Conference Agenda

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) poses a major threat to elk in the Greater Yellowstone Area. CWD, which is always fatal, spreads through both direct contact and persistent environmental contamination via prions. While most studies focus solely on direct transmission, this paper addresses a notable gap by considering both direct and environmental transmission pathways. In Yellowstone, supplemental feeding supports elk herds for hunting and tourism but also accelerates CWD spread. Policymakers must determine feeding and hunting levels that yield both economic benefits and favorable ecological outcomes—specifically, reducing CWD prevalence. This requires dynamic optimization over multiple state variables, including susceptible elk, infected elk, and environmental prion loads. Prior studies and textbooks typically consider single-state-variable problems, offering no guidance for solving nonlinear, multivariable systems. This paper develops a novel high-dimensional perturbation method to approximate optimal management responses in such settings—filling a methodological gap. Results show that environmental transmission accelerates disease spread, while reduced feeding and increased hunting activities can indirectly slow disease transmission and move the system optimally towards the steady state.

Wild meat consumption plays an important role in food systems and livelihoods across many developing regions, yet little is known about how consumers allocate demand across different wild meat types sold within the same market. This paper estimates a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) for bats, pigs, and pythons using market-day transaction data from North Sulawesi, Indonesia. The analysis provides one of the first sets of wild meat type level own- and cross-price elasticity estimates based on observed market behavior. All three wild meat types are normal goods, with positive and statistically significant expenditure elasticities. Bat and python expenditures increase less than proportionally with total wild meat spending, while pig expenditures rise more than proportionally. Distinguishing between uncompensated and compensated price elasticities shows that consumer responses are driven primarily by income effects rather than pure substitution. Compensated substitution effects are weak for bats and pythons, while pig demand exhibits stronger price sensitivity. Addressing price and expenditure endogeneity using a control-function approach, the results suggest that price-based conservation interventions targeting single wild meat types are more likely to reduce overall wild meat consumption than to induce substitution across wildlife products.

Algal blooms originating in the coastal lagoon extend into the lagoon plume area, periodically affecting beach conditions and visitor experience. Temporary algal bloom shocks have been a problem in Melnrage Beach, which is an important recreational destination located on the SE Baltic Sea coast of Klaipėda, for both residents and visitors outside Klaipėda (Lithuania). Car parking data reveal that trip demand was not affected, but time spent on the beach was shorter in the case of an algal bloom, suggesting visitors have imperfect information on site quality before they visit, which is confirmed by the interviews carried-out at the recreation site.

This finding suggests that relying solely on the number of visits does underestimate (or, in the worst case, ignore all together) the welfare impact of algal blooms. The same consideration likely applies to all unfavorable, unpredicted, temporary site quality shocks that can affect recreational experience at an outdoor site, such as turbid water events, high surf, congestion onsite, etc.

By using both the car-parking data and the on-site survey data, we estimated the recreational value of Melnrage beach and the welfare loss due to algal bloom through the loss of onsite time in a straightforward way. This study sheds light on measuring the welfare changes of temporary site quality shocks and is complementary to the travel cost literature regarding the treatment of onsite time. Our findings should also serve as an encouragement for new modeling endeavors within the travel cost literature.

Marine ecosystems provide a wide range of ecosystem services that are fundamental to human well-being, including food provision, climate regulation, and cultural benefits. However, these ecosystems are increasingly threatened by climate change and intensifying anthropogenic pressures, leading to a progressive erosion of their capacity to sustain ecological functions and societal benefits. In this context, the development of robust and policy-relevant framework for monitoring marine natural capital and its associated ecosystem services has become an urgent priority. However, the practical implementation of marine ecosystem accounts remains limited, fragmented, and methodologically heterogeneous.

This paper contributes to this agenda by implementing the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) framework to compile marine ecosystem accounts for Posidonia oceanica, a key seagrass species in the Mediterranean Sea. We focus on Italy as a national case study and integrate three major ecosystem services: fish provisioning, carbon sequestration, and marine-based recreation. We adopt a dual methodological strategy, combining a top-down national-level approach with a bottom-up regional implementation, using Sardinia as illustrative case studies. This dual approach allows us to explicitly examine how scale, data availability, and methodological choices affect the reliability, interpretability, and policy relevance of marine ecosystem accounts.

In addition, we extend the application of ecosystem accounting beyond descriptive stock and flow measures by integrating marine natural capital into the Genuine Savings (GS) indicator. This extension enables an assessment of whether observed economic growth trajectories are achieved at the expense of marine ecosystem degradation or are compatible with long-term sustainability.

Our results demonstrate that it is feasible to compile both physical and monetary accounts for marine ecosystems within a standardized accounting framework. However, they also reveal significant challenges related to data quality, spatial resolution, temporal consistency, and institutional fragmentation. We show that national-level accounts may obscure important local dynamics, while bottom-up approaches, although more ecologically grounded, face limitations in comparability and scalability. The integration of marine natural capital into GS further highlights how ecosystem degradation can alter sustainability assessments, with important implications for regional and national policy priorities.

Overall, this study provides a structured, transparent, and replicable framework for other habitats within the marine ecosystem accounting context, while critically reflecting on its limitations. By explicitly addressing issues of scale, uncertainty, and data gaps, we argue that acknowledging these constraints does not weaken the credibility of ecosystem accounting; rather, it strengthens its role as a decision-support tool for marine conservation, spatial planning, and sustainable development.

The prices of lands up to 20km away from a river are responsive to river's water quality. As the land's distance to water increases, the land prices appear to be more sensitive to superior water quality and the price gradient becomes steeper. Land buyers' perceptions and expectations based on historical water quality status shape their decisions on land bidding prices. The visibility of water quality status serves as another pivotal role influencing buyers' bidding prices. The impacts of water quality on land prices are also contingent on the specific land uses. Additionally, the land price impacts of water quality are universal in terms of rivers and lakes. Over the past two decades, public preferences for water quality in China have evolved. As average water quality improved, additional improvements yield smaller economic gains in terms of land values.

Confronted with the escalating global burden of mental health challenges and constrained medical resources, identifying low-cost, highly accessible environmental interventions is increasingly important. This study examines green space as an environmental health investment and investigates how household investment incentives shape its effects on mental health. We develop a two-stage theoretical model in which parents, acting as the first mover, invest in enhancing children’s efficiency in utilizing green space, after which children adjust their exposure in response. The results show that green space increases the marginal efficiency of health investments, which generates higher preventive efforts and improves mental health outcomes. To test the theoretical results, we employ a two-way fixed effects model using data from the China Family Panel Studies from 2016 to 2022. The findings suggest that a 0.1 increase in population-weighted Normalized Difference Vegetation Index score reduces depression scores by 9.9%. Effects are stronger among youth versus adults and in rural areas, larger households, and provinces with less greenness. Mechanism tests also indicate that frequency of exercise mediates the relationship among younger groups and that parental education amplifies the benefits. Those findings highlight how household behavior shapes environmental health effects and can inform targeted green infrastructure policies.