August 7, 2019
There is increased interest in the role of trees to reduce air pollution and thereby improve human health and well-being. This study determined the removal of air pollutants by dry deposition of trees across the Basque Country and estimated its annual economic value. A model that calculates the hourly dry deposition of NO2, O3, SO2, CO and PM10 on trees at a 1 km x 1 km resolution at a regional scale was developed.
September 16, 2019
BC3 – Basque Centre for Climate Change former cientific director Anil Markandya took part this week at the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP 14). This conference was scherduled to take place from 2-13 September 2019, at the India Expo Center and Mart in New Delhi, India.Part of the side event “Economics of land degradation: Development Alternatives, WOTR & the ELD Initiative” the Distinguished Ikerbasque Professor Markandya gave a presentation about “Economics of Land Degatation: Insights from an evaluation study in Bundelhand by Development Alternatives Group”.
September 18, 2019
Environmental externalities call for the use of environmental taxes to get prices right and thereby reduce environmental pressures. To date, however, the Spanish government makes only limited use of environmental taxes. One major reason for the policy reluctance are concerns on the regressive impacts of environmental taxes. We argue that policy can hedge against these concerns by means of revenue recycling. More specifically, we assess the impacts of a green tax reform where additional revenues are redistributed lump-sum to Spanish households on an equal-per-capita basis. Based on quantitative evidence from coupled microsimulation and computable equilibrium analyses we find that such a green tax reform leads to a substantial reduction in harmful emissions while having a progressive impact.
September 19, 2019
Environmental change constitutes a risk to the sustainability of economic activities, within deltas and the wider regions and economies within which they sit. Slow acting environmental change and shocks from extreme events can affect economic activities. Using multiregional input-output tables, extended to include environmental dimensions and combined with Computable General Equilibrium models, flows of economic activities and ecosystem services across supply chains are assessed.