Economic Approaches to Environmental Management

What kind of benefits does creating an additional marine protected area add? Should the state subsidize programs to use forest slash to create biofuels? What is the value of urban open space? PUBPOL 594 develops and utilizes the main models from natural resource and environmental economics with the goal of developing intuition so that questions like these can be answered in applied policy settings. Key topics covered include: rationing versus economic based policy instruments, policy instruments under uncertainty, non-renewable versus renewable resources, poaching, aspects of climate change, non-market valuation, and benefit-cost analysis.