Search Results (129)

Evaluating the economic value of carbon sinks is fundamental to advancing carbon market mechanisms and supporting sustainable regional development. This study focuses on Fujian Province in China, aiming to assess the spatiotemporal evolution of carbon sink value and analyze the influence of socio-economic drivers. Carbon sink values from 2000 to 2020 were estimated using Net Ecosystem Productivity (NEP) simulation combined with the carbon market valuation method. Eleven socio-economic variables were selected through correlation and multicollinearity testing, and their impacts were examined using Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) at the county level. The results indicate that the total carbon sink value in Fujian declined from CNY 3.212 billion in 2000 to CNY 2.837 billion in 2020, showing a spatial pattern of higher values in the southern region and lower values in the north. GTWR analysis reveals spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the effects of socio-economic factors. For example, the influence of urbanization and retail sales of consumer goods shifts direction over time, while the effects of industrial structure, population, road, and fixed asset investment vary across space. This study emphasizes the necessity of incorporating spatial and temporal dynamics into carbon sink valuation. The findings suggest that northern areas of Fujian should prioritize ecological restoration, rapidly urbanizing regions should adopt green development strategies, and counties guided by investment and consumption should focus on sustainable development pathways to maintain and enhance carbon sink capacity. Full article

Herein, we further examine how we can value nonmarket goods and services by considering the costs associated with environmental conflicts. Focusing on two American rules—the asymmetric reimbursement system and the contingent fee contract—we develop a strategic game-theoretic model in which a citizens group engages a delegate through a contingent fee compensation contract, while a polluter engages a delegate through an hourly fee compensation contract. If the citizens group prevails, the polluter is obligated to contribute a portion of the contingent fee. Solving for the subgame perfect equilibrium, two results emerge. First, the 4x-rule can be maintained through the adjustment of the asymmetric reimbursement system. Second, the asymmetric reimbursement system can serve both as a supplementary method to measure nonmarket valuation and to reduce the rent dissipation resulting from environmental conflicts under general circumstances. Full article

The world is characterised by the growing volumes and flow of goods, which, amid benefits to economic development, result in negative externalities affecting the sustainability of cities. Although numerous studies have analysed the locational patterns of logistics facilities in cities, further research is required to examine their real estate patterns and trends. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to analyse the value of land accommodating logistics facilities in the City of Cape Town municipality, South Africa. Given the lack of dedicated geo-spatial data, logistics firms were searched on Google Maps, utilising a combination of aerial photography and street view imagery. Three main attributes of land parcels hosting logistics facilities were thereafter captured from the municipal cadastral information: property extent, street address, and property number. The latter two were used to extract the 2018 and 2022 property market values from the valuation rolls on the municipal website, followed by statistical, spatial, and geographically weighted regression (GWR) analyses. Zones near the central business district and seaport, as well as areas with prime road-based accessibility, had high market values, while those near the railway stations did not stand out. However, GWR yielded weak relationships between market values and the locational variables analysed, arguably showing a disconnect between spatial planning and logistics planning. Towards augmenting sustainable logistics, it is recommended that relevant stakeholders strategically integrate logistics into spatial planning, and particularly revitalise freight rail to attract investment to logistics hubs with direct railway access. Full article

Small and micro wetlands exhibit enduring ecological dynamics that critically inform urban development planning and biodiversity conservation strategies. Focusing on Wuxi City (a representative area under high-intensity anthropogenic pressure in China’s Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration), we employ the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model. By integrating multi-temporal remote sensing imagery (1980–2020) with field surveys, we quantitatively assess spatiotemporal variations in habitat quality, with particular emphasis on their enhancement effects. The key findings were as follows. (1) The overall habitat quality in Wuxi City declined significantly during the period of 1980–2020 based on 30 m resolution land-use/land cover (LULC) data. The area of “good” habitat increased marginally by 1.02%, while “fair” and “excellent” habitats decreased by 19.4% and 1.64%, respectively. Conversely, the area of “poor” habitat rose markedly by 28.71%. (2) Small and micro wetlands were identified using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification on Landsat imagery, showing a transformation from abundance to scarcity and then back to abundance. Before 2000, these areas grew rapidly, reaching a peak of 4.04 × 10⁴ hm² in 2000. Afterward, there was a sharp decline from 2000 to 2005, followed by stabilization. (3) A comparison of two land-use scenarios revealed that incorporating small and micro wetlands significantly expanded high-quality habitat areas and reduced low-quality areas. The most notable expansion occurred in 2000, with high-quality habitat areas increasing by 12.30%. This study demonstrates that directly using existing land-use data for habitat quality simulation overlooks the influence of small and micro wetlands. It is recommended that habitat quality simulations include extracted small and micro wetland data to ensure accurate assessments. Full article

Coastal blue carbon ecosystems serve as vital carbon sinks in global climate regulation, yet their long-term carbon storage dynamics remain poorly quantified at regional scales. This study quantified the spatiotemporal evolution of mangrove and salt marsh carbon storage in Guangdong Province, China, over three decades (1986–2020), by integrating a new mangrove and salt marsh detection framework based on Landsat image time series and the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model. The proposed detection framework provided two coastal vegetation detection methods, exploring the potential of utilizing phenological features to improve the mangrove and salt marsh discrimination accuracy with Landsat data. The overall accuracies of both mangrove and salt marsh detection results exceeded 90%, suggesting good consistency with the validation data. The mangrove extent showed a trend of decreasing from 1986 to 1995, then fluctuated from 1995 to 2005, and presented an upward trend from 2005 to 2020. The overall trend of the salt marsh area was upward, with small fluctuations. The mangrove carbon storage in Guangdong increased from 414.66 × 10⁴ Mg C to 490.49 × 10⁴ Mg C during 1986–2020, with Zhanjiang having the largest mangrove carbon storage increase. The salt marsh carbon storage in Guangdong grew from 8.73 × 10⁴ Mg C in 1986 to 14.39 × 10⁴ Mg C in 2020, with Zhuhai as the salt marsh carbon sequestration hotspot. The temporal dynamics of carbon storage in mangroves and salt marshes could be divided into three stages, namely a decreasing period, a fluctuating period, and a rapid increase period, during which ecological and economic policies played a crucial role. The multi-decadal blue carbon datasets and their temporal-spatial change analysis results here can provide a scientific basis for nature-based climate solutions and decision-support tools for carbon offset potential realization and sustainable coastal zone management. Full article

Wetlands are highly productive ecosystems with multidimensional value and significant social and economic impacts. Estimating the economic value of their non-marketed goods and services—benefits not traded in conventional markets—can provide essential insights to guide protection, restoration, and sustainable management strategies for these sensitive ecosystems. The present study employs environmental economics tools, specifically the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), to assess the value of the Amvrakikos Gulf in northwestern Greece. This semi-enclosed wetland system is particularly fragile due to its low water renewal rate, while being a primary source of income and an integral component of local cultural identity. Despite its high ecological importance, the Amvrakikos Gulf has experienced substantial environmental degradation stemming from its geomorphological characteristics and external anthropogenic pressures. This investigation was designed to explore residents’ perceptions of the wetland’s value and its correlation with the need for restoration. In total, 383 coastal area residents participated in this study. Data analysis was conducted using appropriate econometric methods based on both parametric and non-parametric models. Approximately 46.2% of respondents expressed willingness to pay, and the environmental restoration of the Amvrakikos Gulf was valued at EUR 715,968.36. Additionally, this study examined potential associations between willingness to pay and various socio-cultural and demographic factors recorded during the interviews. In conclusion, the need for the restoration and preservation of the Amvrakikos Gulf’s natural wealth was made evident, affirming the contribution of the CVM in valuing wetlands and enriching the existing literature, while explicitly recognizing the subjectivity inherent in WTP assessments. Full article

The valuation of neuroblastoma research heterogeneity at African country level is unspecified. Therefore, the study assesses the heterogeneity of neuroblastoma research in 54 African countries and develops recommendations for national cancer-control plans. Metadata of peer-reviewed scientific publications allied to African neuroblastoma research were retrieved from the Web of Science™ Core Collection Database for bibliometric analysis. Comprehensive science mapping analysis and statistical analyses were performed with bibliometric online platform² and GraphPad Prism v. 10.2.3. This study revealed that African countries focused the neuroblastoma research publications mainly on the sustainable development goal of good health and well-being. The dominating research area in Africa is oncology followed by pharmacology. Only 26 of 54 African countries were accountable for total neuroblastoma research in Africa, with South Africa and Egypt contributing 61% of the whole continent’s neuroblastoma research. Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, and Nigeria are the five most active African countries, and they are funded by different funding agencies internationally and domestically. The collected analysed data of this study draws special attention to heterogeneity and enduring upward correlating trajectory of Africa’s neuroblastoma publication numbers, their citations, acquired funds, and countries’ cooperation. Furthermore, this heterogeneity finding flags the necessity of developing a comprehensive strategic plan and implementation to cultivate neuroblastoma research as a fundamental part of each African country’s national cancer control plans. Full article

Information is an experience good, meaning that its value emerges upon use and varies based on individual perceptions. Augmented reality (AR) is a technology designed to deliver immersive informational experiences. This study investigates the impact of AR on the perceived value of information by people experiencing information as consumers or producers. Using Google Maps, we developed an AR mobile map called Tour-It-Yourself (TIY) for city navigation. The TIY app facilitates content consumption and production around local points of interest engagingly and interactively. We discuss the development of the research tool and results from two user studies (N = 37 teenagers and N = 51 students, respectively). Further, we highlight the economic valuation aspect by examining the effects of AR on Willingness-to-Pay and Willingness-to-Accept payment for information. The results indicate a significant main effect of participant experience (consumer/producer) and AR technology on the perceived evaluation of information. Moreover, the addition of AR technology to information improves knowledge regarding points of interest for producers. These findings contribute to our understanding of how AR shapes information value perception and have implications for designing interactive location-based information systems, benefiting tourism, education, and business, as well as fostering a sense of belonging in cities. Full article

Cymbidium goeringii (Rchb. f.) is a traditional Chinese flower with highly valued biological, cultural, and artistic properties. However, the valuation of Rchb. f. mainly relies on subjective judgment, lacking a standardized digital evaluation and grading methods. Traditional grading methods solely rely on unimodal data and are based on fuzzy grading standards; the key features for values are especially inexplicable. Accurately evaluating Rchb. f. quality through multi-modal algorithms and clarifying the impact mechanism of key features on Rchb. f. value is essential for providing scientific references for online orchid trading. A multi-modal Transformer for Rchb. f. quality grading combined with the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) algorithm was proposed, which mainly includes one embedding layer, one UNet, one Vision Transformer (ViT) and one Encoder layer. A multi-modal orchid dataset including images and text was obtained from Orchid Trading Website, and seven key features were extracted. Based on petals’ RGB segmented from UNet and global fine-grained features extracted from ViT, text features and image features were organically fused into Transformer Encoders throughout concatenation operation, a 93.13% accuracy was achieved. Furthermore, SHAP algorithm was utilized to quantify and rank the importance of seven features, clarifying the impact mechanism of key features on Rchb. f. quality and value. This multi-modal Transformer with SHAP algorithm for Rchb. f. grading provided a novel idea to represent the explainable features accurately, exhibiting good potential for establishing a reliable digital evaluation method for agricultural products with high value. Full article

This paper investigates algorithms for identifying the optimal policy for pricing American Options. The American Option pricing is reformulated as a Sequential Decision-Making problem with two binary actions (Exercise or Continue), transforming it into an optimal stopping time problem. Both the least square Monte Carlo simulation method (LSM) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based methods were utilized to find the optimal policy and, hence, the fair value of the American Put Option. Both Classical Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) and calibrated Stochastic Volatility models served as the underlying uncertain assets. The novelty of this work lies in two aspects: (1) Applying LSM- and RL-based methods to determine option prices, with a specific focus on analyzing the dynamics of “Decisions” made by each method and comparing final decisions chosen by the LSM and RL methods. (2) Assess how the RL method updates “Decisions” at each batch, revealing the evolution of the decisions during the learning process to achieve optimal policy. Full article

The upper American River watershed (UARW) provides a myriad of valuable benefits for local communities as well as throughout the state, nation, and even globally. These environmental benefits, often called ecosystem goods and services (EGS), include food, water, power, and recreational opportunities, among many others. Current ecological economics frameworks outline over twenty distinct EGS categories. While this information is becoming more widespread, many of these benefits are still undervalued or are not easily applied to policymaking and project-level investment decisions. Conventional EGS valuation focuses narrowly on a few specific EGS categories, ignoring many to the detriment of those seeking information on the economic value of natural infrastructure. This study provides a novel approach to watershed valuation by assessing eighteen EGS categories in a comprehensive watershed valuation by supplementing locally available data with the benefit transfer method. This approach demonstrates that watershed-scale EGS valuation is possible. The resulting valuation shows the natural capital asset in the UAW has a net present value of $731 billion and $1.6 trillion with 2.5% and 0% discount rates (100 years), respectively, and provides over $14.8 billion in annual value. Valuing natural capital in economic terms provides a common metric for comparison and integration with other types of investments in built and social capitals, informing policy and investment decisions for climate adaptation and water resilience. This EGS valuation provides a case study into how benefit transfer can be used to supplement locally available information to provide watershed-scale EGS valuations. The outcome serves as a tool to promote innovation and equity in the design of funding mechanisms and resulting allocation for improving watershed health, the associated EGS productivity, and rural-agricultural community resilience. Full article

Organic farming is a farming system that combines environmental farming practices, a high degree of biodiversity, and the protection of natural resources. All these environmental services are used in society as public goods, contributing to societal welfare. Understanding the opinions of residents on these environmental public goods is essential because they are both consumers and financial contributors to the common agricultural policy. Therefore, it is imperative to further existing scientific knowledge in the field of consumer behaviour. Using Lithuania as a case study, the present study focuses on analysing societal opinion and willingness to pay (WTP) with respect to the environmental public goods (reflected in three components: the reduction in water, soil, and air pollution) of organic farming. This study uses the contingent valuation (CV) method to obtain the WTP for public goods. The median WTP was calculated for multiple environmental public goods from organic agriculture, excluding the protest zero. This study revealed that the residents of Lithuania understood the contribution of organic farming in creating environmental public goods and were concerned about environmental issues. It was crucial for them to have a clean environment with, for example, better drinking water quality, lower air pollution and soil erosion. The application of the CV method showed a median WTP of EUR 24.58 annually per family for environmental public goods. The preference towards environmental public goods differs depending on the socioeconomic characteristics and knowledge about organic farming. These findings provide quantitative information regarding the demand for the environmental effects of organic farming, which could be useful for policy-makers. Such research could also prove useful in setting the future direction of the common agricultural policy. The example of Lithuania was used to present a universal research problem that concerns European countries, especially those in the European Union. Full article

Constructed wetlands (CWs) are engineered water treatment systems that mimic the features and functions of natural wetlands. As a nature-based solution (NBS) for wastewater treatment, CWs are sustainable and cost-effective while providing various ecosystem services. However, their widespread application faces several uncertainties, particularly in developing countries. This study aims to analyze the success factors and challenges in implementing CW projects. Using the case of successful CWs in Bayawan City in the Philippines, this study surveyed 270 household heads from the community benefiting from the CWs and interviewed various CW stakeholders, including the project planner, management, community leader, social workers, and CW workers. The results showed that 89% of the respondents were aware of the existence of CWs in the community and 73% believed in their long-term sustainability. Among the identified factors for the successful implementation of the CW project were government support (43%), good governance (32%), and public support (14%). On the other hand, the implementation was challenged by improper maintenance (63%), overcrowding in the community (11%), foul smells (4%), funding (4%), and climate-related uncertainties, including natural calamities (4%), flooding (7%), earthquakes (4%), and sea level rise (11%). The implications of these success factors and challenges were discussed in the application of real options valuation to CW projects by incorporating the identified uncertainties into flexible decision making in the scaling up and widespread implementation of a more sustainable NBS to water resources management. Full article

After recognizing the importance of marine and coastal resources and the use of marine space for economic growth, the European Union (EU) created and implemented a long-term Blue Economy (BE) strategy that supports the development of traditional and emerging marine and maritime sectors, aiming at the enhancement of Blue Growth (BG). However, despite the existence of a robust policy framework that supports the expansion of BE sectors at both an EU Sea Basin and state level, scholars have been sceptical as to whether the pursuit of BG adequately addresses the challenges that usually come with economic development, including those of climate change and marine biodiversity loss. Various frameworks for integrating sectoral goals with each other and with environmental goals that could facilitate the transition towards Sustainable Blue Growth (SBG) already exist and have been suggested and promoted by the European Commission, such as Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) and Marine Spatial Planning (MSP). They require the consideration of marine ecosystems and biodiversity and their protection as one of the BE sectors to be integrated via planning and management, which in turn requires the estimation of the value of ecosystem services and the spatial implications thereof. Nonetheless, there is little evidence or real-world examples on whether and how ecosystems, and within them coastal and marine biodiversity, are actually integrated (i.e., mainstreamed) when developing sectoral policies and planning and implementing economic activities at sea at various scales, i.e., local, national, and regional, and what the necessary steps and actions are that would facilitate such mainstreaming. By seeking evidence in EU and Atlantic Arc (AA) member states’ sectoral policies on marine tourism, ports and shipping, marine renewable energy, and fisheries and aquaculture (as promoted by the Atlantic Maritime Strategy and its corresponding action plans) and in the outcomes of the Interreg Atlantic Funded Research Project MOSES (aiming at valuating a Sustainable Blue Economy at the national and regional scale of the EU AA), the present article focused on understanding if and how marine biodiversity is taken into consideration by EU and AA BE and/or BG policies, strategies, and sectoral developments. Τhe selected sectoral policies demonstrate a good uptake of marine-ecosystem- and biodiversity-related challenges; however, at both the EU and the AA member-state level, it is unclear whether and how marine ecosystems and biodiversity are addressed as a separate BE sector. As such, we argue why and how Marine Biodiversity Mainstreaming (MBM) could address this gap, and hence it could contribute to planning, implementing, and managing maritime economic activities towards SBG at the Sea Basin level. This is demonstrated by illustrating the central role of MBM in enabling (and being further enabled by) the above integrative frameworks (i.e., MSP and EBM) and by presenting the key elements and actions required for such facilitation. Full article

Linking the improvement of water ecosystems to the use of economic concepts and instruments is one of the main innovations introduced by the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). This should be achieved by Member States through an approach clearly linking measures and interventions to improve water ecosystems to the identified pressures on water bodies (i.e., the gap analysis) and a set of economic provisions. However, modest progress in the implementation of these provisions has been recorded over time. Therefore, this paper aims to shed new light on the current limits in the implementation of the economic analysis of the WFD, in particular in relation to the gap analysis, through a comprehensive review of grey and scientific literature on the topics of gap analysis, economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services, water pricing, and disproportionate costs of measures. General conclusions and recommendations of this analysis are that enhancing data quality, promoting consistency and interaction in economic analysis components, and embedding them pragmatically in decision-making procedures are crucial. The gap analysis plays a pivotal role in directing economic research towards relevant issues within the river basin and in guiding decision makers more effectively in the application of the economic analyses required by the WFD. Full article