The complicated process of public forest land allocation involves competing economies of scale. While harvesting cost economies of scale may benefit harvesters, where average costs decline as contiguous harvested acreage increases, larger harvested areas can generate diseconomies in terms of environmental and ecosystem damage. This paper extends existing timber rotation models to more completel...

Disasters are widely reported, commonplace events that characteristically leave an enormous legacy of human suffering through death, injury, extensive infrastructural damage, and disorganization to systems and communities. The economic costs may be almost incalculable. Professional and civilian first responders play a vital role in mitigating these effects. However, to maximize their potential ...

A reliability-based design for the improvement of earth-fill dams is created in this study, and the effect of the improvement of the embankment is evaluated for the safety of the embankment against earthquakes. An inclined core is considered here as the means of improvement for the earth-fill embankment. To evaluate the stability of earth-fill dams, the elasto-viscoplastic finite element method...

The success of sustainable crop production depends on our ability to select or create varieties that can allocate resources to both growth and defence. However, breeding efforts have emphasized increases in yields but have partially neglected defence traits against pests. Estimating the costs of multiple defences against tuber herbivores and the tradeoffs among them, as well as understanding th...

The UK Government recently reviewed its methodology to value greenhouse gas emissions in policy appraisal. The Review implemented a move away from the previous approach, which used estimates of marginal social damage costs (‘the social cost of carbon’) to value changes in emissions, to one in which valuation is based on the marginal abatement costs that will need to be incurred to meet specific...

Economists viewed the world through the eyes of Pigou (1920). Professor A. C. Pigou had argued that in the face of an externality, such as pollution, the appropriate remedy involved imposing a per-unit tax on the emissions from a polluting activity. The tax rate would be set equal to the marginal external social damage caused by the last unit of pollution at the efficient allocation. Faced with...

According to life-history theory, investment in reproduction is associated with costs, which should appear as decreased survival to the next reproduction or lower future reproductive success. It has been suggested that oxidative stress may be the proximate mechanism of these trade-offs. Despite numerous studies of the defense against reactive oxygen species (ROS) during reproduction, very littl...

Japan is the only country in the world that has an extensive, specially regulated compensation system for diseases considered to have resulted from environmental pollution. For certain types of diseases, the system provides for financial compensation and other benefits prorated according to the severity of the case. Much of this compensation is paid by the firms responsible for pollution in the...

Economic arguments for acting for health are increasingly important for policymakers, yet to date there has been no consideration of the likely economic burden of alcohol on the global level. A review of existing cost estimates was conducted, with each study disaggregated into different cost areas and the methodology of each element evaluated. The range of figures produced from more robust stud...