Faced with intensified environmental degradation and decreased agricultural land productivity, the Chinese government has sought policy interventions to reverse both of these negative trends. Among the policy instruments is the Conversion of Cropland to Forest and Grassland Program (CCFGP) that aims to change the pattern of agricultural land use in 25 provinces and autonomous regions across China. This book provides the most comprehensive assessment of the CCFGP undertaken to date. It allows the consideration of fundamental questions pertaining to the sustainability of the land use changes...

Benefit transfer is the practice of estimating economic values at a target site by utilizing the results of existing studies for different sites. This text assesses the validity of benefit transfer using choice modeling in contrast to the traditional focus of transferring results from contingent valuation and travel cost models.

The management of natural resources located on private lands often involves a perceived conflict between the mix of private and public benefits they produce. This book is focused on one such issue: the design of policy relating to the production of wetland outputs in order to maximize private and social welfare. The authors first address the welfare impacts of alternative wetland management strategies on the wider community. They then concentrate on privately owned wetlands in Australia and find that they generate substantial public benefits. Furthermore, they are able to identify...

Choice modelling is a technique that has recently emerged as a means of estimating the demand for environmental goods and the benefits and costs associated with them.

Advancing the incorporation of equity preferences in policy analysis, this book demonstrates the application of choice modelling to the estimation of distributional weights suitable for inclusion in a cost-benefit analytical framework. A platform for discussion of the challenges and opportunities of this approach is presented in the form of a detailed case study designed to estimate community preferences for different intergenerational distributions. While the case study is focused on natural resource management and environmental policy, the conceptual and methodological advances illustrated...

Valuing Climate Change Mitigation discusses the role of uncertainty in valuing the benefits of climate change mitigation policies using contingent valuation and choice experiment techniques. It treats climate change using three dimensions of uncertainty: scenario, policy and preference. Conceptual frameworks are advanced to account simultaneously for these various dimensions of uncertainty. The authors then explore the impact of introducing these uncertainties into benefit estimates for the Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.