Environmental Economics and Sustainability Flashcards
6 cards from real Environmental Science practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 6 Environmental Economics and Sustainability flashcards as text
The tragedy of the anticommons (complementary to Hardin's commons tragedy) describes:
Answer: The underuse of a resource when too many owners each hold veto rights, preventing anyone from using it productively
The anticommons (Heller, 1998) occurs when too many parties hold the right to exclude others from a resource, leading to underuse - seen in patent thickets, fragmented land ownership, and pharmaceutical research.
Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) in environmental decision-making is limited primarily because:
Answer: Difficult-to-quantify values (biodiversity, human life, future generations) must be monetized, introducing significant uncertainty and ethical controversy
BCA requires assigning monetary values to environmental goods (existence value of a species, value of a statistical life) that are inherently difficult to measure and involve ethical judgments about what can be traded for money.
Which of the following is an example of a full cost accounting approach in environmental management?
Answer: Including environmental externalities and social costs in the price of products (e.g., carbon-inclusive electricity pricing)
Full cost accounting (FCA) incorporates all costs - including environmental externalities, social costs, and lifecycle costs - into product prices or decision-making, rather than externalizing them to society.
Which of the following best illustrates the concept of natural monopoly as applied to environmental infrastructure?
Answer: Water and wastewater utilities that exhibit declining average costs as scale increases, making a single provider more efficient than competition
Water and wastewater infrastructure has high fixed costs (pipes, treatment plants) spread over large volumes, making average cost fall continuously with scale - creating natural monopoly conditions that justify public provision or regulation.
The concept of safe minimum standard (SMS) in biodiversity economics suggests that:
Answer: Society should protect a minimum viable population of all species unless the costs are intolerably high, regardless of cost-benefit calculations
SMS (Ciriacy-Wantrup) argues that because species extinction is irreversible and the value of biodiversity is highly uncertain, society should maintain a minimum viable population of each species unless costs are catastrophically high.
What does the concept of decoupling mean in the context of sustainable development?
Answer: Achieving economic growth while simultaneously reducing environmental impacts such as resource use or emissions
Decoupling means that economic growth (GDP increase) is accompanied by a reduction (or slower growth) in environmental pressure - resource use, emissions, or waste - breaking the historic linkage between prosperity and pollution.