Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are significant for poverty alleviation, but are threatened by over-exploitation and climate change effects such as drastic drops in regrowth rates. How will fishers adapt? To shed light on this, we ran a common-pool resource experiment with SSF fishers in Thailand. Our results show that groups confronted with a potential abrupt drop in the regrowth rate are more likely to form cooperative agreements compared to groups not confronted with such a drop, which theory cannot predict. However, groups that form cooperative agreements do not necessarily manage the resource efficiently; many groups under-exploit. Over-exploitation is driven by individual characteristics, e.g., if individuals can diversify income, and if they are born outside the village. We conclude that more systematic exploration of the role of socio-economic factors, and how these factors interact with ecological conditions facing fishers, are needed. Our work can be seen as one step in this direction.

Cleaner cooking is an important policy objective in the bid to achieve sustainable development. Despite efforts to encourage cleaner cooking fuel use, biomass fuel is still widely used in many developing countries. This study investigates the role of behavioral factors, particularly risk aversion, in the choice of cooking fuels in Ghana. In addition, we investigate how the improvement of supply infrastructure and services mitigates the impact of risk preferences in fuel choices. By employing data from the recent round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, we find that risk-averse households are less likely to choose liquified petroleum gas as their cooking fuel. However, the effect is mitigated for households located in districts with more supply infrastructure. Additional analyses reveal the influence of risk and time preferences in other household behavior.

Payments for environmental services have been popularly used in environmental management and an increasing number of studies assesses their contribution to local livelihoods. This study employs propensity score matching with a dataset of 404 indigenous households in the Central Highlands of Vietnam to evaluate the effect of payments for forest environmental services (PFES) on their livelihoods. Participating in PFES increased households' employment and income from activities related to natural forests. Income from PFES allowed households to enhance productive investment and promote income from cultivation activities. All of this, in turn, increased their annual income, job satisfaction, living expenditures, and reduced the amount of any loan. Additionally, PFES enhanced opportunities to participate in training courses and traditional community activities. This confirms that PFES is not only a good initiative for forest management but also a livelihood policy for communities.

This paper combines population and climate data to estimate the volume of migration induced by the drought events that have hit Mali since the late 1980s. The results show that droughts have had the effect of decreasing net migration rates in the affected localities. This is true for both men and women, regardless of their age. The effect of drought episodes, however, is found to differ according to localities and households’ capacity to adapt to climatic constraints: it fades in localities characterized by more diversified crops and in areas that receive more rainfall on average. Climate shocks also had an impact on international mobility: over the 2004–2009 period, around 2300 additional departures per year can be attributed to the droughts that hit Mali during the 2000s. We forecast that, under different climate scenarios and population growth projections, mobility induced by drought events will substantially grow in the next decades.

This paper investigates whether pollution-intensive industries develop faster in a time of economic downturn. Using firm-level panel data from 2005 to 2013, we find supporting empirical results in an analysis of China's manufacturing industries in the 2008 economic crisis. We find that pollution-intensive firms tended to produce more compared with non-pollution-intensive firms in the 2008 economic crisis, with the pre-crisis period as a baseline. We further find that this effect is more pronounced in areas with higher export dependence and a smaller proportion of production from pollution-intensive industries. The relatively faster production expansion in pollution-intensive industries is more evident for state-owned enterprises.