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PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the decline in environmental quality in India, China and Brazil is due to release of toxic gases which is an effect of high energy consumption? If so, the increase in energy consumption is due to rapid economic growth led by industrialization? Also examined is what effect does excessive economic growth rates have on energy consumption levels in these countries.

This paper illustrates the main results of an expert elicitation survey on advanced (second and third generation) biofuel technologies. The survey focuses on eliciting probabilistic information on the future costs of advanced biofuels and on the potential role of Research, Development and Demonstration (RD&D) efforts in reducing these costs and in supporting the deployment of biofuels in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries. Fifteen leading experts from different EU member states provide insights on the future potential of advanced biofuel technologies both in terms of costs and diffusion. This information results in a number of policy recommendations with respect to public RD&D strategies and is an important contribution to the integrated assessment modelling community.

Socio-technical or strategic approach to renewable energy deployment all suggests that the uptake of renewable energy technology such as solar photovoltaic is as much a social issue as a technical issue. Among social issues, one most direct and immediate component is the cost of the renewable energy technology. Because renewable electricity provides no new functionality—a clean electron does the same work as a dirty electron does—but is relatively expensive compared with fossil fuel based electricity, there is currently an under-supply of renewable electricity. Policy instruments based on economics approaches are therefore developed to encourage the production and consumption of renewable electricity, aiming to remediate the market inefficiencies that stem from the failure in internalizing the environmental or social costs of fossil fuels. In this vein, the most discussed instruments are renewable portfolio standard or quota based system and the general category of feed-in tariff. Feed-in tariff is to support output or generation of the renewable electricity by subsidizing revenues. The existing discussions have all concerned about the relative effectiveness of these two instruments in terms of cost, prices and implementation efficiency. This paper attempts a different basis of evaluation of these two instruments in terms of cost and (network) externality effects. The cost effect is driven by deploying the renewable as a manufactured technology, and the network externality effect is driven by deploying the renewable as an information technology. The deployment instruments are studied in terms of how these two effects are leveraged in the deployment process. Our formulation lends itself to evolutionary policy interpretation. Future research directions associated with this new energy policy framework is then suggested.

The Upper Yangtze River Basin comprises a densely-populated agricultural region with mountainous and hilly landforms. Intensive cultivation has been extended onto steep hillslopes, which constitute the principal source area for sediment production. Soil conservation on sloping arable lands is thus of utmost priority for persisting sustainable agricultural production and maintaining sound ecosystem services. Although there have been many soil conservation techniques, either promoted by the government or adopted by local farmers, the practiced area was very limited relative to the total area affected by soil erosion. This paper attempts to introduce four popular soil conservation measures on sloping arable lands in this region to enhance a broader scale of implementation, including hedgerow buffers, level trenches, sloping terraces and limited downslope tillage. These practices, although developed from local farmers’ indigenous knowledge for productive purposes, have well conformed to our contemporary understanding of soil erosion processes on sloping landscape affected by human disturbances, were of sound suitability to regional manual tillage agriculture and more trade-off-efficient on rill prevention, runoff harvest and nutrient management.

This paper tries to identify under which conditions voluntary certification could be an answer to the governance of sustainability at global level. The study addresses the case of biofuel sustainability certification in Brazil and the role of the EU Directive on biofuels. The case study has permitted to identify and analyze some of these factors as the degree of dependence from foreign market, the policy environment, the structure of the supply chain, the benefits and costs associated to certification as well as some unintended consequences. The research has been conducted through a case study in the state of Sao Paolo (Brazil).

Economists have confined the concept of 'sustainability' to intertemporal distributional equity. We propose a broader definition, combining dynamic efficiency and intergenerational equity, and relate it to two concepts from neoclassical economics: potential Pareto-improvements and inter-personal compensation.

Domestic cookstoves in rural India have long been targeted by development programs dedicated to solving a diverse range of problems from deforestation and indoor air pollution to global warming and rural market inefficiencies. Theories on how technologies are mobilized in these design and diffusion innovation projects and what this presages for development outcomes can be improved by explicitly detailing the composition and structure of program governance frameworks. I develop a ‘dual adoption analytic framework’ to interrogate two technology innovation programs in Western India. This framework underscores the collaborative nature of technology mobilizations and, more specifically, how power is distributed across partnerships at different stages of the development process. Local partners are shown to function as influential mediating agents operating between extrinsic agencies and targeted village groups. They reinforce funding agency planning commitments while also activating economic contingencies and generating alternative development pathways. I also reveal how the structure of technology innovation projects—as either administratively heavy handed or committed to free market principles—influences intermediary behavior, intrapartnership structures of control and, ultimately, development outcomes for targeted artisan communities and households.