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Costs of Nutrient Management with Technological Development and Climate Change

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Abstract

This chapter examines the implications for the cost-effective management of nitrogen and phosphorus, in the presence of uncertain climate change effects on nutrient pools in a eutrophied sea. It investigates the impact of uncertain development on nutrient abatement technologies. A dynamic cost-effectiveness model to account for differences in the sea’s adjustment to the loads of the two nutrients is used to study uncertain climate change effects with probabilistic constraints on nutrient pool targets and uncertain technological development in a mean–variance framework. Empirical application to the Baltic Sea indicates that climate change and technological development can reduce total abatement cost by half, but also increase it by 125% when uncertainty is included. Poland faces the largest cost burden—approximately 50% of the total cost in all scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

We are much indebted to the EU-funded BONUS project BaltCoast and to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency Grant No. 15/24 for financial support, and to Tomasz Zylicz for valuable comments at the workshop on environmental challenges in the Baltic region at Södertörn University, 11 May 2016.

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  1. Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7013, 750 07, Uppsala, Sweden

    Ing-Marie Gren

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  1. Ing-Marie Gren
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Correspondence to Ing-Marie Gren .

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  1. Department of Economics, Södertörn University Department of Economics, Uppsala, Sweden

    Ranjula Bali Swain

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Gren, IM. (2017). Costs of Nutrient Management with Technological Development and Climate Change. In: Bali Swain, R. (eds) Environmental Challenges in the Baltic Region. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56007-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56007-6_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56006-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56007-6

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