In many countries around the world impacts of climate change are assessed and adaptation options identified. We describe an approach for a qualitative and quantitative assessment of adaptation options to respond to climate change in the Netherlands. The study introduces an inventory and ranking of adaptation options based on stakeholder analysis and expert judgement, and presents some estimates of incremental costs and benefits. The qualitative assessment focuses on ranking and prioritisation of adaptation options. Options are selected and identified and discussed by stakeholders on the basis of a sectoral approach, and assessed with respect to their importance, urgency and other characteristics by experts. The preliminary quantitative assessment identifies incremental costs and benefits of adaptation options. Priority ranking based on a weighted sum of criteria reveals that in the Netherlands integrated nature and water management and risk based policies rank high, followed by policies aiming at 'climate proof' housing and infrastructure.

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There is a growing concern that increased nutrient and sediment runoff from river catchments are a potential source of coral reef degradation. Degradation of reefs may affect the number of tourists visiting the reef and, consequently, the economic sectors that rely on healthy reefs for their income generation. This study uses a contingent behaviour approach to estimate the effect of reef degradation on demand for recreational dive and snorkel trips, for a case study of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Results from a negative binomial random effects panel model show that the consumer surplus current reef visitors derive from a diving or snorkelling trip is approximately A$185 per trip. Furthermore, results indicate that reef trips by divers and snorkellers could go down by as much as 80 per cent given a hypothetical decrease in coral and fish biodiversity. This corresponds to a decrease in tourism expenditure by divers and snorkellers on full-day reef trips in the Cairns management area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park of about A$103 million per year.

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Farmers on the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso in West Africa cultivate under precarious conditions. Rainfall variability is extremely high in this area and accounts for much of the uncertainty surrounding the farmers' decision-making process. Strategies to cope with these risks are typically dynamic. Sequential decision making is one of the most important ways to cope with risk due to uncertain rainfall. In this paper, a stochastic programming model is presented to describe farmers' sequential decisions in reaction to rainfall. The model describes farmers' strategies of production, consumption, selling, purchasing, and storage from the start of the growing season until one year after the harvest period. This dynamic model better describes farmers' strategies than do static models that are usually applied. This study draws important policy conclusions regarding reorientation of research programs and illustrates how operations research techniques can be usefully applied to study grass root problems in developing countries.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Climate Change and the Stability of Water Allocation Agreements SummaryWe analyse agreements on river water allocation between riparian countries. Besides being efficient, water allocation agreements need to be stable in order to be effective in increasing the efficiency of water use. In this paper, we assess the stability of water allocation agreements, using a game theoretic model. We consider the effects of climate change and the choice of a sharing rule on stability. Our results show that both a decrease in mean river flow and an increase in the variance of river flow decrease the stability of an agreement. An agreement where the downstream country is allocated a fixed amount of water has the lowest stability compared to other sharing rules.