EEPSEA hosted its 36th Biannual Workshop at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, last November 7–11, 2011, with 91 participants in attendance. The meeting showcased four distinguished plenary speakers, presentations of six cross-country projects, and a two day-workshop where individual research projects were presented. The first plenary speaker, Dr. Raman Letchumanan from the ASEAN Secretariat, stressed that priority environmental concerns in the region included trade-environment and trans-boundary issues, climate change and disaster risk reduction. He said that in this current age, researchers needed to broaden their understanding of who the policy-makers were because those who made decisions affecting policy were no longer limited to those working in government. For instance, significant power lay with the corporate sector which is very sensitive to what consumers want while the latter can dictate whether businesses will become more environmentally sensitive and responsible through their purchasing decisions.
The second plenary speaker, Mr. Jerry Velasquez from the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction, presented the main findings of the 2009 and 2011 Global Assessment Reports (GARs) for Disaster Risk Reduction. He pointed out that many attributes of risk were intensively concentrated in a small part of the earth’s surface and involved a small number of mega disasters. Furthermore, the concentration of risk was found to be unevenly spread out with developing countries having a hugely disproportionate share. Mr. Velasquez said that reducing disaster risk can be achieved by addressing the underlying drivers of risk such as poor urban governance, ecosystem decline, and vulnerable rural livelihoods. He stressed that research to help governments evaluate the costs and benefits or cost-effectiveness of different disaster risk reduction measures was needed from environmental economists.
The third and fourth plenary speakers discussed tools that economists use in impact evaluation and measuring the economic effects of environmental change. Dr. Jeff Vincent from Duke University, USA, led researchers into the rudiments of applying econometric analysis using panel data to measure the impacts of climate change on migration through changes in crop productivity. Dr. Vincent demonstrated how one could econometrically measure the effects of climate change variables on agriculture and migration in 32 states in Mexico for two time periods. In his presentation, he compared the outcomes of the fixed effects and random effects models in terms of their level of significance, error terms, and ability to capture short-run and long-run adaptation.
Lastly, Dr. Ted Horbulyk talked about impact evaluation tools that researchers could use to control for selection bias based on his literature review of this topic. He distinguished between experimental methods (random design trials and natural experiments) and quasi-experimental methods of impact evaluation (namely, propensity score matching, instrumental variables in regression analysis, and difference-in-difference methods using panel data). Dr. Horbulyk then presented a list of past EEPSEA research projects where the economic valuation could be expanded into impact evaluation and encouraged researchers to be on the look-out for such possibilities in order to enrich their analysis.