AAEA Annual Meeting

Our first section meeting will be at the 2013 AAEA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC next summer.  Please plan to attend and help chart the future of your section. 

The ENV section will sponsor two sessions at the 2013 AAEA & CAES Joint Annual Meeting in Washington, DC:

• “The Economics of Executive Order 13508:  The Chesapeake Bay and Implications for Large-Scale Watershed Management” (Rob Johnston, Organizer, rjohnston@clarku.edu)

The US EPA is charting a new course for addressing point and non-point source pollution in watersheds and coastal estuaries through the Chesapeake Bay Program.  Pollution control throughout the 64,000 square mile Chesapeake Bay watershed has been popularly characterized as the imposition of upstream costs to provide downstream benefits.  However, a closer look reveals that there are heterogeneous benefits and costs throughout the watershed.  Moreover, much of the  recent work on the economics of non-point source pollution control emphasizes potential applications to Chesapeake Bay or similarly high profile estuaries and bays that drain large watershed areas.   Given the prominence of the watershed, the recent executive order mandating its protection and restoration, and central role of economics in both informing policy approaches and evaluating outcomes, papers in this session present primary contributions on the economics of Chesapeake Bay pollution control.  These papers address both potential methods of pollution control and outcomes in terms of benefits and costs across the watershed. While emphasizing Chesapeake Bay, these analyses have broad implications for pollution control in watersheds across the US.

• “Bioenergy Policy Amid Missing Markets, Changing Technology and Environmental Trade-offs” (Ben Gramig, Organizer, bgramig@purdue.edu)

Bioenergy in the form of liquid fuels or electricity can be produced using different feedstocks and technologies.  The natural resource and environmental effects of bioenergy development are influenced by changing public policies governing energy and the environment, changing technology, market forces that include the cost of substitutes, and incentives for associated ecosystem services. The papers in this session will examine environmental and natural resource economics dimensions of bioenergy development related to resource use and environmental quality.

If you would like to present a paper in either of these sessions, or have someone who you would like to recommend for a presentation, please contact Rob or Ben.