Hochard, Jacob. "Investing wisely in land restoration." Nature Sustainability 5, no. 1 (2022): 3-4.
Degraded land is being restored along an 8,000 km stretch across Sahelian countries. A new analysis reveals promising economic returns from recent projects and informs the targeting of strategies for newly pledged funds.
Fourteen years ago, a gargantuan restoration project started with the aim to establish the world’s largest living structure — the Great Green Wall — across the Sahel. The project’s plan, to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, also seeks to promote food security, climate resilience and economic productivity, which will benefit land users directly and the broader society indirectly. However, to date, 78% of the area remains unfinished1. Fundraising has been a critical barrier and hinges on determining the economic viability of new restoration projects, which includes assessing the social feasibility, developing a better understanding of the local and global restoration benefits and gauging the expected return on investment according to the performance of early restoration undertakings. An article published by Alisher Mirzabaev and co-authors1 in Nature Sustainability assesses the economic returns from 16 years of land restoration projects in the Sahel, which include early Great Green Wall efforts, as an indicator of the viability of future projects along the land restoration belt.
Hochard, Jacob P., Edward B. Barbier, and Stuart E. Hamilton. "Mangroves and coastal topography create economic “safe havens” from tropical storms." Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (2021): 1-8.
Collaborators:
Edward Barbier (Colorado State University)
Stuart Hamilton (Salisbury University)
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 width) alone shelter economic activity from indirect cyclone exposure, whereas protection from direct cyclone exposure occurs only in high elevation communities with wide mangroves. Our results reveal that the majority of these “safe havens” are in upper middle-income countries but provide significant benefits to populations in lower middle-income countries.
Shogren, Jason F., Jacob Hochard, Katherine D. Lee, and Leticia Varelas Henderson. "Experimental mindset for environmental challenges: the puzzling case of public good contributions." European Review of Agricultural Economics 48, no. 4 (2021): 785-804.
Collaborators:
Jason Shogren (University of Wyoming)
Katherine Lee (University of Idaho)
Leticia Varelas Henderson (University of Wyoming)
The experimental mindset strips down and mimics social constructs in a setting we can use to understand how institutions create or destroy economic value. We explore how to use the mindset to consider climate change mitigation, in which more investment in climate mitigation by the collective, the less costly for each party. Using the lab to capture Conference of the Parties declining-cost environment with a jigsaw puzzle to mimic real-time costs, we find decreasing ‘cost’ of commitment increases contribution but not reaching the public good threshold. Highlighting the economies of scale might be an effective way to elicit greater commitment.
Under review.
Funded by USDA-Center for Behavioral and Experiment Agri-Environmental Policy Research (CBEAR)
Collaborators:
Yuanhao Li (Norwegian School of Economics)
David Finnoff (University of Wyoming)
Jason Shogren (University of Wyoming)
Agricultural expansion is a leading cause of habitat fragmentation reducing the population size and resilience of many species. Private landowners are often compensated to modify agricultural practices that segment habitat patches. We examine the scope for reuniting fragmented habitat when landowners bargain over an incentive program’s budget. The bargaining approach offers advantages to the classic Agglomeration Bonus mechanism. First, unequal payouts may be more equitable when private sentiments influence a landowner’s opportunity cost of parcel enrollment. Second, mutually agreeably payouts avoid systematic over-payment to “green” landowners and underpayment to “brown” landowners. Third, shifts in the Pareto-efficient frontier reflect the marginal cost of promoting species recovery on varying degrees of fragmented land; a cost often known to wildlife managers. All experiment participants converged towards fragmented and contiguous enrollment patterns when socially and privately optimal strategies were aligned. Presenting budget information caused participants to overshoot the Pareto-efficient frontier in early rounds thus delaying the first round in which they achieved the optimal pattern of enrollment. We join a growing literature suggesting that budget transparency may hinder the effectiveness of payment for ecosystem services programs.
Howard, Gregory, John C. Whitehead, and Jacob Hochard. "Estimating discount rates using referendum-style choice experiments: An analysis of multiple methodologies." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 105 (2021): 102399.
Collaborators:
Gregory Howard (East Carolina University)
John Whitehead (Appalachian State University)
There is a growing literature that utilizes stated preference surveys to estimate discount rates. A review of the literature reveals large variation both in the discount rate estimates coming from different stated preference surveys and in the specific methodologies used to estimate discount rates. While most methods use similar theory and logic in deriving discount rate estimates, it is an open question how much of the variation seen in the literature is due to differences in methodology. Using a single data set of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid control preferences, we estimate annual discount rates using six different methodologies and find that most of our estimates are tightly clustered between 25-31%. One methodology yields an outlier value of 200%. We also use multiple metrics to examine which methodology yields the “right” discount rate.
Sims, Charles, David Aadland, David Finnoff, and Jacob Hochard. "What are the benefits of delisting endangered species and who receives them?: Lessons from the gray wolf recovery in Greater Yellowstone." Ecological Economics 174 (2020): 106656.
Collaborators:
David Aadland (University of Wyoming)
David Finnoff (University of Wyoming)
Charles Sims (University of Tennessee)
This paper uses a spatial predator-prey model to provide insights into the complex and politically charged management of species recently removed from the federal endangered species list. The model is motivated by the recently delisted gray wolf with spatiotemporal dynamics between elk, wolves, hunters, cattle ranchers, and the tourism industry in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. State wildlife managers set hunting rates for elk and wolves to maximize the discounted net benefits from tourism, hunting, cattle grazing, and non-use values that accrue to the area while ensuring a minimum viable wolf population meant to prevent extinction. We show that the cost of wolf conservation paid by residents and visitors to the area falls substantially after delisting. These costs savings arise by taking advantage of differences in habitats and economies across the region resulting in an unequal spatial distribution of wolves and of wolf hunting opportunities. The cost savings from delisting are reduced when a more even distribution of wolves and hunting opportunity is achieved, highlighting a bioeconomic equity-efficiency tradeoff. Finally, we show that current livestock compensation programs cannot decrease the discrepancy between state and federal management following delisting but propose a federally-funded alternative that can.
Kruse, Jamie, and Jacob Hochard. "Economics, Insurance, and Flood Hazards." Southern Economic Journal 85, no. 4 (2019): 1027-1031.
Collaborator:
Jamie Kruse (East Carolina University)
This article introduces the Symposium Economics, Insurance, and Flood Hazards. We provide background on the magnitude of recent extreme weather events and subsequent flooding in terms of lives and property damage. After a brief background of the National Flood Insurance Program and its renewal, we describe the papers contributed to the symposium and their relationship to the challenges described by the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO).
Funded by Environmental Protection Agency STAR Grant (2017-2020)
Collaborators:
Randall Etheridge (East Carolina University)
Ariane Peralta (East Carolina University)
Charles Sims (University of Tennessee Knoxville)
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) support local economies but are associated with air, surface and groundwater pollution. Community-level management of pollution-related health risks requires (i) a local capacity to identify at-risk neighborhoods and (ii) an understanding of how community defensive investments into physical capital and natural capital relate to one another in their capacity to reduce human exposure to contaminants. Such community-based responses to health externalities recognize that command-and-control style upstream regulation may be less cost effective and potentially more harmful to downstream communities when livelihoods depend critically on local industries. Community-led mitigation of human health risks must make targeted investments into public infrastructure and natural capital to expand the flows of public services and ecosystem services to at-risk households. (1) Objectives. We propose a multidisciplinary social-ecological (economics/econometrics, ecological engineering, soil ecology) modeling and empirical investigation to (i) identify and measure the effect of swine production operations on local human health, (ii) examine if land cover, soil types, hydrographic relationships and public institutions mediate health outcomes and (iii) construct neighborhood-specific recommendations to inform community-level management of human health risks. We hypothesize that CAFO-linked contaminants cause downstream adverse health outcomes, which are attenuated by natural capital between source contaminants and households. We also hypothesize that natural capital is more valuable to those communities lacking public services, which buffer communities from upstream contaminants.
Hochard, Jacob P., Stuart Hamilton, and Edward B. Barbier. "Mangroves shelter coastal economic activity from cyclones." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 25 (2019): 12232-12237.
Funded by Oak Ridge Affiliated University's POWE Junior Faculty Enhancement Award
Collaborators:
Stuart Hamilton (Salisbury University)
Edward Barbier (Colorado State University)
Mangroves shelter coastlines during hazardous storm events leaving coastal communities experiencing mangrove deforestation increasingly vulnerable to economic damages resulting from cyclones. To date, the benefits of mangroves in terms of protecting coastal areas have been estimated only through individual case studies of specific regions or countries. Using spatially referenced data and statistical methods, we track from 2000 to 2012 the impact of cyclones on economic activity in coastal regions inhabited by nearly 2,000 tropical and subtropical communities across 23 major mangrove-holding countries. We find that direct cyclone exposure results in a permanent loss of economic activity of 5.4 to 6.7 months for a community with average mangrove extent (6.3 m), whereas a community with more extensive mangroves (25.6 m) experiences a 50% reduction in these losses. These results suggest that mangrove restoration efforts for protective benefits may be more cost-effective, and mangrove deforestation more damaging, than previously thought.
Barbier, Edward B., and Jacob P. Hochard. "Land degradation and poverty." Nature Sustainability 1, no. 11 (2018): 623.
Collaborators:
Edward Barbier (Colorado State University)
Land is one of the few productive assets owned by the rural poor, and almost all households engage in some form of agriculture. Over 2000-2010 the rural poor on degrading agricultural land increased in low-income countries, and in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Although degradation threatens the livelihoods of the poor, this interaction is complex and conditioned by key economic, social and environmental factors. These factors also limit the poverty-reducing impacts of economic growth and economy-wide reforms. A comprehensive development strategy requires investments that improve the livelihoods of affected populations and regions and facilitate outmigration in severely impacted areas.
Garg, Teevrat, Stuart E. Hamilton, Jacob P. Hochard, Evan Plous Kresch, and John Talbot. "(Not so) Gently down the stream: river pollution and health in Indonesia." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (2018).
Collaborators:
Teevrat Garg (UC San Diego)
Evan Kresch (Oberlin College)
Stuart Hamilton (Salisbury University)
John Talbot (Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative)
Waterborne diseases, often arising from freshwater pollution, are a leading cause of mortality in developing countries. However, data limitations inhibit our understanding of the extent of damage arising from freshwater pollution. We employ a novel hydrological approach combined with village census data to study the effect of upstream polluting behavior on downstream health in Indonesia. We find that upstream use of rivers for bathing and associated sanitary practices can explain as many as 7.5% of all diarrhea-related deaths annually. We also find suggestive evidence for differential avoidance behavior in response to different pollutants. Our approach relies on publicly available satellite data, open source hydrological models, and coarse village census data allowing us to estimate health externalities from river pollution in particularly vulnerable and data poor environments.
Barbier, Edward B., and Jacob P. Hochard. "Poverty, rural population distribution and climate change." Environment and Development Economics 23, no. 3 (2018): 234-256.
Formerly Poverty and the Spatial Distribution of Rural Population World Bank Policy Research Working Paper #7101.
Collaborators:
Edward Barbier (Colorado State University)
Our spatial analysis indicates that in 2000 over one third of the rural population in developing countries was located on less favored agricultural land and areas, which are constrained by biophysical conditions or poor market access. We examine whether these spatial distributions of rural population in 2000 influence subsequent changes in the rate of poverty from 2000 to 2012 in 83 developing countries. We find no evidence of a direct impact on changes in poverty, but there is a significant indirect impact via the elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to growth. If climate change leads to more people concentrated in these areas, or an increase in unfavorable agricultural regions, then the poverty-reducing impact of overall per capita income growth could be further weakened. Reducing poverty will require targeting rural populations in less favored lands and remote areas and encouraging out-migration.
Barbier, Edward B., and Jacob P. Hochard. "The Impacts of Climate Change on the Poor in Disadvantaged Regions." Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 12, no. 1 (2018): 26-47.
Collaborators:
Edward Barbier (Colorado State University)
Populations in developing countries that are located in less-favored agricultural areas (LFAAs)— agricultural lands constrained by difficult terrain, poor soil quality, limited rainfall, etc. or with limited access to markets—and rural low-elevation coastal zones (LECZs)—coasts that have less than 10 meters elevation—are not only at risk from the most severe and long-lasting climate change impacts, they are also susceptible to poverty-environment traps (overreliance on marginal agricultural land and resource commons, which leads to stagnant, low incomes) that further increase their vulnerability to these impacts. We estimate that approximately 586 million people with high infant mortality live in LFAAs and 85 million with high infant mortality live in rural LECZs, although both of these populations declined between 2000 and 2010. Nearly all of these people are in low-income or lower middle-income countries, with twenty countries accounting for most of the LFAA or rural LECZ populations with high infant mortality. We also examine the economic and environmental impacts of climate change on the rural poor in LFAAs and LECZs and discuss policy strategies for mitigating the impacts of climate change on poverty among rural households in LFAAs and LECZs.
Hochard, Jacob, and David Finnoff. "Cross-jurisdictional management of a trophy-hunted species." Journal of Theoretical Biology 420 (2017): 41-52.
Collaborators:
David Finnoff (University of Wyoming)
Gray wolves (Canis lupus) are managed for competing uses in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). Tourism benefits Yellowstone National Park (YNP) visitors while trophy hunting benefits hunters outside of the park. We investigate the policy scope of gray wolf management across jurisdictional boundaries by incorporating three foundations of the behavioral ecology of wolves: refuge-seeking behavior, optimal foraging group size and territoriality. Tradeoffs between and within consumptive and non-consumptive human benefits and wolf population fitness and life history indicators are quantified as a set of elasticities, providing clear implications to resource managers. Our approach highlights that hunting intensity affects the provision of consumptive and non-consumptive human benefits across jurisdictional boundaries and ought to be managed accordingly. We also show that population levels are an incomplete indicator of species fitness, which may depend on how hunting policies impact underlying group ecology. Our findings suggest traditional optimization approaches to wildlife management may lead to suboptimal policy recommendations when the boundaries on the natural system are oversimplified. Highlighting the human element of wildlife management, we show that understanding tourist and hunter responses to wildlife population abundances is critical to balancing provision of consumptive and non-consumptive human uses.
Sims, Charles, David Finnoff, Alan Hastings, and Jacob Hochard. "Listing and Delisting Thresholds under the Endangered Species Act." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 99, no. 3 (2017): 549-570.
Collaborators:
Charles Sims (University of Tennessee)
David Finnoff (University of Wyoming)
Alan Hastings (University of California, Davis)
We consider the case where a species provides a flow of economic benefits, is threatened by possible extinction, and is being considered for addition to the Endangered Species List. Listing the species as endangered is costly but increases the flow of social benefits and reduces the likelihood of extinction. If the species recovers sufficiently, is more abundant than initial estimates, or less valuable than previously thought, additional costs can be incurred to subsequently delist the species. By treating listing and delisting as a pair of linked investment options, we show that delisting is difficult to justify economically. We also illustrate that listing decisions are more influenced by biological sources of uncertainty while economic uncertainty is more influential in delisting decisions. Biological sources of uncertainty may cause species most in need of protection to be passed over in favor of more stable species that represent a “sure bet” for species preservation.
Hochard, Jacob, and Edward Barbier. "Market accessibility and economic growth: Insights from a new dimension of inequality." World Development (2017).
Collaborators:
Edward Barbier (Colorado State University)
We modify an endogenous growth model to allow for households' differential access to markets. Such local production spillovers highlight a new dimension of inequality arising through geographic remoteness and predicts divergent growth patterns among countries with poorly market-integrated households. The model is tested using an instrumental variables approach that takes advantage of the relationship between market accessibility and exogenous geographic features of the landscape as well as spatial data derived from a unique global dataset characterizing country-level market accessibility distributions. We find evidence that production spillovers diminish concavely across space before tapering off convexly in remote areas. This result suggests that the marginal household exhibiting production spillovers is located approximately five hours from the nearest market center. The policy implications are that governments could adopt pro-growth inequality-reducing policies using targeted infrastructural investments, relocation subsidies or income redistribution mechanisms. Based on our spillover threshold estimates, these policies would be access-equality enhancing for 5.1 billion people globally and access-equality reducing for 825 million people globally. We also present findings that growth divergence occurs among countries with geographically less pervasive markets. This outcome may explain why wealthier nations exhibit divergent growth paths relative to poorer nations.
Barbier, Edward B., and Jacob P. Hochard. "Does Land Degradation Increase Poverty in Developing Countries?." PLOS One 11, no. 5 (2016): e0152973.
Land degradation is a global problem that particularly impacts the poor rural inhabitants of low and middle-income countries. We improve upon existing literature by estimating the extent of rural populations in 2000 and 2010 globally on degrading and improving agricultural land, taking into account the role of market access, and analyzing the resulting impacts on poverty. Using a variety of spatially referenced datasets, we estimate that 1.33 billion people worldwide in 2000 were located on degrading agricultural land (DAL), of which 1.26 billion were in developing countries. Almost all the world’s 200 million people on remote DAL were in developing countries, which is about 6% of their rural population. There were also 1.54 billion rural people on improving agricultural land (IAL), with 1.34 billion in developing countries. We find that a lower share of people in 2000 on DAL, or a higher share on IAL, lowers significantly how much overall economic growth reduces poverty from 2000 to 2012 across 83 developing countries. As the population on DAL and IAL in developing countries grew by 13% and 15% respectively from 2000 to 2010, these changing spatial distributions of rural populations could impact significantly future poverty in developing countries.
Barbier, Edward B., Ramón E. López, and Jacob P. Hochard. "Debt, poverty and resource management in a rural smallholder economy." Environmental and Resource Economics 63, no. 2 (2016): 411-427.*
*Recipient of the 2016 Best Publication in Environmental and Resource Economics Award.
This paper develops a model to capture the key features of poverty, credit constraints and resource management faced by poor rural households. We assume that, due to the existence of asymmetric information and moral hazard, the household faces an increasing cost of credit as its debt/equity ratio rises. A household exploiting a natural resource may fall into a poverty trap, but only if it is unable to afford the increasing borrowing costs implied by increasing debt to allow it to avoid such a trap, or if it discounts future utility so much that a balanced growth path cannot be financed at any level of long-run borrowing. In contrast, along an optimal balanced growth path, the household’s asset wealth, purchased inputs, resource stock and consumption increase at the same constant rate. However, over the long run there may be carrying capacity limits that prevent the resource from improving further. The household may then direct its savings to accumulating financial assets, and eventually under certain conditions may become a net creditor with resource exploitation becoming a less and less important source of its income.
Hochard, J., and D. Finnoff. "GRAY WOLF POPULATION PROJECTION WITH INTRASPECIFIC COMPETITION." Natural Resource Modeling 27, no. 3 (2014): 360-375.
Competition effects are incorporated into a model of wolf-population dynamics. A classic single-state model is augmented into a dual-state mapping of the evolution of the size of wolf packs and the number of wolf packs. This dual-state model, unlike the single-state density dependent model, is amenable to analyzing intraspecific competition. The single-state, dual-state and dual-state with competition models are estimated using Yellowstone National Park (YNP) data on wolf populations and pack structures from 1996 to 2011. The dynamic properties of each model are examined under an array of harvesting policies. Results suggest that intraspecific competition matters when projecting wolf populations. Wolf pack removal has competition-reducing effects from added territory availability, making populations more sensitive to pack size reduction than reduction in the number of packs. This research suggests that wildlife managers may consider monitoring the composition of wolf kills throughout a harvesting season, adaptively adjusting harvesting quotas and delineating harvesting zones over a few pack territories rather than spreading these effects evenly across all packs.