Environmental Markets

This course is available for on-campus & remote (online) learning. All students participate in interactive, real-time classes. The goals of this course are to understand how environmental markets are designed and the determinants of their effectiveness in achieving favourable environmental outcomes. The course will equip students with the necessary knowledge to identify and design effective market mechanisms to solve environmental externalities in the context of both developing and developed countries. It will also enable them to assess the performance of these markets and their impacts on environment, socio-economic welfare, local livelihoods and environmental justice. The course focuses on the applied aspects of a wide range of environmental markets by drawing on case studies, lessons learned and best practices of programs and schemes from around the world. This course is designed for students who have an interest in applying economic instruments for environmental conservation. The material covered in the course will prepare students for applied/practical work in government, not-for-profit organizations and international agencies that have a mandate for environmental conservation. The course will cover a range of market mechanisms including the payment for ecosystem services (PES), water markets, markets for biodiversity offsets, cap and trade, weather/climate risk & insurance and carbon farming. Additionally, the course will discuss some commonly used environmental valuation methods and their caveats, the practical application and use of these methods for policy making, resource allocation and designing market mechanisms.