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This chapter explores how infrastructure arguments apply to environmental resources and contribute to the difficult tasks of valuing and managing these resources. It is organized into four sections. Section A briefly discusses some difficult valuation and management problems that plague economic analysis of environmental resources. Section B applies the infrastructure criteria and delineates environmental infrastructure. It shows how environmental infrastructures are mixed infrastructure and discusses the many different ways in which users generate massive social value, some of which is reflected in markets and much of which is not. Section C considers commons management and various complications. While the demand-side case for commons management is quite strong, there are strong countervailing concerns, including congestion, degradation, and depletion (conventional tragedy of the commons problems); interuse rivalrousness and incompatibilities (e.g., when pollution and swimming conflict); and negative externalities associated with the production of “public bads” that cause harm in interdependent systems (e.g., pollution that causes adverse health effects to people regardless of whether or not they use the resource). This section offers a few insights regarding how environmental regulation addresses these concerns while sustaining commons to the extent feasible. Section D considers how infrastructure analysis relates to the literatures on ecosystem services and multiple-use management.

This chapter reviews income and welfare measurement and examines the central topics of assets and sustainability with the evaluation of key conceptual and theoretical literature. It also outlines the methods of asset accounting and presents selected empirical results from ‘greening’ the national accounts. Linkages to policy are explored, followed by broad conclusions on some basic questions: To what extent has the promise of environmental accounting been realized? Which approach has the greatest policy significance? And where is environmental accounting likely to be most useful? Finally, it studies the recent empirical results from Southern Africa and explores policy linkage with concluding remarks.

This concluding chapter looks back to the lessons previously discussed and offers some further insights on the war's impacts and implications on the Pacific islands and beyond. It shows the tensions and the potentials for cooperation between conflicting colonial and indigenous visions of Pacific environments and resources, moving further to examine the changes now wrought within these environments and in their indigenous populations. The years of the Pacific War repeated, in an intensified manner, all the environmental processes and related resource contests that the southern Pacific had experienced previously. In addition, politically and strategically, the islands of the southern Pacific were, and still are, pawns of the powers on their periphery. Despite this, since independence, peoples and their small nations think creatively and beyond their beaches.

Introduces the Colorado River case, presenting an overview of the chapters to follow, as well as providing context for analysis of the binational negotiations with a summary of the 2012 landmark Minute 319 agreement between the United States and Mexico. Outlines the key players, the decades-long history of protracted disputes over the waters of the river basin and the environmental resources of the Colorado River Delta, the increasing challenges in the face of extraordinary drought and climate change, and the mutual gains approach that underpinned the negotiations.