Using China's provincial economic and pollution data from 1992 to 2008, we employ data envelope analysis and econometric analyses to explicitly estimate technical efficiency and examine the role of technical efficiency, pollution control instruments (pollution levy and pollution quantity control) and prices of production inputs on pollution intensity. We find that an increase of labor wage and a decrease of capital cost are associated with an improvement in technical efficiency. The levy rates of air pollution improve technical efficiency but pollution quantity control targets have no statistically significant effect on technical efficiency. On the other hand, technical efficiency, the effective levy rates, pollution quantity control targets and capital cost have a negative effect but wage has a positive effect on pollution intensity. The importance of production input prices in pollution intensity and technical efficiency suggests alternative channels for industrial pollution control as well as cautions for the unintended consequence on the environment if any policy changes are made relating to labor and capital costs.

Conserving wildlife has been much in the news in early 2014, owing to the rapid growth of wildlife crime since 2000. This is now a problem measured in tens of billions of dollars, with large, organized and violent criminal activity pushing rhinos towards extinction, and losses of African elephants measured in the thousands per year. Tigers, lions and other top predators are under severe pressure as well.

My first advice to graduate students is always that they should follow their own motivation. That is, in my view, the key to success for the students and the main driver for scientific progress: only motivated researchers will make a difference, in academia and in society. But of course environment and development economics is a good choice: it is very relevant and intellectually challenging. Alleviating poverty and preserving a balance between the human sphere and the natural environment are the major issues of our world. The parts of the world that are still developing are also the parts of the world where important choices will be made on preserving this balance. This makes the field very relevant.

Climate and global economic integration have contributed to a refocusing of research in EDE in the two last decades. The disclosure of new scientific evidence, namely after the publication of the Stern Review and the following debates, has definitely granted economists a central role in defining the key elements of the debate on climate change.

A problem in urgent need of attention in modern industrial societies is to discover ways to de-link aggregate output from recorded employment. If the loss were shared in a manner deemed fair by the general public, there would be nothing catastrophic for people in a country where the average income is 35,000 international dollars a year to suffer an income loss of even 25 per cent, let alone 5 per cent. Average income in the UK in 1990 was about 25 per cent less than in 2005. It's hard to maintain that UK citizens experienced significantly lower levels of personal wellbeing in 1990 than they did in 2005. Revival of research on competitive consumption (e.g., Veblen's ‘conspicuous consumption’) and reports on ‘life satisfaction’ suggest that a general rise in private consumption among a population enjoying a high standard of living adds little to happiness, or indeed to objectively measured indices of wellbeing.

It was a visionary initiative, 20 years ago, to start a journal devoted to the intersection between environmental, resource and development economics. At the time, the ‘Brundtland Report’ was old enough to be recognized in policy discussions at many possible levels, IPCC had already published its first and second assessment reports, and the Kyoto Protocol was just shaping up. Over the first 20 years of EDE's life, interest in environment and development grew quickly if not explosively, both in research and in the (policy) field, as was witnessed by the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, ‘Green Growth’ initiatives (from 2008 onwards at UNEP, OECD and World Bank), and at Rio +20 in 2012; IPCC's fifth assessment report is expected this year.

Population growth and growing incomes in developing and developed countries are leading to increased demand for energy and food, placing significant stress on the environment. At the same time, the increased scarcity of natural resources, and especially concerns about climate change and other environmental side effects, are constraining the traditional supplies of food and fuel. Failure to provide both energy and food in an affordable as well as in an environmentally sustainable manner, as well as climate change, will negatively affect our society, especially the global poor. Finding solutions to food energy problems is both a policy and technological challenge.

The most challenging topic in the area of EDE is, to my point of view, the understanding of the various issues related to biodiversity and their modeling. We do not know much about the reasons why we would want to prevent ecosystem and species losses, but we suspect that preventing large-scale loss is indeed a tremendously important task we should undertake rapidly. We need tools to help us evaluate the costs of these losses and the benefits of preventing them, and to provide guiding principles for environmental policy.

I wandered into environment and development economics through an initially disconnected series of interests in the environment, development and, finally, economics. Family camping trips instilled in me a love of nature from an early age, but growing up in the US industrial heartland in the 1960s also exposed me (literally) to serious pollution problems. My home state of Ohio is famous for having a river that caught on fire. It is also on the shores of Lake Erie, which was the source of my family's Friday fish dinners untilmercury contamination closed the fishery. About the only business in my rural hometown was a waste dump, which contaminated all the wells in the town and forced the town to develop a more costly water source.

I was 23 when I first ventured into rural India as a research assistant to examine how women harvested, traded and earned income from a fruit from the Uppage (Garcinia Cambogia) tree. The seeds were collected for their oil by local women, until markets opened up for the fruit, which had value as a condiment in a neighboring region. This led to changes in demand, and harvest rights began to be auctioned by the government. The Uppage case presents a classic story of access to new markets leading to partial privatization of common property, with consequences for both conservation and income distribution. Of course, I knew little about environmental economics then. But this foray into rural India exposed me to many elements of environment and development problems – the challenges of managing the commons, the possibility of markets leading to overexploitation of resources and growth in employment, the idea of institutional change contributing to multiple winners and losers with poor women being left behind on the bottom rung, and so on. This had a life-changing influence, leading me eventually to branch out and specialize in this area.