14 pages, In recent years, “urban greening” has become a new keyword in urban policy and practice, used to describe a proliferation of urban quality of life and environmental sustainability initiatives including street trees, public parks, greenways, farmers' markets, green roofs, and LEED certification in design. The emerging critical literature on urban greening has highlighted important ways green's social and economic added value affects the political economy of contemporary greening and produces inequalities in access to real or perceived environmental goods. However, such research has only infrequently asked why and under what conditions naturalized understandings of green as “good” make it possible for such initiatives to add value in the first place. As a result, it offers only partial explanations of why green has the effects it has—for instance, increasing property values—and only very rarely questions the fundamental “good” of nature itself. I argue that integrating insights on green's naturalized social and economic value from a growing body of social-theoretical work across geography and the social sciences can complement political economic explanations for greening and provide new vantage points for critique.
Miao, Ruiqing (author) and Hennessy, David A. (author)
Format:
Paper
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 131 Document Number: D11313
Notes:
Abstract of a paper presented at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association 2011 AAEA and NAREA joint annual meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 24-26, 2011. Two-page abstract of a 54-page paper., Study of U.S. wheat farmers' willingness to pay for a near infrared sensor that can segregate wheat grains according to their protein concentration. Findings indicated willingness to pay 4.8 cents a bushel for the sorting technology.
14 pages, This study aimed to estimate the economic benefits of the mangrove ecosystem resulting from coastal rehabilitation efforts in the coastal area of Karawang Regency, West Java Province, Indonesia. The estimation results are crucial for convincing stakeholders, including the government, that the budget allocated for coastal rehabilitation will provide significant benefits for human well-being and the sustainability of coastal ecosystems. The study employed an economic valuation analysis method, focusing on the three areas most severely affected by coastal erosion in Karawang Regency. The results showed that the total annual economic benefit from mangrove planting as part of coastal rehabilitation in these areas amounted to IDR 4,257,468,324,946. These findings are intended to support efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
12pgs, This study highlights the results of a national survey of Extension land-grant and sea grant professionals designed to better understand their involvement in state/regional tourism programming and their perceptions of tourism related opportunities and challenges. This study demonstrates the breadth and importance of Extension’s tourism programing and continued challenges including limited investment and commitment by state institutions and the larger CES for core tourism program offerings. Investments in tourism programing are recommended as a way for Extension to maintain its relevancy, and better engage and address the community and economic development needs of traditional and emerging audiences.
12 pages, Extension program participants tell story after story of the impact of Cooperative Extension on their lives, their families, and their businesses. Despite huge amounts of qualitative data, very little quantitative data exist showing the aggregated public value of Extension programs—especially across program areas. The lack of data leaves Extension administrators high and dry when they are asked to show public value, a circumstance sometimes resulting in reductions in human and financial resources. A simple, yet powerful Extension public value instrument was developed and used in Georgia along with analysis methods designed to showcase the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of Extension programs.
21 pages., Economic analyst provided evidence of "the deplorable state of affairs in the analytical procedure employed in the evaluation of the effects of advertising in the agricultural field."
11pgs, Are farmers better stewards of the land they own than the land they rent from others? We answer this question using a data set that identifies Ontario farmers’ conservation practices on their own land as well as the land they rent. Using a fixed-effects regression approach, we find that the role of tenure varies for different types of conservation practices. Farmers were found to be just as likely to adopt a machinery-related practice such as conservation tillage on their rented land as that land which they own. On the other hand, farmers were found to be less likely to adopt site-specific conservation practices such as planting cover crops on rented land. However, this effect diminishes as the expected length of the rental relationship increases when the landlord has a farming background.
15 pages, This paper studies Chinese grape growers’ time discounting and its implications for the adoption of technology that can reduce the negative effects of increasing precipitation. Using primary data collected in Xinjiang Province, we undertook a contingent valuation of rain covers that protect fruit from rain and estimated a discounted utility model using these data. Using a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we find that local grape growers discount the future very heavily, with a discount rate of 0.17 per year, which is almost four times higher than the Chinese market interest rate. Farmers also tend to underestimate the benefits of adopting covers, with their purchase decisions appearing to largely depend on their past actual losses rather than future anticipated losses. These findings have broader implications for policies promoting proactive adaptation in response to likely increased rainfall in the region. Targeting farmers who give lower weight to events far off in the future and understanding that many farmers may tend only to make adoption decisions that have strong short-term benefits could improve the efficacy of climate policies that target agricultural technologies.
