Edward Barbier Bücher

Addressing the pressing environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, this book presents innovative strategies for managing a fragile planet. It emphasizes the need for rethinking markets, institutions, and governance to foster sustainability. The author provides a comprehensive policy blueprint aimed at creating a safer, more inclusive world, highlighting the importance of proactive measures in the face of ecological risks and scarcities.

"The Green Revolution" of the 60s and 70s produced immense gains in food cereal production in the Third World. But there are huge problems in the "post revolutionary" era - farmers with small or marginal holdings have benefited less than wealthier farmers, intensive mono-cropping has made production more susceptible to environmental stresses and shocks. Now that there is evidence of diminishing returns from intensive and intensively chemical agricultural production the authors contend that what is needed is a new approach, equally revolutionary, but different in its ideas and style. The book sets out what is meant by "sustainable" agriculture in the new era and look at effects of international economic restraints and of national policies on the kind of development they see as necessary. It charts a path for sustainable livelihoods for Third World farmers enmeshed by forces outside their control. It describes methods of evaluating and resolving the tough trade-offs at all levels of intervention, from international trade down to the individual farm. Edward Barbier is co-author of "Blueprint for a Green Economy" and author of "Economics, Natural-Resource Scarcity and Development".

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is one of the most useful tools of applied economies for the social appraisal of public projects and government policies. This textbook shows how CBA can be applied to environmental policy choice and environmental resource management.

This report has been prepared by the London Environmental Economics Centre (LEEC). LEEC is a joint venture, established in 1988, by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the department of Economics of University College London (UCL). Popularly known as The Pearce Report, this book is a report prepared for the Department of the Environment. It demonstrates the ways in which elements in our environment at present under threat from many forms of pollution can be costed. The book goes on to show ways in which governments are able, as a consequence of this analysis, to construct systems of taxation which would both reduce pollution by making it too costly and generate revenue for cleaning up much of the damage. The book ends with a series of skeleton programmes for progress.

Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new 'frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.