This pilot survey was conducted during the spring of 2010 to guage the awareness and perceptions of local elected officials and water managers about water scarcity in the Triangle region of North Carolina. An online survey elicited 104 responses, one-fifth of which identified themselves as elected officials, another one-fifth as water managers and the remainder as staff. The responses indicate that there is widespread awareness of water scarcity among the respondent groups, but there are differing opinions on the state and local level about the immediacy of water scarcity concerns.

Short profiles of each council’s approach to risk policy and ABC control rules, developed resource for managers and a foundation for discussion at the May 2010 Forum on scientific uncertainty and risk.

This paper was prepared for the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

The most common stormwater policy structure across North Carolina local governments is for developers to bear full responsibility for stormwater best management practices construction and the associated costs, and for the subsequent property owners to bear full responsibility for operation and maintenance of best management practices. Options for improvements to the policy framework to solve these problems are constrained. This report offers recommendations to help local governments in North Carolina better address these issues.

Summary of presentations and panel discussions at the Mid-Atlantic Catch Shares Workshop, March 16-18 in Williamsburg, VA.

Energy Efficiency in the South is a recent report by a team of researchers at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and Georgia Institute of Technology and that uses state-of-the-art economic modeling to evaluate the potential impact of energy efficiency policies on Southern states. The energy efficiency policies examined by the research team fall into three broad categories: residential, commercial, and industrial. The report also includes state profiles for each state in the region (including the District of Columbia) and the economic and employment impacts of energy efficiency for each individual state.

During recent years, the U.S. agricultural sector has experienced high prices for energy-related inputs and commodities, and a rapidly developing bioenergy market. Greenhouse gas emissions mitigation would further alter agricultural markets and increase land competition in forestry and agriculture by shifting input costs, creating an agricultural greenhouse gas abatement market and expanding bioenergy demand. The potential effects of these events on the agricultural sector are being hotly debated. We use a multisector model (FASOM-GHG, Adams et al, 2009) to estimate the potential implications of these developments on net farm income and the U.S. agricultural sector.

In light of the continuing uncertainty regarding if and when a U.S. compliance market for carbon will be established, this paper summarizes approaches for generating U.S. funding for international climate action that are outside of any U.S. climate bill. Proposals along the lines of those presented here were identified by Project Catalyst and Climate Advisers as being both politically feasible and financially effective. In addition, a newly released international Monetary Fund proposal for the creation of a "Green Fund" capable of meeting the $100 billion target set in the Copenhagen Accord is discussed.

Public lands have the potential to make significant contributions to climate mitigation objectives and are likely to play an important role in comprehensive climate policy. Existing legislation and regulations provide broad authority for public lands to contribute to carbon sequestration, emission avoidance, and biomass production objectives. Introducing new climate policy objectives, however, requires balancing with other objectives, such as endangered species preservation, recreation, protection of soil and water resources, grazing, timber harvesting, energy production and natural resource extraction.

Carbon trading works only if markets for carbon provide enough liquidity and pricing accuracy. Further, the creation of a de novo market for carbon assumes that the incentives to create such markets exist and that these markets will occur in the form that regulators desire. We argue that while regulators should receive all relevant information on trades (a trade repository), some discretion is necessary in the structure of markets. We suggest that regulators follow a hybrid approach to regulation, where regulators require some markets to exchange-traded centralized limit order books, require trades between large financial intermediates to be centrally settled, but allow for some contracts to be over-the-counter with the right to move markets to a different reporting or settlement structure as they develop. Such an approach requires the regulator to have genuine discretion in decisio making.