Q51 - Valuation of Environmental EffectsReturn

This paper uses as its point of departure a hypothesis that support to renewable sources by means of various subsidies, regulatory measures and tax changes is implemented not only in costlier energy, but also (given various new forms of economic pressure) in those areas of human activity that are meant to be helped and strengthened by these measures. The relationship between strengthening the pressure for advancing renewable energy sources and data such as CO2 emissions or fossil fuel consumption in households is also mathematically tested. Besides this, certain data in the area of agricultural production are also examined, considering the fact that attempts at regulation often have the exact opposite effect - for instance, stagnation of emissions or introducing new plants that are unsuitable for the Czech environment, the cultivation of which is connected with significant problems, including local ecological catastrophes. On the basis of proof, the paper arrives at the conclusion that not only do attempts to benefit the environment through support to renewable energy sources fail to lead to demonstrable success, but that it is highly probable that the real results are negative, which means that the environment comes off in a generally poorer state as a result of these endeavours.

Almost every landscape fulfils various important functions for human society. Nevertheless, planning does not always allocate individual functions the significance that they ought to receive in comparison with others. A typical example is undervaluing landscape services that cannot be expressed in market terms. However, there are means to correct this imbalance. A landscape's non-market services can be expressed using non-market evaluation methods. As a basis for assessing the importance of multi-functional land use, a systematic overview of the various functions of a landscape is presented here. Furthermore, there is a brief description of the non-market evaluation methods that are suitable for evaluating important non-production landscape functions. The core of this work is a search in three flagship periodicals in the field of environmental economics. There is a review of papers applying non-market valuation methods to landscape services, which gives a firmly based picture of the possibilities for evaluating the non-market services of a landscape, the means most commonly used for this evaluation, the intensity of the work that went into developing them, and the increasing importance and prestige of these methods.

In recent years, there have been many changes in environmental law and policy around the globe targeted at improving both economic and environmental conditions. Policy makers and research analysts in many countries are interested in evaluating the success of these changes. Ex-post analysis may be useful in assessing economic and environmental performance. However, the methodology for this type of analysis is still developing. This paper presents one method for performing ex-post analysis using the case of recent changes in water law in the country of Colombia.