Environmental Economics

Congratulations to the authors! From the inbox:

We are glad to announce that the 2012 Sören Wibe
Prize was awarded to Christopher C. Moore, Thomas P. Holmes and
Kathleen. P. Bell, for their article "An attribute-based approach to
contingent
valuation of forest protection programs":

Journal of Forest Economics 17 (2011):35-52

The article provides a well-structured, well-written, and innovative
piece of research in applying contingent valuation of welfare effects of
forest conservation in the special case of Eastern Hemlock in the
United States.
The article presents an "attribute based" CV method to study the
welfare gains, to carry out cost-benefit analysis, and to inform the
distribution of mitigation effort over land units. One of the key
questions studied is
the preference of the citizens concerning ecologically valuable sites
versus recreational sites. The results indicate, interestingly, that
people are willing to provide "substantial support" to programs that
protect
ecological sites, in spite of their description "difficult for
visitors to access". For practical policy planning, the results are
interesting. First of all, welfare effects from conservation clearly
exceed the low
conservation costs, and almost any program with positive welfare
effects would pass the cost-benefit test. More importantly, when the
welfare effects of the weighted optimal allocation of conservation sites
are compared
to the actual program, it turns out that the current allocation is
strongly biased towards human-use sites as compared to a much larger
share of ecological sites of the optimal allocation. The study
demonstrates that
although many conservation programs may pass the cost-benefit tests,
significant welfare gains are possible if the preferences of the public
are correctly accounted for in the allocation of conservation measures
to
forest sites with different environmental benefits.

The 2012 Award Selection committee comprised of: Sashi Kant, Jari Kuuluvainen and David Newman (chair).

Thanks to the support of Sören Wibe's family, the Journal publisher
Elsevier, and the Department of Forest Economics at the Swedish
University of Agricultural Sciences, the prize winners will receive a
cash amount of
€ 2 000, and will be invited to give a lecture at the Swedish
University of Agricultural Sciences.

Yours sincerely,

Runar Brännlund, Ola Carlén, Peichen Gong
Editors Journal of Forest Economics