Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution And Economic Incentive Policies

Excerpt from Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution and Economic Incentive Policies: Issues in the Reauthorization of the Clean Water Act No single policy is likely to be able to effectively control all nps pollution. Economic incentive policies may work well in some cases, but command-and-control practices will be more effective in others. Thus, an ideal nps pollution-control strategy would include a variety of policy instruments and the simultaneous use of multiple instruments. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Water pollution control has been a top environmental policy priority of the world’s most developed countries for decades, and the focus of significant regulation and public and private spending. Yet, significant water quality problems remain, and trends for some pollutants are in the wrong direction. This book addresses the economics of water pollution control and water pollution control policy in agriculture, with an aim towards providing students, environmental policy analysts, and other environmental professionals with economic concepts and tools essential to understanding the problem and crafting solutions that can be effective and efficient. The book will also examine existing policies and proposed reforms in the developed world. Although this book addresses and has a general applicability to major water pollutants from agriculture (e.g., pesticides, pharmaceuticals, sediments, nutrients), it will focus on the sediment and nutrient pollution problem. The economic and scientific foundations for pollution management are best developed for these pollutants, and they are currently the top priorities of policy makers. Accordingly, the authors provide both highly salient and informative cases for developing concepts and methods of general applicability, with high profile examples such as the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone in the US; the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe; and Lake Taupo in New Zealand.

Flexible Incentives for the Adoption of Environmental Technologies in Agriculture identifies and structures more flexible economic incentives for the achievement of environmental goals in agriculture. It provides a conceptual framework and presents case studies that analyze how flexible incentives can address environmental problems that are caused by agricultural production. The book brings together economists, agency personnel and political economists for the purpose of exploring how new cutting-edge economic tools could be developed and applied to environmental problems. The goal of the book is to complement and to expand the economic theory of environmental regulation and technology adoption with new research findings. The key theme of this book is the important role technology takes when addressing environmental problems. New technologies and technical development are broadly defined to include economic instruments, innovative ways to communicate environmental information, new economic institutions, and education. This book is designed for public and private policymakers, government analysts, teachers, researchers and students who specialize in the fields of natural resources, agricultural economics and environmental regulation. It provides a fresh perspective on what types of incentives may be used to lead us to the desired environmental outcomes and offers new ideas about the types of economic instruments that may achieve these outcomes.

Nonpoint-source pollution (NPSP) poses a special challenge to society's ability to manage its collective environmental good - especially surface and groundwater quality. Since there is no `point', such as an outfall pipe, from which the pollution is being discharged and can be measured, pollution can reach the ambient environment without being monitored. Since management of air and water polution requires the definition and enforcement of limits on discharges or the imposition of fees on those discharges, inability to measure limits our ability to manage this environmental problem. This book presents a state-of-the-art review and discussion of economists' efforts to resolve this major problem and attempts to provide a way of working around it. The book sets forth the theoretical issues, modeling, and the actual programs set up to confront this issue.

In April 1992 the Foundation Eni Enrico Mattei organized a workshop on the regulation of nonpoint source pollution. This volume inc1udes the proceedings of that meeting, as well as additional original contributions, in an attempt to provide an overview of recent theoretical developments in the field. Research on the causes, consequences, and control of nonpoint source pol lution has been carried out over the last two decades. Interest in this subject has grown as a result of the increasing recognition of the insufficiency of traditional pollution control policies focused on the large scale, confined, and general ly predictable pollutant discharges. In fact, many contemporary problems are caused by the combined activities of small polluters, along with natural pro cesses, intermittent and unpredictable events, and often involve pollutants with complex environmental outcomes. Despite the progress made in understanding the nature and size of pollution from diffuse sources, the issue of regulation is still far from being system at ically and adequately addressed. This policy vacuum is partly attributable to the difficulty of adapting the traditional point source regulatory tool kit to the specific features of nonpoint source problems. Such features inc1ude the tech nical difficulty of identifying sources and measuring individual emissions, their variability over time and space, the role played by natural processes in detennin ing pollutant discharges at source and their ultimate impacts on the receiving environmental media.

This two-volume set collects key essays examining economic theory, methods, and issues salient to agri-environmental policy in the US and in Europe, as well as in other countries. The topics under discussion are arranged thematically and include theoretical, numerical and empirical works; all are grounded in policy and economics. The introduction to these volumes reviews the evolution of agri-environmental policies, with an important focus on the history of US policy and European agri-environmental policy. A key feature within this is the importance of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US, particularly its move towards more 'market-based incentives' from the 1980s onwards. Within the European context, the effects of the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) on agri-environmental programmes and schemes within the member states, are discussed. Significantly, the essays republished here have provided the knowledge base that has influenced further applied work, creating an influential impact on policy development.

This volume brings together a number of prominent economic studies all of which deal with key water quality issues. The studies focus on the economic aspects of water quality including identifying the polluters' actions and incentives, designing and comparing control mechanisms, analyzing the costs and benefits of water quality programmes, and finally managing transboundary water quality. They all make recommendations for improving water quality through changing incentives, programmes and/or policies.