"Green Bonds" emerged as a new form of environmental financing in 2007. While most investors still view them as a niche product in the overall fixed income market, green bonds have grown rapidly to nearly $37 billion in issuance in 2014, with issuers from the World Bank to the State of Massachusetts. This paper examines the current and potential future use of green bonds for financing sustainable land use and conservation projects around the world.

The paper looks at the development of conservation policy since the mid-20th Century. It reviews how land conservation policy developed in the UK, and the ethical and policy design issues which emerged as the focus of conservation expanded. It then considers how the lessons learned may be applied to address environmental conservation needs in developing society situations. The first steps in UK conservation policy entailed legislation to establish public rights over privately owned resources.

Until recently public efforts to encourage conservation on private land in many countries has primarily been through uniform payment policies. Auctions are increasingly used as a payment mechanism to acquire public benefits such as conservation actions that provide environmental improvements on private land (e.g. the US Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).

The agglomeration bonus literature has not recognized the potential of conditional agreements to overcome the informational requirements, particularly those of landowners, necessary to induce spatially coordinated land conservation. The model presented in this paper shows that the net social benefits produced by a conditional agglomeration bonus program are at least as large as those produced by a traditional uniform subsidy whenever the benefit function exhibits threshold effects and the uniform and CAB subsidies are equal.

This book exposes the key land use and environmental problems facing Kenya today due to lack of an appropriate national land use policy. The publication details how the air is increasingly being polluted, the water systems are diminishing in quantity and deteriorating in quality. The desertification process threatens the land and its cover

Purchasing development rights is a major mechanism for the protection of environmental quality and landscape amenities. This paper provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that takes into account land costs and probability of land use conversion. We compare two strategies. Subject to a budget constraint on parcel purchases, the standard strategy is to target parcels with the highest ratio of environmental benefits to land costs. The standard strategy selects parcels even if there is little probability that the parcel would otherwise be converted.

In many parts of the world, deteriorating environmental conditions have led policy makers to develop policies and programs aimed at promoting conservation practices on lands devoted to agriculture. Such programs have been studied by environmental economists, but little research has been done on the usefulness of strategically varying the conservation contract's length.

The dominant paradigm of conservation-reserve planning in economics is to optimize the provision of physical conservation benefits (measured in units like species protected) given a budget constraint. Large-scale biology-based priority setting implies that the value we place on biodiversity and ecosystem function is not affected by human proximity to that natural capital. There is significant evidence, however, that human willingness to pay (WTP) for conservation declines with distance (e.g. Loomis 2000) – a phenomenon we refer to as “spatial value decay”.

Temporal spillovers occur when a conservation program changes what happens to land outside the temporal window of the conservation contract. This may happen when conservation improves land so that returns to non-conservation uses are increased, or when landowners' preferences become more pro-conservation as they see land flourish under conservation, for example. These post-contract changes may occur on the extensive margin (acres of land conserved) or intensive margin (intensity of land in a given use).

This special issue of Policy Matters focuses on the outreach and impact of Dr. Elinor Ostrom's groundbreaking research on common property (or commons) theory. Her work was instrumental in shaping contemporary analyses of resource management and conservation, especially at a local level. This collection of research papers, essays, commentaries, and songs build upon her work and provide case studies demonstrating the practical application of her theoretical contributions. 

We examine the role of spatial interactions in conservation easements placed on prairie pothole habitat in western Canada. One of the goals of the conservation easement program we study is to protect contiguous habitat. We identify endogenous spatial interactions among conservation easements and government protected land, independent of spatially correlated landscape features and local economic shocks that influence easement enrollment. We present evidence that easements increase the likelihood of subsequent easements on neighboring land.

Climate warming and human actions both have negative impacts on the land cover of Mongolia, and are accelerating land degradation. Anthropogenic factors which intensify the land degradation process include mining, road erosion, overgrazing, agriculture soil erosion, and soil pollution, which all have direct impacts on the environment. In 2009–2010, eroded mining land in Mongolia increased by 3,984.46 ha., with an expansion in surrounding road erosion. By rough estimation, transportation eroded 1.5 million ha. of land.