Newsroom: 2016

Diversions Operations: Addressing Socioeconomic Challenges with Fishers
(posted May 20, 2016)

Fishes vs. Fishers: Large‐scale alterations to Louisiana’s coastal hydrology will affect not only fishes, but also fishers. Biophysical modelling can help characterize management‐driven changes to the distribution and
productivity of specific fish assemblages, but an expanded analysis is required to examine the socioeconomic effects of these changes on individual businesses and harvest sectors. Identifying a standard context is the principle challenge of such an expansion. While fisheries‐independent and fisheries‐dependent impact analyses are inexorably linked, they are often conducted on different scales.
This difference is evidenced by fisheries impact simulations recently commissioned on behalf of the state’s 2012 coastal restoration plan. Those modeling efforts center on forecasted changes in
ecosystems services (fish biomass) over relatively long time periods (20y, 50y) and large geographic regions (coast wide, basin wide). Such simulations may constitute long‐term proxies of social welfare,
but are typically too broad in scope for estimating localized economic impacts.

Read the abstract

Economist: Policy changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; voluntary actions alone won’t do the trick
(posted March 21, 2016)

Policy changes, such as a tax on greenhouse gas releases — something already paid by 1.6 billion people in the world, are needed to combat the rise in global temperature, an economist said during a Monday conference in New Orleans.

Feel-good measures such as taking part in Earth Hour, where millions turned off their lights for an hour, don’t make a dent in where we’re headed with global temperature increases, Gernot Wagner, senior economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, told the crowd at the Challenges of Natural Resources Economics and Policy conference.

Read the full article

CNREP 2016 Recognizes Public and Private Sponsors
(updated February 18, 2016)

Coordinating a national research forum is no small undertaking. It requires a topical focus of sufficient interest to attract hundreds of researchers, managers and specialists. It involves selecting a venue that is both appealing and accessible to prospective attendees. It means providing an amenity-rich schedule that maximizes opportunities for networking and the exchange of technical information and ideas. It entails contractual agreements on registration, lodging, catering, audio-visual, printing and room rental. It takes logistical coordination of attendees, students, vendors, content, website maintenance, social media and event marketing. All of these tasks - and a host of other event-related items - are typically initiated a full year in advance of the actual event.

Accomplishing this requires a team of like-minded, dedicated individuals. It also requires money. The coordinators of CNREP forums have always strived to provide a high-value forum, one in which the benefits of attending far exceed the costs of attendance. Doing so, however, requires supplemental resources and funding from partners and sponsors. Over the past decade, the forum has been supported by in-kind services and direct monetary support from dozens of public and private partners. This year is certainly no different. The CNREP 2016 planning committee wishes to extend sincere thanks to the following organizations for their support:

• Louisiana State University Agricultural Center
• Louisiana Sea Grant College Program
• Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative
• Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
• Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act
• U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Tulane Institute of Water Resources Law & Policy
• Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
• Northern Gulf Institute
• Ramboll Environ
• Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics
• The Water Institute of the Gulf
• Center for the Blue Economy
• Moffatt & Nichol
• Tierra Resources
• ICF International

More detailed information on conference sponsorship is available at:
www.cnrep.lsu.edu/2016/sponsorship.html .

Tremendous Response to CNREP 2016 Call for Abstracts
(February 12, 2016)

Response to the CNREP 2016 call for abstracts has resulted in an unprecedented number of high quality submissions. The conference will feature more than 160 presentations from attendees representing 63 public and private institutions located in 29 U.S. states and five countries. This triennial forum was initiated by the LSU Center for Natural Resource Economic Policy (CNREP) in 2004, with subsequent meetings held in 2007, 2010, and 2013.

“We’ve seen a steady increase in the number of abstracts submitted to our forum over the past 12 years” said Rex Caffey, conference chairman and professor of natural resource economics at Louisiana Sea Grant and the LSU AgCenter. “This event will be our largest by far, and we added a fifth concurrent session to accommodate the large number of quality presentations.

Since its inception, the goal of the triennial CNREP forum has been to marshal the social sciences towards the most timely and relevant socioeconomic research questions of coastal resource management and policy. A sampling of the questions to be addressed at this year’s forum includes:

• What are the economic consequences and policy alternatives of climate change?
• What role will ecosystem services play in federal policy?
• What changes are slated for the National Flood Insurance Program?
• What is the status of state-level efforts to develop model water policy?
• What opportunities and challenges lay ahead for the restoration economy?
• What is the latest research on the costs and benefits of coastal restoration?
• What is the latest economic research on commercial and recreational fisheries?
• What public health impacts have been associated with the DWH spill?
• What are the latest advancement is measuring coastal resilience and mitigating coastal risks?
• How will coastal restoration be financed at the state and federal level?
• What do we know, and need to know, about the socioeconomic impacts of coastal restoration projects?

Additional topics for the forum include, but are not limited to, market and nonmarket valuation of natural resources, environmental benefit-cost analyses, economic linkage/impact assessment, input-output modeling, and comparative assessments of resource management and coastal restoration policy.

The preliminary conference program is available at:
www.cnrep.lsu.edu/2016/agenda.html

Wagner, Campanella and Ryker to Headline CNREP 2016 Conference
(February 12, 2016)

The CNREP 2016 conference is pleased to welcome three prestigious speakers with national expertise in the socioeconomic challenges of coastal systems. On Monday morning, March 21, Dr. Gernot Wagner, senior economist of the Environmental Defense Fund, will open the conference with a plenary presentation focused on the economic implications and policy alternatives of climate change. Wagner will draw from research outlined in his most recent book, Climate Shock, a top 15 Financial Times McKinsey Business Books of the Year in 2015.

The luncheon speaker on March 21 will be Richard Campanella, a professor of geography at Tulane University and an award winning author of nine books on the geography and history of New Orleans. Campanella’s presentation will chronicle the city’s socioeconomic evolution from the 1700s to modern day.

On Tuesday, March 22, the luncheon speaker will be Dr. Sarah Ryker, United States Geological Survey (USGS) deputy associate director for Climate and Land Use Change. Ryker will discuss the genesis and implications of recent federal guidance from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) on the use of ecosystem services in federal decision making.

A more detailed version of keynote speaker bios is available at:
www.cnrep.lsu.edu/2016/speakers.html .

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