Among the green lobby and the general public there is urgency for agriculture to clean up its act on environmental issues. Increased intensification of land use and in particular dairying has led to environmental spill-overs that the public is no longer willing to tolerate. Agriculture is in...

This paper describes a multi-agent system (MAS) model, Desktop MAS, designed for New Zealand‟s pastoral industries. Desktop MAS models the strategic decisions and behaviours of individual farmers in response to changes in their operating environment. Farmer responses determine production,...

Resource Management's Act current “first come first served” method of distributing water rights is fast becoming inadequate to handle this increasingly over-allocated factor of production. Water markets or tariffs are one way to achieve allocative efficiency. To establish such markets or...

The National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management now requires that water quality objectives and limits be set for all water bodies in New Zealand. Where objectives result in the development of nitrate limits for waterways and development pressure is likely to make these limits difficult to...

The application of stated preference non-market valuation approaches in settings where there are strong cultural differences in environmental perspectives potentially misrepresent strengths of preferences for different groups. This paper reports on a study that measured strength of affiliation...

Forest carbon is potentially an important income stream for small land owners in Guatemala that would help to cease deforestation and forest degradation pressures. However, the temporary nature of sequestered forest carbon, the risk of environmental disturbances releasing forest sequestered...

Human capital development, especially higher educational attainment attaches high premium to human skills as an important factor of production. In view of this, the objective of the study is defined in two folds; first, to revisit returns to education in Nigeria and second, to investigate...

The paper describes an innovative approach to stakeholder consultation about agricultural land uses and water quality in rural waterways. In mid-2012 the authors prepared a number of policy scenarios from published regional council planning documents, addressing sediment, nutrients and...

Nutrient emissions from agricultural land are now widely recognized as one of the key contributors to poor water quality in local lakes, rivers and streams. Nutrient trading has been suggested as a regulatory tool to improve and protect water quality. However, farmers’ attitudes suggest that...

We consider two approaches to quantify New Zealand farmers’ ability to mitigate their farm’s environmental impact: The construction of marginal abatement cost curves and improvements in farm management practices. Marginal abatement cost curves can be constructed by combining information on...