Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Environmental economics
By the 1980s ‘new economics’ had appeared and environmental economics was
expanding (Costanza, 1991; Common, 1996). Bodies like the London Environmental
Economics Centre had been established and environmental issues had gained a much
higher profile (Tietenberg and Folmer, 1998). Even so, economics is still far from
becoming green—being aware of a problem is no guarantee that people change their
ways. Things like shadow pricing may be more often used, but macro-economics is
still generally reluctant to include environmental costs in calculations of things like
gross national product (GNP); economic growth is still a major goal, little change
from the 1970s when an environmentalist observed that ‘growth for the sake of growth
is the ideology of the cancer-cell’. A recent UK press advert called for an
‘environmental economist’
to explore how economic factors should be taken into account when drafting
and applying environmental regulations; to establish the value of economic
instruments within a mixed regime of regulations; to establish economic
measures of trends in the employing nation’s environmental capital.
There have been attempts to incorporate economic evaluation into environmental
impact assessment (James, 1994). Valuation of the environment must be improved
for developing and developed countries (Georgiou et al., 1997). For an introduction
to the economic theory involved in policy making for environmental management
see Baumol and Oates (1988).
Global environmental problems and economics
Those exploring policies to cope with climate change, transboundary pollution
and other global environmental problems need to know the likely costs,
approaches which may be useful, and economic controls. The economics of global
climate change is attracting considerable attention to try to resolve disagreement
between various countries and institutions over the apportionment of blame,
estimation of costs, and development of controls (Agarwal and Narain, 1991;

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Funkhauser, 1995; Tietenberg, 1997; Proost and Braden, 1998). Another area of
interest is technology change: in the early 1970s Farvar and Milton (1972)
suggested that careless application of technology caused socioeconomic problems.
Nowadays economists try to forecast the impacts of proposed innovations
(Tylecote and Van der Straaten, 1997).