Daniel A. Brent

While levees safeguard over 23 million people and trillions of dollars in property, a profound, largely unrecognized flood risk crisis is emerging. Because approximately 75% of surveyed levees remain unaccredited, millions live behind levee systems that may not meet minimum federal safety standards. To overcome this accreditation bottleneck, this commentary translates research‐driven opportunities into a prioritized, three‐phase operational roadmap. First and most critically, regulators must transition from deterministic models to risk‐based probabilistic frameworks that leverage economic indicators to guide local interventions. In the mid‐term, engineering practices must integrate technical innovations, such as non‐invasive geophysical field testing methods and artificial intelligence, alongside hybrid green‐gray infrastructure solutions. Finally, achieving long‐term resilience requires embedding transdisciplinary coproduction and design‐centered alternatives into local governance. Ultimately, this framework moves beyond ‘check the box’ accreditation toward a holistic understanding of levee performance, equity, and community contexts, offering levee communities, management agencies, regulators, and researchers actionable pathways to safer, more resilient flood protection nationwide.

Many cities provide incentives for private landowners to install green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) to reduce stormwater runoff and deliver co-benefits of urban greening. We analyze how participation in a GSI subsidy program affects the spatial distribution of urban greening. The distributional effects manifest in two stages: program eligibility and participation decisions. Eligibility, determined by hydrological factors, is positively correlated with wealthier and whiter areas. Within eligible areas, the wealthiest households and least white neighborhoods have lower participation rates. The findings highlight the importance of considering eligibility and participation in balancing the joint goals of environmental quality and environmental justice.

The recent stated preference literature emphasises the importance of incentive compatible elicitation methods, which depend on respondent beliefs that payment can be collected if provision occurs. We investigate this condition in a randomised field experiment where stated choices are incentivised financially. The objective of the treatment was to make choices salient by making each decision financially relevant and to increase the respondents' beliefs that future payments will be enforced. Our results show that the treatment increases estimates of the marginal utility of income, with the effect being economically and statistically significant for low‐income respondents. We develop a stylised theoretical framework that allows us to quantify the bias that is implied by the observed differences between the treated and control groups. We find that failure to account for respondents' doubts about payment coercion in an otherwise well‐designed survey inflates the marginal willingness to pay among low‐income respondents by a factor of at least 1.72.

Little is known about the consumer preferences of next-generation plant-based and cell-based meat alternatives, two food technologies that offer a demand-side solution to the environmental, nutritional, and other societal concerns associated with animal-intensive agriculture. To address this gap, this paper estimates consumers’ willingness to pay for four sources of protein (conventional meat, plant-based meat, cell-based meat, and chickpeas) in a developing country with rising demand for meat—India. A latent class model of a discrete choice experiment conducted in Mumbai identifies four heterogeneous segments in the Indian market. Aggregating across all four segments, respondents are willing to pay a premium for plant-based meat and a smaller premium for cell-based meat over the price of conventional meat. However, our main findings show that these premiums strongly differ across the four consumer-class segments. The results offer important insights into future price points and policy options that might make these meat alternatives commercially successful, and therefore, a viable option in addressing societal concerns.

Incentivized experiments and stated preference methods are commonly viewed as substitutes in preference elicitation. We leverage the distinct strengths of each approach by combining a fully incentivized risk experiment with a stated preference survey to model utility for intrinsically risky attributes. A door-to-door survey of 981 participants in a drought-prone region elicits preferences for alternative sources of municipal water, conditional on water price and quality. Participants’ observed and imputed risk attitudes are incorporated into preference estimation. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that participants are concerned about water supply risk, but not about new technology risk. (JEL C51, D81)