envecon 2020 - Agenda

We're delighted to announce our Keynote speaker for 2020. Emma Howard Boyd is the Chair of the Environment Agency, an Ex officio board member of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and the UK Commissioner to the Global Commission on Adaptation. Emma serves on a number of boards and advisory committees which include Menhaden Capital PLC and The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project. She has worked in financial services for over 25 years, in corporate finance and fund management. As Director of Stewardship at Jupiter Asset Management until July 2014, Emma was integral to the development of their expertise in the corporate governance and sustainability fields. Her previous board and advisory roles include: Chair and trustee of ShareAction, Vice Chair of Future Cities Catapult, a director of the Aldersgate Group and Triodos Renewables PLC, Chair of UKSIF (the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association), and a member of the Commission on Environmental Markets and Economic Performance and the Green Finance Taskforce.

Draft Agriculture and Environment Bills, and many other policy developments have been developed since June 2016: a comparatively short time for drafting new laws and ensuring that the past achievements are not lost. In this session, we will hear an overview of where we are now. Because of ongoing uncertainty about technical details of future policy the rest of the session comprises research that can offer such detail on agricultural policy, biodiversity offsetting and the marine environment.

• Overview of where we are… Edward Lockhart, Broadway Initiative

• Designing auctions for the procurement of environmental services: Insights from theory, experience and experiment - Ben Balmford, University of Exeter

• On the efficiency of agglomeration bonus: An endogenous coalition formation framework -  Francois Bareille, University of Bologna, Italy

• Investigating the potential of biodiversity offset markets in the UK  - Katherine Needham, University of Glasgow

• The supply of ecosystem services as inputs to economic production: Application to the marine environment   - Emily Stebbings, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

We are being challenged to make changes to many of our habits. Demonstrating environmental, health and wellbeing gains is rarely enough to induce behaviour change. We need to understand what creates and maintains habits and what changes them. Papers in this session look at such factors in the context of deposit return schemes, smart meters and single use plastic bags.

• The Can Challenge: Exploring the best way to incentivise recycling behaviour - Mike Brock, University of East Anglia

• Measuring drivers of and barriers to smart meter adoption: Evidence from a randomised experiment - Daire McCoy, London School of Economics and Political Sciences

• Odi et amo: A nudge to reduce single-use carrier bags; Chiara Sotis, London School of Economics and Political Sciences

Eat, sleep and be safe! Fundamental needs of anyone which, it turns out are affected by an even wider array of factors than previously thought or could fit within a single policy area. The cross-cutting research presented in this session explores the links between carbon policy and diet; noise and crime; pollution and sleep.

• Implications of carbon policies on the quality of UK consumers’ diet and health Elena Benedetti, University of Newcastle

• Noise pollution and violent crime - Timo Hener, Aarhus University, Denmark

• Is Pollution affecting your Sleep? - Dheeya Rizmie, Imperial College

We're looking forward to a range of poster presentations this year:

• Deterring Extraction from the Commons: Evidence from an Experiment - Anomitro Chatterjee, London School of Economics

• Economic Appraisal and the Environmental Kuznets Curve: An Empirical Test - in Cui, University of Bath

• Permission to Pollute: The Impact of Free Permit Allocation on Firms Regulated by the EU Emissions Trading Scheme - Petra Sarapatkova, Imperial College Business School

• How do Western European farms behave and respond to climate change: A simultaneous irrigation-crop decision model - Steven Van Passel, Janka Vanschoenwinkel, Mark Vancauteren, University of Antwerp

• Time Discounting and Chinese Grape Growers Response to An Upward Trend in Precipitation - Ding Yihong, Kelvin Balcombe, Elizabeth Robinson, University of Reading

• UK Natural Capital for Peatlands - Hazel Trenbirth, Office for National Statistics

• Thames Water Evenlode Phosphorus Catchment Management Trial – Economic Evaluation - Warwick Wainwright, Atkins

Sarah Williams is head of the Greener UK Unit, which campaigns with partners across the environmental sector to influence the Brexit negotiations and related law and policy. Sarah was previously Public Affairs Manager at the Aldersgate Group – responsible for advancing the Group's policy priorities through engagement with politicians, civil servants and other stakeholders. Prior to this, she worked in Parliament as special adviser to Tim Yeo, former MP and Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee. She holds a BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford.

To say 2020 has had an exciting start would be an understatement – from the draft Environment Bill coming back for its first reading in Westminster to green accounting being talked about at Davos, this so-called ‘Super Year for Nature’ will be busy. In this short plenary, we’ll look into a few key events and resources that will help us get through them, including the launch of a Taskforce for Nature Related Risks (after the TCFD); COP15 of the CBD in Kunming in October and Climate COP26 in Glasgow in November. We will also have an opportunity to learn more about ENCA from Defra and the updated TEEB valuation database. There may be others too – all quick-fire presentations and videos to help you mark your diaries if you have not already done so.

In earlier years, envecon, like many others, had separate sessions for mitigation and adaptation. We now know we cannot think of them as separate actions – because they affect each other and also because even if we achieved zero net Carbon today, we’d still need to adapt. This session has papers on the health effects of climate change; health benefits and income effects of mitigation; and investing in nature for adaptation.

• Heatwaves and worker productivity in Europe: Economic assessment of past events and climate change projections - David Garcia Leon, University of Venice and Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Italy

• Urban green as climate change adaptation measure. The effect of information in stated preferences - Malte Welling, Institute for Ecological Economy Research, Berlin, Germany

• Cost-benefit analysis of carbon mitigation measures in European cities: the importance of co-benefit - Anna Maccagnan, University of Exeter Medical School

• The Distributional effects of a carbon tax: The role of income inequality - Julius J Andersson, London School of Economics and Political Sciences

Market based analysis and the role of incentives are key contributions economists make to environmental policy and management. For example, understanding how firms respond to different penalties and how individuals reflect their preferences for green space in their home buying behaviour as two of the papers in this session explore. However, we also need to engage with stakeholders and use that information in designing policies, payments and accounting for changes – as other papers in the session explore.

• Flood regulation and stakeholder views on natural flood management: Positive expectations, shared responsibility and payment design - Rosalind Bark, University of East Anglia

• Exploring the role of choice experiment in ecosystem accounting and management: A simulated exchange value approach - Gaetano Grilli, Cefas

• Valuing green spaces in urban areas: a hedonic price approach using machine learning techniques - Vahe Nafilyan, Office of National Statistics

• Cash versus In-Kind Settlements: Implications for environmental protection - Pamela Campa, Stockholm Institute for Transition Economics, Sweden

This 5-year interdisciplinary programme is finishing at the end of March 2020. Here we’ll have a chance to hear the key findings of the health & wellbeing research projects on urban green infrastructure, wetlands and mosquitos (there will be more in future!) and saltmarshes. We will also hear about how the projects and networking activities contributed to building the interdisciplinary research legacy for the programme.

• IWUN: why what we know doesn’t change what we do: how logics of inaction limit the wellbeing benefits of urban nature - Nicola Dempsey, University of Sheffield

• WetlandLIFE: Once bitten….Environmental values and risks - the case of English wetlands and mosquitoes - Joe Morris, Cranfield University

• CoastWEB: Valuing the contribution which saltmarshes make to human health and wellbeing- Nicola Beaumount, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

We have a lot to learn from the application of environmental economics around the world, even if envecon agendas tend to give more time to the work from the UK. This year, we have work from China, Uganda and Ethiopia on topics ranging from water quality, land management and firm behaviour.

• Supplemental irrigation from farm ponds to mitigate rainfall variability in the Sahel: What are the social representations of farmers and institutions in Burkina Faso? - Rahim Ouedraogo,University of Montpellier

• Using choice modelling to investigate water-quality interventions for mitigating Schistosoma Mansoni transmission in Uganda – Keila Meginnis, University of Stirling

• Uncovering ecosystem services of expropriated land: the case of urban expansion in Bahir Dar, Northwest Ethiopia - Wubante Fetene Admasu, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Somewhere – Nowhere will be bringing 'data of the heart' into the equation of cost, value and connection.