Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

Today the RiskMetrics Group ESG Blog highlights new research showing that companies with better environmental performance are viewed as lower risk in bond markets and pay a lower cost of borrowing.  The researchers, Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann, won the Moskowitz Prize for research in socially responsible investing.  I found this the most interesting finding: ...the link between environmental risk and debt costs has strengthened over time. To test this, Bauer and Hann divided their 1995-2006 data sample into two parts, and performed the same tests on data from the 1995-2001 and 2001-2006 periods.

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In 1998, Dan Pauly et al. of the University of British Columbia published a classic paper called "Fishing Down Marine Food Webs." They reported that humans were steadily depleting oceans of the top predators in the food web and working our way down the food web as the fish ran out.  Pauly measured a value called "Mean Tropic Level," (MTL), essentially the average place in the food web that our fish come from, finding that it had declined in fisheries globally since the 1970s.

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In a new paper in Ecological Economics, Mark Sagoff criticizes ecologists for trying to find general, broadly applicable values for ecosystem services. Real values, Sagoff argues, are "dispersed, contingent, particular, local, transitory, and embedded in institutions and practices." He cites an example of citrus growers in the San Joaquin valley of California. While pollinators have been held up by many ecologists as providers of a valuable ecosystem services, pollinators are a pest to these farmers:

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I've noticed a rise lately in the frequency of times I see the name PricewaterhouseCoopers pop up in research about ecosystem services and economics.   Most recently they have produced a series of reports with the United Nations Development Program on habitat banking in Latin America and the Carribean.  Habitat banking is an ecosystem service market in which habitat "developers" protect or restore ecosystems to generate credits that can be bought by other developers as part of a requirement to mitigate damage caused by construction projects.

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Via Garry Peterson  I discovered this post by Simon Donner about forecasts of this year'smassive coral bleaching event in the Caribbean. Donner and colleagues published a paper in PNAS in 2007 in which they calculated that heat waves that cause massive coral bleaching, like a previous event in 2005, had gone from being 1-in-1000-year events to a probability of once every 10-50 years during the 1990s, and by the 2030s will occur every 1-2 years.

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