Journal Article

Reversing Property Rights: Practice-Based Approaches for Controlling Agricultural Nonpoint-source Water Pollution When Emissions Aggregate Nonlinearly

Valcu, Adriana M., Kling, Catherine L., Rabotyagov, Sergey S.

2014

Overview

Nonpoint-source water pollution remains a major issue despite decades of research and sizable conservation programs. We suggest that by taking advantage of contemporary modeling and optimization approaches, good approximations to physical relationships can be constructed so that even in the presence of unobservable field emissions and nonlinear fate and transport relationships, standard economic tools of command-and-control requirements, performance standards, and trading can be implemented. The Boone River Watershed in the U.S. state of Iowa is used for empirical demonstration. Although the approach can be used to construct voluntary conservation policies, the described policies involve imposing requirements on agricultural polluters rather than relying on voluntary actions alone.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subject: agricultural conservation practices / Agricultural economics / agricultural land / agricultural nonpoint-source pollution / Agricultural pollution / Agriculture / Approximation / conservation policy / Conservation practices / conservation programs / Cost efficiency / cost-effective policy design / Emissions / Environmental economics / Environmental policy / evolutionary algorithms / Iowa / issues and policy / Job performance standards / multi-objective optimization / Nonpoint source pollution / Optimization / Performance standards / Pollutant emissions / pollutants / Pollution / Pollution control / Property rights / Rivers / States / Studies / United States / Water pollution / Water quality / water quality trading / Water supply / Watersheds