STEFAN GRUBER, University of Sydney - Faculty of Law
Email: gruber.st@web.de

Climate change poses a severe threat to many cultural heritage sites. Threats include floods, increasing thunderstorms and rainfall, desertification, deterioration of permafrost and the decay of cultural landscapes. Protecting cultural heritage sites proves to be very difficult because they are as diverse as the threats from climate change. This paper argues that laws from different areas of environmental law such as heritage conservation law, pollution law, land use law, construction law, water law, environmental impact assessment law and planning law must be used in an integrated way to form a comprehensive system of legal instruments and enforcement mechanisms in order to minimise the effects of global climate change on heritage properties.

CHRISTIAN-OLIVER EWALD, University of St. Andrews - School of Economics and Finance
Email: ce16@st-andrews.ac.uk
WEN-KAI WANG, University of St. Andrews - School of Economics and Finance
Email: ww83@st-andrews.ac.uk

We consider a model of a fishery in which the dynamic of the unharvested fish population is given by the stochastic logistic growth equation. Similar as in the classical deterministic analogon, we assume that the fishery harvests the fish population following a constant effort strategy. In a first step we derive the effort level that leads to maximum expected sustainable yield, which is understood as the expectation of the equilibrium distribution of the stochastic dynamics. This replaces the non-zero fixed point, in the classical deterministic setup. In a second step, we assume that the fishery is risk averse and that there is a trade off between expected sustainable yield and uncertainty measured in terms of the variance of the equilibrium distribution. We derive the optimal constant effort harvesting strategy for this problem. In a final step, we consider an approach which we call the mean-variance analysis to sustainable fisheries. Similar as in the now classical mean-variance analysis in Finance, going back to Markowitz (1957), we study the problem of maximizing expected sustainable yields under variance constraints, and dual to this, minimizing the variance, e.g. risk, under guaranteed minimum expected sustainable yields. We derive explicit formulas for the optimal fishing effort in all four problem considered and study the effects of uncertainty, risk aversion and mean reversion speed on fishing efforts.

AMITRAJEET A. BATABYAL, Rochester Institute of Technology - Department of Economics
Email: aabgsh@rit.edu

The many aspects of alien species management normally all involve decision making over time and under uncertainty. Therefore, in this note, we focus on an arbitrary seaport in a country called Home and we conduct a dynamic and stochastic analysis of two questions that have received insufficient attention in the extant literature on alien species management. First, we provide a particular way of classifying ships that enter the Home seaport from K possible countries in the time interval [0,t]. Second, we characterize the total cost of inspecting the ships that arrive in the Home seaport during the same time interval [0,t].