Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Forestry and Environmental Studies

First Advisor

Fenichel, Eli

Abstract

Impacts from global change are demonstrably affecting ecosystems and natural assets that are central to supporting and sustaining human well-being. To mitigate these impacts effectively, comparable measures to evaluate policy outcomes are needed. The three chapters of this dissertation contribute to scholarship at the intersection of economics and ecosystem measurement using examples from coastal and marine economics. The first chapter addresses the use of information criteria, in particular, Akaike's Information Criterion, for model selection in ecology. In collaboration with other economists and ecologists, I argue that researchers can reach incorrect conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships by relying on information criteria. We illustrate via a concrete example that inference extending beyond prediction into causality can be badly misled by information-theoretic evidence and identify a solution space for improving estimates. The second chapter addresses the substitutability of transfers of produced capital to compensate for losses of natural capital assets. I use a setting in coastal Florida to explore whether planned transfers of beach sand from one side of an inlet to the other are valued differentially compared to naturally provided sand. I find that the marginal capitalization of a unit of human-transferred sand in coastal property values is larger than naturally-provided sand, per property transaction. Quantifying gaps between natural capital assets, services, and putative produced-capital substitutes is important for virtually all policies involving land use—from municipal zoning to climate. In the final chapter, I turn to beach-dune systems in North Carolina to address the mapping of natural and produced capital attributes to the ecosystem services they provide. I use the hedonic property valuation method coupled with a quasi-experimental design exploiting differences in the relative height of dunes and buildings to show how structural characteristics of properties—the nature of produced capital—come to bear on the value of and tradeoffs among natural capital assets. I show that the presence/absence approach used in the prior literature masks high magnitude service flows—coastal protection and viewshed reduction—that have offsetting effects. I then tackle the problem of optimal adaptation to global change and sea-level rise using my estimates to inform more efficient adaptation strategies in the coastal zone.

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