This paper provides a concise introduction to and evaluation of the Lake Taupo nitrogen cap and trade program established as part of Waikato Regional Council's recent Regional Plan Variation Five. The policy establishes a catchment-wide cap on nitrogen losses by allocating farmers individual...

As part of international climate change policy, voluntary opt-in programs to reduce emissions in unregulated sectors or countries have spurred considerable discussion. Since any regulator will make errors in predicting baselines, adverse selection will reduce efficiency since participants will...

A crucial factor in the success of any water quality trading market is its ability to cost-effectively reallocate nutrient allowances from initial holders to those users who find them most valuable; the market's trading efficiency. We explore causes of and solutions to trading inefficiency by...

The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) was introduced through the Climate Change Response Act in September 2008 and remains in force. The forestry sector has been directly affected by the NZ ETS since 1 January 2008 and stationary energy, liquid fuels and industrial emissions have...

The life satisfaction approach has recently emerged as a new technique in the suite of options available to non-market valuation practitioners. This paper examines the influence of ecosystem diversity on the life satisfaction of residents of South East Queensland, Australia. It is found that, on...

The question of how to effectively address agricultural greenhouse gas emissions is of critical importance for New Zealand and the world. Ensuring that our responses are effective requires us to first consider what we aim to achieve: why do we care about agricultural emissions? This paper...

Allocating permits based on individual historical emissions (‘grandfathering’), or industry benchmark data, is an important design aspect of an emissions trading scheme. Free permit allocation has proven complex and inefficient (particularly in the European Union) with distribution...

This paper describes preliminary work on establishing a pilot project for carbon sequestration. The project is intended to simulate the structure of the Permanent Forest Sinks Initiative, a program that may extend to the national level under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture and...

Several different New Zealand economic models produce measures of rural economic activity that have greenhouse gas implications. For climate change analysis, models need to translate economic activity into greenhouse gas emissions. This document estimates functions and creates projections for...

Hendy and Kerr (2005b) find that an emissions charge on agricultural methane and nitrous oxide of $25 per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent would be likely to reduce New Zealand‘s net land-use related emissions for commitment period one in the order of 3%, with full accounting. The...