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Today, more than ever, ‘Spaceship Earth’ is an apt metaphor as we chart the boundaries for a safe planet1. Social scientists both analyse why society courts disaster by approaching or even overstepping these boundaries and try to design suitable policies to avoid these perils. Because the threats of transgressing planetary boundaries are global, long-run, uncertain and interconnected, they must be analysed together to avoid conflicts and take advantage of synergies. To obtain policies that are effective at both international and local levels requires careful analysis of the underlying mechanisms across scientific disciplines and approaches, and must take politics into account. In this Perspective, we examine the complexities of designing policies that can keep Earth within the biophysical limits favourable to human life.

Early empirical studies in labour and urban economics addressing the role of commuting (on, e.g., wages and locational choice) have typically been confined to the use of survey data. Researchers ar ...

We propose a framework to support management that builds on a social–ecological system perspective on the Arctic Ocean. We illustrate the framework’s application for two policy-relevant scenarios of climate-driven change, picturing a shift in zooplankton composition and alternatively a crab invasion. We analyse archetypical system dynamics between the socio-economic, the natural, and the governance systems in these scenarios. Our holistic approach can help managers identify looming problems arising from complex system interactions and prioritise among problems and solutions, even when available data are limited. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-017-0960-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Using a data set on housing sales transactions we explore the potential effect of the Fukushima disaster on housing prices in Sweden. In contrast to most earlier findings in other countries we do not find any disproportionate effect from the Fukushima disaster on housing prices in vicinity of nuclear power plants in Sweden.

Human activities are threatening to push the Earth system beyond its planetary boundaries, risking catastrophic and irreversible global environmental change. Action is urgently needed, yet well-intentioned policies designed to reduce pressure on a single boundary can lead, through economic linkages, to aggravation of other pressures. In particular, the potential policy spillovers from an increase in the global carbon price onto other critical Earth system processes has received little attention to date. To this end, we explore the global environmental effects of pricing carbon, beyond its effect on carbon emissions. We find that the case for carbon pricing globally becomes even stronger in a multi-boundary world, since it can ameliorate many other planetary pressures. It does however exacerbate certain planetary pressures, largely by stimulating additional biofuel production. When carbon pricing is allied with a biofuel policy, however, it can alleviate all planetary pressures., In the light of nine Earth System Processes (ESPs) and the corresponding planetary boundaries, here the authors assessed the global environmental impact of a global carbon pricing in a multi-boundary world. They show that a global carbon tax would relieve pressure on most ESPs and it is therefore stronger in a multi-boundary world than when considering climate change in isolation.

This paper characterizes the value of biodiversity and ecosystem resilience by formalizing a stochastic dynamic bioeconomic model of pollinator diversity under climate changes, with an application to oil rapeseed production in the Stockholm region of Sweden. It studies the optimal provision of semi-natural habitat for two different pollinator bee species: bumble bees and solitary wild bees. It is found that, despite being less effective, solitary bees hold considerable resilience value due to the differences in how the two species respond to temperature shocks. The paper also discusses the role of spatial aspects, in particular the reduced pollination effectiveness due to spatially uneven allocation of semi-natural habitats. It is found that spatial unevenness leads to an increase in the habitat provision, with an attendant reduction in the resilience value of solitary bees.

The coronavirus pandemic has led many countries to initiate unprecedented economic recovery packages. Policymakers tackling the coronavirus crisis have also been encouraged to prioritize policies which help mitigate a second, looming crisis: climate change. We identify and analyze policies that combat both the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis. We analyze both the long-run climate impacts from coronavirus-related economic recovery policies, and the impacts of long-run climate policies on economic recovery and public health post-recession. We base our analysis on data on emissions, employment and corona-related layoffs across sectors, and on previous research. We show that, among climate policies, labor-intensive green infrastructure projects, planting trees, and in particular pricing carbon coupled with reduced labor taxation boost economic recovery. Among coronavirus policies, aiding services sectors (leisure services such as restaurants and culture, or professional services such as technology), education and the healthcare sector appear most promising, being labor intensive yet low-emission—if such sectoral aid is conditioned on being directed towards employment and on low-carbon supply chains. Large-scale green infrastructure projects and green R&D investment, while good for the climate, are unlikely to generate enough employment to effectively alleviate the coronavirus crisis. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10640-020-00451-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The economics of climate change is characterized by many uncertainties regarding, for instance, climate dynamics, economic damages and potentially irreversible climate catastrophes. Using an optimal growth model of a fossil-fuel-driven economy subject to climate externalities and potentially irreversible climatic regime shifts, this paper contributes to the understanding of how the risk of such events impacts on optimal fossil-fuel use, carbon taxes and fossil-fuel prices over time. We show that in excess, to an increase in the expected present value of marginal damages and an increase in the probability of triggering the event, there also exists a third opposing effect. This effect comes from the fall in value of remaining fossil-fuel reserve, which results from the potential regime shift which may (or may not) occur sometime in the future, and implies that optimal fossil-fuel policy shifts towards using more resources early on. This effect is related to the idea of the green paradox. We prove the existence of this effect and show under which circumstances it can become quantitatively important. Numerically, the green-paradox effect seems to be somewhat smaller than, but comparable in size to, the increase in expected marginal damages. In general, our findings highlight the importance of considering the supply-side impacts on climate policy in response to catastrophic climate events.

This paper studies a multi-sector growth model where emissions from fossil fuels give rise to a climate externality. Each sector is impacted heterogeneously by climate change which together with technological differences induces factor reallocation over time. By solving the social planners problem and characterizing the competitive equilibrium this paper derives a simple formula for optimal taxes and sectoral factor allocation which shows how the elasticity of substitution between sectors impact on taxes through differences in technology as well as sensitivity to climate change. I also present separate numerical simulations for how optimal policies differ depending on sectoral composition, exemplified by the U.S and Indian economy. The results show how climate change,Please check the telephone number and the email address of the corresponding author, and correct if necessary. technological development and the elasticity of substitution can impact on optimal fossil fuel consumption over time.

Climate change has in recent years moved to the forefront of the policy scene. At the same time, the research literature on macroeconomic aspects of climate change has grown and broadened significantly. In this review, we survey and discuss this literature, with special attention given to results that help shed light on important qualitative questions regarding how an optimal carbon tax should be set. The review covers topics such as spatial aspects of optimal taxes, interactions with other taxes, uncertainty, technological change, and the qualitative time profile of the optimal tax.

The complex roles of nature and culture in poverty traps call for diverse and often transformative poverty alleviation strategies., The poverty trap concept strongly influences current research and policy on poverty alleviation. Financial or technological inputs intended to “push” the rural poor out of a poverty trap have had many successes but have also failed unexpectedly with serious ecological and social consequences that can reinforce poverty. Resilience thinking can help to (i) understand how these failures emerge from the complex relationships between humans and the ecosystems on which they depend and (ii) navigate diverse poverty alleviation strategies, such as transformative change, that may instead be required. First, we review commonly observed or assumed social-ecological relationships in rural development contexts, focusing on economic, biophysical, and cultural aspects of poverty. Second, we develop a classification of poverty alleviation strategies using insights from resilience research on social-ecological change. Last, we use these advances to develop stylized, multidimensional poverty trap models. The models show that (i) interventions that ignore nature and culture can reinforce poverty (particularly in agrobiodiverse landscapes), (ii) transformative change can instead open new pathways for poverty alleviation, and (iii) asset inputs may be effective in other contexts (for example, where resource degradation and poverty are tightly interlinked). Our model-based approach and insights offer a systematic way to review the consequences of the causal mechanisms that characterize poverty traps in different agricultural contexts and identify appropriate strategies for rural development challenges.

"Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks. Conditions that enable general resilience include diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust. Processes for building general resilience are an emerging and crucially important area of research."

The purpose of the paper is to simulate the water pumping phenomenon that may cause damage to driven concrete pile below water. The cracked concrete is modeled as water saturated porous media, where the cracked region is given a high permeability. A FE program based on a coupled hydro-mechanical theory has been developed to perform simulations. The simulations clearly demonstrate the water pumping phenomenon, where water is pressed out from the crack by the compressive wave induced by the pile driving hammer, and then sucked back again by the following tensile wave. Further, the principal tensile stress distribution indicates that further cracking is likely to occur at the surface of the pile around the crack, which is in agreement with the damages seen on piles in reality.

The purpose of this paper is to simulate the water flow induced by the moving wheel pressure on wet asphalt road pavements, which may be a reason for a damage phenomenon in asphalt denoted stripping. The wet asphalt pavement is modeled as water saturated porous media. The interaction of the porous solid skeleton and the pore liquid leads to a coupled dynamic problem with the deformation of the solid and the relative velocity and pressure of the fluid as primary unknown fields. A FE program has been developed to perform simulations. The simulations clearly demonstrate the induced deformation and water flow in the asphalt. A water pumping phenomenon is obtained where water is squeezed out of the asphalt underneath the wheel load and then later sucked back when the wheel has moved away. The water velocity is however low.

A simplified energy balance climate model is considered with the global mean temperature as the state variable, and an endogenous ice line. The movements of the ice line towards the Poles are associated with damage reservoirs where initial damages are high and then eventually vanish as the ice caps vanish and the damage reservoir is exhausted. We couple this climate model with a simple economic growth model and we show that the endogenous ice line induces a nonlinearity. This nonlinearity when combined with two sources of damages - the conventional damages due to temperature increase and the reservoir damages - generates multiple steady states and Skiba points. It is shown that the policy ramp implied by this model calls for high mitigation now. Simulation results suggest that the policy ramp could be U-shaped instead of the monotonically increasing with low starting mitigation gradualist policy ramp.

The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.

In a general equilibrium model of the world economy, we develop a two-dimensional energy balance climate model featuring heat diffusion and anthropogenic forcing driven by global fossil fuel use across the sphere of the Earth. This introduces an endogenous location dependent temperature function, driving spatial characteristics, in terms of location dependent damages resulting from local temperature anomalies into the standard climate-economy framework. We solve the social planner's problem and characterize the competitive equilibrium for two polar cases differentiated by the degree of market integration. We define optimal taxes on fossil fuel use and how they may implement the planning solution. Our results suggest that if the implementation of international transfers across latitudes is not possible then optimal taxes are in general spatially non-homogeneous and may be lower at poorer latitudes. The degree of spatial differentiation of optimal taxes depends on heat transportation. By employing the properties of the spatial model, we show by numerical simulations how the impact of thermal transport across latitudes on welfare can be studied. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

We couple a one-dimensional energy balance climate model with heat transportation across latitudes, with an economic growth model. We derive temperature and damage distributions across locations and optimal taxes on fossil fuels which, in contrast to zero-dimensional Integrated Assessment Models, account for cross latitude externalities. We analyze the impact of welfare weights on the spatial structure of optimal carbon taxes and identify conditions under which these taxes are spatially nonhomogeneous and are lower in latitudes with relatively lower per capita income populations. We show the way that heat transportation affects local economic variables and taxes, and locate sufficient conditions for optimal mitigation policies to have rapid ramp-up initially and then decrease over time. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

We couple a one-dimensional energy balance climate model with heat transportation across latitudes, with an economic growth model. We derive temperature and damage distributions across locations and optimal taxes on fossil fuels which, in contrast to zero-dimensional Integrated Assessment Models, account for cross latitude externalities. We analyze the impact of welfare weights on the spatial structure of optimal carbon taxes and identify conditions under which these taxes are spatially non-uniform and are lower in latitudes with relatively lower per capita income populations. We show the way that heat transportation affects local economic variables and taxes, and locate sufficient conditions for optimal mitigation policies to have rapid ramp-up initially and then decrease over time.

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.