2024 Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecture by Kathleen Segerson

Kathleen Segerson  delivered lecture "Designing Effective Environmental and Conservation Policies:  The Role of Individual and Collective Incentives" s one of the 2024 Rachel Carson Distinguished Anniversary Lecture Series on Mar 14.

Abstract:  Human well-being depends critically on the services provided by nature and the environment, and those services are in turn profoundly affected by human behavior.  However, despite the increasingly widespread recognition of this coupled relationship, in the absence of effective government policies, individuals and firms often have little incentive to take steps needed to protect (or restore) the earth’s environment and natural resources, especially when environmental degradation or resource exploitation provides some short run gain to them.  Government policies can play a key role in changing incentives and hence modifying the behavior of individual people or firms, as well as providing incentives for them to work cooperatively to ensure long run sustainability.   Designing effective policies requires understanding human and firm behavior and how it is likely to respond to individual and group (collective) incentives.  In the case of group incentives, this will depend not only on the specific policy design but also on the internal organization of the group.

Kathleen Segerson is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut.  Her research focuses on the incentive effects of alternative environmental and conservation policies, with applications to groundwater contamination, hazardous waste management, land use regulation, climate change, agricultural pollution, and protection of marine species.  Dr. Segerson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and a fellow at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm.  She has served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and the Committee on Valuing the Protection of Ecological Systems and Services, the National Academy of Science Advisory Committee for the U.S. Global Change Research Program and Review Panel on the National Climate Assessment, the National Research Council’s Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the U.S. National Member Organization of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis.  Dr. Segerson holds a PhD from Cornell University and a BA from Dartmouth College.