Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

The course covers the following: \- Market failures and various economic concepts of efficiency \- Public sector tools for addressing market failures such as negative externalities in the form of environmental problems \- Cost-benefit analysis and the significance of the discount rate for monetary valuation \- The energy sector \- Global issues such as sustainable development, climate change, energy, demography, poverty, and economic growth \- Biodiversity and monetary valuation of life, health, environment, and natural resources \- Valuation of renewable and non-renewable resources \- Moral philosophy and ethics applied to environmental issues and sustainable development The course concludes with students presenting, in writing and in seminar form as a group, an economic analysis of an environmental and/or sustainability-related development problem.