Todd L. Cherry

The wildlife valuation literature largely focuses on eliciting willingness-to-pay for wildlife conservation, not recreation, and frequently groups species together under the banner of “wildlife”. This study employs the contingent valuation method to value the likelihood of viewing specific wildlife in Grand Teton National Park (GTNP). We estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) and willingness-to-accept (WTA) for species-specific recreation trips to explore substitutability between popular wildlife species. Estimates across species better equip wildlife managers to balance the inherent tradeoffs associated with climate impacts on habitats and populations as well as changing interests among recreationists.

The urgency of addressing climate change has led to the exploration of solar geoengineering (SGE)—a collection of technologies that cool the planet by reflecting a fraction of sunlight back into space. One of the most prominent concerns with SGE is that it may crowd out greenhouse gas mitigation efforts. This paper examines how advances in SGE technologies may impact mitigation. We conduct a social dilemma experiment with treatments that vary how effective SGE is at reducing climate damages and the level of certainty about its effects. Results indicate SGE generally leads to increased cooperation on mitigation, but importantly, we find that mitigation levels decrease significantly as SGE technologies become more effective and less uncertain. At an individual level, agents that stand to benefit the most tend to decrease mitigation, while those that are vulnerable to SGE act to diminish the role of SGE by increasing mitigation.

Wildfire management strategies in the United States historically have focused on suppression activities, but recent work in wildfire policy and ecology has called for a shift in the management paradigm towards prevention. Suppression however remains the budget priority. We design a survey to measure the U.S. public’s preferences for investing public resources to federal wildfire prevention activities. We consider absolute investment as well as investment relative to suppression. Results indicate the public prefers much greater investment in prevention than federally appropriated levels. While people correctly identify the misalignment, they underestimate the extent of the difference between public and agency priorities. We also examine individual actions to reduce the risk of future wildfires. We explore people’s willingness to voluntarily join a local risk-reduction program to reduce community wildfire risk. We find that a large segment of respondents are not only willing to join but support a mandatory requirement for peers to join. Support for government and local prevention is robust across locations, though wildfire risk and exposure matter at the margin. Overall, results indicate that public priorities better align with the expert advice than current practices by wildfire management.

The lack of progress in addressing climate change has led to increased interest in solar radiation modification (SRM)—a collection of large-scale interventions that cool the planet by managing the amount of solar radiation that reaches the earth. SRM complicates climate change governance because, in addition to advancing collective action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, governance needs to restrain unilateral SRM action while balancing diverging actor interests, ethical risks and scientific uncertainty. We survey international climate policy experts for their assessments of the potential for effective global governance of SRM and the likelihood of possible international responses to unilateral SRM scenarios. Experts are pessimistic about the global community achieving effective SRM governance, and they believe unilateral SRM action will trigger international responses and conflicts. Experts believe softer responses are most likely (e.g. diplomatic sanctions) but the potential for stronger responses, including military action, are non-trivial. Relative to the Global North, experts from the Global South are relatively more supportive of SRM, including the development of SRM, the inclusion of SRM in international negotiations, and the deployment of SRM in a climate emergency.