Richard B. Norgaard

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• PhD
• professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley

Ecosystems in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta are changing rapidly, as are ecosystems around the world. Extreme events are becoming more frequent and thresholds are likely to be crossed more often, creating greater uncertainty about future conditions. The accelerating speed of change means that ecological systems may not remain stable long enough...

Methodological pluralism has been a tenet of ecological economics since the journal's inauguration. Pluralism has fostered collaboration and forged new insights across disciplines. However, to counter the hegemonic voice of mainstream economics and inspire action on climate change and inequality, ecological economics requires coherence to produce m...

Kanchan Chopra attended early meetings of the ISEE, led the formation of the InSEE in 1998, and brought a strong contingent of Indian ecological economists to the ISEE meeting in 2000. She has been a strong and effective voice for the South in the ISEE.

Uncertainties in understanding ecosystems increase the risk that management will fail to achieve desired results. Adaptive management is a structured, iterative application of science-based knowledge to reduce uncertainties and build flexibility into decision-making. However, adaptive management is more easily planned than implemented, and it is on...

More than a hundred hydropower dams have already been built in the Amazon basin and numerous proposals for further dam constructions are under consideration. The accumulated negative environmental effects of existing dams and proposed dams, if constructed, will trigger massive hydrophysical and biotic disturbances that will affect the Amazon basin’...

Richard B. Norgaard is troubled by the incrementalism of Jeffrey Sachs's modest new plan for the US economy.

doi: https://doi.org/10.15447/sfews.2016v14iss4art6The State of Bay–Delta Science 2008 highlighted seven emerging perspectives on science and management of the Delta. These perspectives had important effects on policy and legislation concerning management of the Delta ecosystem and water exports. From the collection of papers that make up the State...

The State of Bay-Delta Science 2008 highlighted seven emerging perspectives on science and management of the Delta. These perspectives had important effects on policy and legislation concerning management of the Delta ecosystem and water exports. From the collection of papers that make up the State of Bay-Delta Science 2016, we derive another seven...

In 2014, the Third International Conference on the resilience of social-ecological systems chose the theme "resilience and development: mobilizing for transformation." The conference aimed specifically at fostering an encounter between the experiences and thinking focused on the issue of resilience through a social and ecological system perspective...

The State of Bay-Delta Science 2016 (SBDS) is a collection of papers that summarizes the scientific understanding of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, emphasizing progress made during the past decade. It builds on the first SBDS edition (Healey et al. 2008). Paper topics for this edition address the most relevant scientific issues in the Delta iden...

Legacy words and the search of a new human-environment dynamic

Words are integral to thinking and communicating. Words also carry old baggage. The Anthropocene necessitates new thinking and communication at the human-nature interface. Words like progress, natural, and thresholds are pervasive in both scientific and policy discourse, but carry baggage that will likely slow understanding of the Anthropocene and...

In the long run, responding to the challenge of climate change is going to require a de-carbonized economy with different energy systems and reconceptualized social-ecological relationships. Given the magnitude of the task, quite how to move in this direction remains a matter of some contention. In this chapter we examine several potentially comple...

Climate science has a long history. The Swede Svante Arrhenius in 1896 recognized that the burning of fossil fuels could add CO2 to the atmosphere in sufficient quantities to warm the Earth, though he thought it would take millennia for that to become apparent. Arrhenius himself thought this would be beneficial to agriculture, anticipating some con...

This book is an original, accessible, and thought-provoking introduction to the severe and broad-ranging challenges that climate change presents and how societies can respond. It synthesizes and deploys cutting-edge scholarship on the range of social, economic, political, and philosophical issues surrounding climate change. The treatment is introdu...

Climate change will challenge the human community in many ways for centuries to come. Human influence on the climate is now the primary driver of the shift to a less stable and more dynamic global environmental system—the Anthropocene. In this chapter we explore some profound implications of this new age. First, what we mean by “the environment” is...

The costs of climate change, like the proverbial “death and taxes,” are inevitable, though not entirely fixed or predictable in terms of when they arrive. Humanity has some control over the specifics. As with taxes, different people will be suffering different levels—though when it comes to climate change, the damage can fall most heavily on those...

Climate change presents a particularly tough challenge. There are of course plenty of other tough problems around: inequality, poverty, terrorism, the instabilities of financial systems, the risks of nuclear technologies, persistent and potentially violent antagonisms in international politics. Yet we have at least a sense of the nature of these so...

Almost all national governments now recognize the reality of climate change, and the need to respond. As should be clear from the previous chapter, the costs of inaction eventually become prohibitive. The repertoire of actions available to governments (and others) is substantial, and in this chapter we take a look at what can be done. Many actions...

It is all very well to contemplate what policies are likely to prove effective and just, as we did in Chapters 4 and 5, but that assumes we have some effective authority to put them into practice. So comparisons of (for example) emissions trading schemes against carbon taxes as ways of achieving greenhouse gas emissions reduction need some kind of...

Climate change is a collective global issue that requires a collective response—but that is not its whole story. Those most responsible for the existence of problems (industrialized societies with a long history of emissions) are not the same people or countries as those likely to be most affected by the consequences. Nor are they necessarily the s...

October 2013 San Francisco Estuary & Watershed Science: A Broad Perspective The Econocene and the California Delta Richard B. Norgaard Professor Emeritus Energy and Resources Group University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 USA norgaard@berkeley.edu Member, Delta Independent Science Board Considering the 50-fold increase and the globaliz...

In this commentary we critically discuss the suitability of payments for ecosystem services and the most important challenges they face. While such instruments can play a role in improving environmental governance, we argue that over-reliance on payments as win-win solutions might lead to ineffective outcomes, similar to earlier experience with int...

The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society presents an analysis of this issue that draws on the best thinking on questions of how climate change affects human systems, and how societies can, do, and should respond. Key topics covered include the history of the issues, the social and political reception of climate science, the denial of that...

Climate change is a special case of the generic problem of sustainable development, but the valuation methods and analytics of economics were never adjusted for sustainable development. This article describes the early history of cost-benefit analysis and the concerns of economists with distributional issues, who benefits and who loses from a proje...

Climate change presents perhaps the most profound challenge ever to have confronted human social, political, and economic systems. The stakes are massive, the risks and uncertainties severe, the economics controversial, the science besieged, the politics bitter and complicated, the psychology puzzling, the impacts devastating, the interactions with...

Insights from social system-environmental system coevolutionary thought experiments are abstract, mind opening, and can only be conveyed by leading readers through the experiment themselves. Undertaking applied coevolutionary analyses requires one to bound processes and fix some of the categories, contrary to the nature of the broad, opening nature...

What started as a humble metaphor to help us think about our relation to nature has become integral to how we are addressing the future of humanity and the course of biological evolution. The metaphor of nature as a stock that provides a flow of services is insufficient for the difficulties we are in or the task ahead. Indeed, combined with the mis...

Social and Natural sciences have, for the most part, ignored the existence of interlinked/interdependent evolutionary processes between cultural and biotic systems, both embedded in an overall dynamic biophysical environment. In this paper, we explore the potential of filling this gap by further developing a common coevolutionary framework based on...

This paper maps a coevolutionary research agenda for ecological economics. At an epistemological level coevolution offers a powerful logic for transcending environmental and social determinisms and developing a cross-disciplinary approach in the study of socio-ecological systems. We identify four consistent stories emerging out of coevolutionary st...

Both for its technological and institutional innovations and for its history of conflicts, California's water system has been one of the most observed in the world. This article and this Special Issue on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program continue in this tradition. CALFED is likely the most ambitious experiment in collaborative environmental policy and...

We address the future of science and governance for the California Delta, focusing on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, an interagency, multi-stakeholder effort to understand and manage the Delta for multiple purposes. We portray a Delta history as a coevolutionary process between science, governance and ecosystems. Global integrated environmental asse...

Purpose – This paper sets out to investigate the potential contribution of the inter‐disciplinary field of ecological economics to the explanation of the current economic crisis. The root of the crisis is the growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. Design/methodology/approach – The authors trace...

The modern world is characterized by an unprecedented fragmentation and specialization of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Yet to solve the problems—especially environmental problems—created in part by the successful application of this knowledge to expanded agricultural and industrial production, scientists must bring together this dispe...

Understanding the risks posed by anthropogenic climate change and the possible societal responses to those risks has generated a prototypical example of the challenge of “collectively seeing complex systems.” After briefly examining the ways in which problems like climate change reach the scientific and public agenda, we look at four different ways...

Background/Question/Methods . Models simplify the complexities of reality; they would be of no use if they did not. Economists typically use but one model in any analysis, one model in particular dominates environmental and development policymaking, and consequently policymaking is a relatively simple exercise, at least in theory. Ecologists on the...

We work with a basic general equilibrium model of an economy with an industrial good and a rural good. Industrial good production results in pollution that affects the provision of ecosystem services and thereby the production of the rural good. The assignment of ecosystem rights to the industrial polluters or to the rural pollutees results in diff...

Over the past quarter century, a new scientific activity has emerged: collective assessments by large numbers of scientists from different disciplines combining their expertise to better understand human interrelations with nature and to inform policy. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment exceeded all such assessments before it in both the breadth o...

The activities of economists associated with the IBP project entitled « The Principles, Strategies, and Tactics of Pest Population Regulation and Control in Major Crop Ecosystems » and their interaction with entomologists in the design and implementation of integrated control strategies are described. Profit maximization criteria and a method of co...

As human impacts to the environment accelerate, disparities in the distribution of damages between rich and poor nations mount. Globally, environmental change is dramatically affecting the flow of ecosystem services, but the distribution of ecological damages and their driving forces has not been estimated. Here, we conservatively estimate the envi...

Ecological economists excel at deliberating the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of framing a problem and incorporating insights from the multiple separate ways we understand complex problems. The broad findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment arose through such a deliberative approach between experts with different analytical fram...

Culture of Ecology. Reconciling Economics and EnvironmentBY ROBERT BABE xiv + 230 pp., 23.5 × 16 × 1.5 cm, ISBN 0 8020 3595 7 hardback, US$ 65.00/GB£ 42.00, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2006 - - Volume 34 Issue 1 - RICHARD B. NORGAARD

While there are criteria to distinguish which decisions might best be made through markets and which through governance, economists have generally neglected how the extent of markets per se affect the costs and thereby the effectiveness of governance. We provide a simple heuristic model and use assumptions typically made in economics to illustrate...

This paper provides an overview of what the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) calls “indirect and direct drivers” of change in ecosystem services at a global level. The MA definition of a driver is any natural or human-induced factor that directly or indirectly causes a change in an ecosystem. A direct driver unequivocally influences ecosystem p...

Not yet two decades after the publication of Our Common Future, the world's political and environmental landscape has changed significantly. Nonetheless, we argue that the concept and practice of sustainable development (SD)–as guiding institutional principle, as concrete policy goal, and as focus of political struggle–remains salient in confrontin...

We explore the practical difficulties of interdisciplinary research in the context of a regional- or local-scale project. We posit four barriers to interdisciplinarity that are common across many disciplines and draw on our own experience and on other sources to explore how these barriers are manifested. Values enter into scientific theories and da...

Winder, McIntosh, and Jeffrey (2005) thread acritique of bDevelopment BetrayedQ through an unu-sual reading of the history of evolutionary thought.Some of their commentary is interesting; frequently itis colorfully portrayed. For example, Winder et al.write that bIn emphasising the pervasiveness of co-evolution in socio-natural dynamics, Norgaard i...