Suggestions for a Covid-19 Post-Pandemic Research Agenda in Environmental Economics.

In this article we draw upon early lessons from the 2020 Covid-19 crisis and discuss how these may relate to a future research agenda in environmental economics. In particular, we describe how the events surrounding the Covid-19 crisis may inform environmental research related to globalization and cooperation, the green transition, pricing carbon externalities, as well as the role of uncertainty and timing of policy inventions. We also discuss the implications for future empirical research in this area.

Assessment of Life Cycle Impacts on Ecosystem Services: Promise, Problems, and Prospects.

The analysis of ecosystem services (ES) is becoming a key-factor to implement policies on sustainable technologies. Accordingly, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods are more and more oriented toward the development of harmonized characterization models to address impacts on ES. However, such efforts are relatively recent and have not reached full consensus yet. We investigate here on the transdisciplinary pillars related to the modeling of LCIA on ES by conducting a critical review and comparison of the state-of-the-art in both LCIA and ES domains. We observe that current LCIA practices to assess impacts on "ES provision" suffer from incompleteness in modeling the cause-effect chains; the multifunctionality of ecosystems is omitted; and the "flow" nature of ES is not considered. Furthermore, ES modeling in LCIA is limited by its static calculation framework, and the valuation of ES also experiences some limitations. The conceptualization of land use (changes) as the main impact driver on ES, and the corresponding approaches to retrieve characterization factors, eventually embody several methodological shortcomings, such as the lack of time-dependency and interrelationships between elements in the cause-effect chains. We conclude that future LCIA modeling of ES could benefit from the harmonization with existing integrated multiscale dynamic integrated approaches.

Battle for Climate and Scarcity Rents: Beyond the Linear-Quadratic Case.

Industria imports oil, produces final goods and wishes to mitigate global warming. Oilrabia exports oil and buys final goods from the other country. Industria uses the carbon tax to impose an import tariff on oil and steal some of Oilrabia's scarcity rent. Conversely, Oilrabia has monopoly power and sets the oil price to steal some of Industria's climate rent. We analyze the relative speeds of oil extraction and carbon accumulation under these strategic interactions for various production function specifications and compare these with the efficient and competitive outcomes. We prove that for the class of HARA production functions, the oil price is initially higher and subsequently lower in the open-loop Nash equilibrium than in the efficient outcome. The oil extraction rate is thus initially too low and in later stages too high. The HARA class includes linear, loglinear and semi-loglinear demand functions as special cases. For non-HARA production functions, Oilrabia may in the open-loop Nash equilibrium initially price oil lower than the efficient level, thus resulting in more oil extraction and climate damages. We also contrast the open-loop Nash and efficient outcomes numerically with the feedback Nash outcomes. We find that the optimal carbon tax path in the feedback Nash equilibrium is flatter than in the open-loop Nash equilibrium. It turns out that for certain demand functions using the carbon tax as an import tariff may hurt consumers' welfare as the resulting user cost of oil is so high that the fall in welfare wipes out the gain from higher tariff revenues.