Potential Socioeconomic and Environmental Effects of an Expanding U.S. Bioeconomy: An Assessment of Near-Commercial Cellulosic Biofuel Pathways.

This paper showcases the suitability of an environmentally extended input-output framework to provide macroeconomic analyses of an expanding bioeconomy to allow for adequate evaluation of its benefits and trade-offs. It also exemplifies the framework's applicability to provide early design stage evaluations of emerging technologies expected to contribute to a future bioeconomy. Here, it is used to compare the current United States (U.

What Factors Drive the Changes in Water Withdrawals in the U.S. Agriculture and Food Manufacturing Industries between 1995 and 2010?

Climate change and increasing world population will directly impact the global food supply chain linkages. In the United States, agricultural production requires less irrigated water than before but it still accounts for a third of total water withdrawals. To better understand the evolution of its water use, we perform a structural decomposition analysis of water withdrawals across eight different crops and six livestock categories and differentiate the trends over 1995-2005 vs 2005-2010 to account for the role of the economic crisis in the second period.

Comparing the Economic Impact of Natural Disasters Generated by Different Input-Output Models: An Application to the 2007 Chehalis River Flood (WA).

Due to the concentration of assets in disaster-prone zones, changes in risk landscape and in the intensity of natural events, property losses have increased considerably in recent decades. While measuring these stock damages is common practice in the literature, the assessment of economic ripple effects due to business interruption is still limited and available estimates tend to vary significantly across models. This article focuses on the most popular single-region input-output models for disaster impact evaluation.

Goldilocks and the Raster Grid: Selecting Scale when Evaluating Conservation Programs.

Access to high quality spatial data raises fundamental questions about how to select the appropriate scale and unit of analysis. Studies that evaluate the impact of conservation programs have used multiple scales and areal units: from 5x5 km grids; to 30m pixels; to irregular units based on land uses or political boundaries. These choices affect the estimate of program impact.