geographical locations that have limited market access. We estimate that, across developing countries, 130 million people with high infant mortality live in such areas, and the incidence is 40%. In low-...

Assessment of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has largely focused on formulating appropriate targets and indicators for each goal. Much less attention has been devoted to estimating possible tradeoffs and complementarities in attaining the various SDGs. Yet such tradeoffs and complementarities clearly exist. We develop an analytical mod...

Cambridge Core - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics - Natural Resources and Economic Development - by Edward B. Barbier