Create a culture of experiments in environmental programs.

Organizations need a better "learning by doing" approach.

Physical distancing versus testing with self-isolation for controlling an emerging epidemic.

Two distinct strategies for controlling an emerging epidemic are physical distancing and regular testing with self-isolation. These strategies are especially important before effective vaccines or treatments become widely available. The testing strategy has been promoted frequently but used less often than physical distancing to mitigate COVID-19.

Emphasize personal health benefits to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates.

The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines is a tremendous scientific response to the current global pandemic. However, vaccines per se do not save lives and restart economies. Their success depends on the number of people getting vaccinated.

Hesitancy Toward a COVID-19 Vaccine.

The scientific community has come together in a mass mobilization to combat the public health risks of COVID-19, including efforts to develop a vaccine. However, the success of any vaccine depends on the share of the population that gets vaccinated. We designed a survey experiment in which a nationally representative sample of 3,133 adults in the USA stated their intentions to vaccinate themselves and their children for COVID-19.

Protecting local water quality has global benefits.

Surface water is among Earth's most important resources. Yet, benefit-cost studies often report that the costs of water quality protection exceed its benefits. One possible reason for this seeming paradox is that often only a narrow range of local water quality benefits are considered.

Effects of Physical Distancing to Control COVID-19 on Public Health, the Economy, and the Environment.

Physical distancing measures are important tools to control disease spread, especially in the absence of treatments and vaccines. While distancing measures can safeguard public health, they also can profoundly impact the economy and may have important indirect effects on the environment. The extent to which physical distancing measures should be applied therefore depends on the trade-offs between their health benefits and their economic costs.

Policy Brief - What's in a Name? A Search for Alternatives to "VSL".

Benefit-cost analyses of environmental, health, and safety regulations often rely on an estimate of the value of statistical life (VSL) to calculate the aggregate benefits of reducing human mortality risk. The VSL represents the marginal rate of substitution between mortality risk and money. Although this concept is well-understood by economists, it is viewed by many non-economists as confusing technical jargon that borders on the immoral.

Using structural restrictions to achieve theoretical consistency in benefit transfers.

Analysts often extrapolate estimates of the value of environmental improvements reported in prior studies to evaluate new policy proposals, a practice sometimes referred to as "benefit transfer." Benefit transfer functions are frequently specified based on statistical considerations alone. However, such a purely statistical approach can lead to willingness-to-pay functions that fail to satisfy some aspects of theoretical consistency that may be especially important for policy evaluations.

Potential biodiversity benefits from international programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation.

Deforestation is the second largest anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide emissions and options for its reduction are integral to climate policy. In addition to providing potentially low cost and near-term options for reducing global carbon emissions, reducing deforestation also could support biodiversity conservation. However, current understanding of the potential benefits to biodiversity from forest carbon offset programs is limited.

Prioritizing conservation activities using reserve site selection methods and population viability analysis.

In recent years a large literature on reserve site selection (RSS) has developed at the interface between ecology, operations research, and environmental economics. Reserve site selection models use numerical optimization techniques to select sites for a network of nature reserves for protecting biodiversity. In this paper, we develop a population viability analysis (PVA) model for salmon and incorporate it into an RSS framework for prioritizing conservation activities in upstream watersheds.

Ecological effects of density-independent mortality: application to cooling-water withdrawals.

A wide variety of environmental stresses can cause density-independent mortality in species populations. One example is cooling-water withdrawals, which kill or injure many aquatic organisms near power plants and other industrial facilities. In the United States alone, hundreds of facilities withdraw trillions of gallons from inland and coastal waters every year to cool turbines and other manufacturing equipment.

Population level impacts of cooling water withdrawals on harvested fish stocks.

Trillions of gallons are withdrawn every year from U.S. rivers, estuaries, lakes, and coastal waters to cool the turbines of power plants and other equipment in manufacturing facilities.