Resource Economics: An Economic Approach to Natural Resource and Environmental Policy, Fourth Edition

'I joined this amazing journey about 30 years ago. I benefited from all the theories, principles, and approaches offered in this book to explore the natural resource and environmental issues on the other side of the world. It makes me an enthusiastic and pragmatic teacher and researcher. In addition to rearranging and rewriting certain chapters, the fourth edition comprises new chapters on climate change which reflect our future challenges. Such knowledge deserves continuously passing to our future generations and equipping more students as an effective doer in resolving complex natural resources issues.'
- Pei-Ing Wu, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Resource Economics engages students and practitioners in natural resource and environmental issues from both local and global standpoints. The Fourth edition of this approachable but rigorous text provides a new focus on risk and uncertainty as well as new applications that address the effect of new energy technologies on scarcity and climate change mitigation and adaptation, while preserving and systematically updating the approach and key features that drew many thousands of readers to the first three editions.

More comprehensive than its competitors, this new edition frames issues and policies from resource scarcity and basic ecology to welfare criteria, property rights, and environmental ethics. Necessary economic, policy, and management concepts and tools are provided, along with applications to a variety of real-world problems. Also included are substantial treatments of new energy technologies, including fracking for oil and natural gas, solar and wind energy, and chapter length analyses of air quality, land markets and use, water resources, climate change, and sustainability.

Primarily a textbook, this teaching tool is perfect for undergraduate and graduate students alike who are studying natural resource and environmental economics, as well as sustainability. Additionally, natural resource, environmental policy, and management decision-makers in the private and public sectors will find the content of this book useful for guiding real-world management and policy decisions. Academic, government, and NGO researchers will also find this to be a valuable resource.

John C. Bergstrom, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Georgia and Alan Randall, The Ohio State University, US and The University of Sydney, Australia