Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Natural resource economics
Summary
Natural resource economics deals with the supply, demand, and allocation of the Earth's natural resources. One main objective of natural resource economics is to better understand the role of natural resources in the economy in order to develop more sustainable methods of managing those resources to ensure their availability for future generations. Resource economists study interactions between economic and natural systems, with the goal of developing a sustainable and efficient economy.
Natural resource economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research within economics that aims to address the connections and interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its focus is how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of earth's natural resources. Resource economics brings together and connects different disciplines within the natural and social sciences connected to broad areas of earth science, human economics, and natural ecosystems. Economic models must be adapted to accommodate the special features of natural resource inputs. The traditional curriculum of natural resource economics emphasized fisheries models, forestry models, and mineral extraction models (i.e. fish, trees, and ore). In recent years, however, other resources, notably air, water, the global climate, and "environmental resources" in general have become increasingly important to policy-making.
Academic and policy interest has now moved beyond simply the optimal commercial exploitation of the standard trio of resources to encompass management for other objectives. For example, natural resources more broadly have defined recreational, as well as commercial values. They may also contribute to overall social welfare levels, by their mere existence.
The economics and policy area focuses on the human aspects of environmental problems. Traditional areas of environmental and natural resource economics include welfare theory, land/location use, pollution control, resource extraction, and non-market valuation, and also resource exhaustibility, sustainability, environmental management, and environmental policy.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.