Chris Moore

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Valuation of Surface Water Quality Improvements

Since 1982, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has used benefit-cost analysis to evaluate many of its surface water quality regulations. Early regulations were aimed at controlling conventional and toxic pollutants that were directly linked to highly visible water quality problems. More recent regulations have focused on “unconventional” water quality stressors or more subtle distinctions in water quality. While a number of national-scale water quality models have been used over the years, there has been less exploration of economic models to estimate benefits. This article addresses three issues that have been particularly challenging in estimating the benefits from water quality improvement: defining standardized measures of water quality improvement, measuring benefits arising from ecological protection and restoration, and measuring nonuse benefits.

Towards improved socio-economic assessments of ocean acidification’s impacts

Ocean acidification is increasingly recognized as a component of global change that could have a wide range of impacts on marine organisms, the ecosystems they live in, and the goods and services they provide humankind. Assessment of these potential socio-economic impacts requires integrated efforts between biologists, chemists, oceanographers, economists and social scientists. But because ocean acidification is a new research area, significant knowledge gaps are preventing economists from estimating its welfare impacts. For instance, economic data on the impact of ocean acidification on significant markets such as fisheries, aquaculture and tourism are very limited (if not non-existent), and non-market valuation studies on this topic are not yet available. Our paper summarizes the current understanding of future OA impacts and sets out what further information is required for economists to assess socio-economic impacts of ocean acidification. Our aim is to provide clear directions for multidisciplinary collaborative research.

FURTHER COMMENT ON "A RAPID ASSESSMENT MODEL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON"

In this reply to the comment by Gerlagh, we confirm an error in our estimate of the certainty-equivalent social cost of carbon (SCC) reported in Newbold et al. (2013), and we discuss the underlying conceptual difficulties that arise in conducting a social welfare analysis when preferences are heterogeneous or uncertain. The certainty-equivalent SCC depends crucially on the reference level of per capita consumption used to normalize marginal utility across possible preference parameters, and our estimate of the certainty-equivalent SCC was driven largely by an arbitrary choice of measurement units. All other results from our rapid assessment model are based on the deterministic SCC or its simulated probability distribution, which does not depend on the reference level of per capita consumption.