Scope & Mission

Frontiers in Environmental Economics is being launched at a time of multiple global crises: the COVID 19 pandemic, the climate crisis, the energy crisis, the biodiversity collapse, the population and food crisis, the economic recession and mounting inflationary pressures.  The United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, adopted on 25 September 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, aimed to eradicate poverty in all its forms and to achieve sustainable development in its three dimensions - economic, social, and environmental - by 2030 world-wide, in a balanced and integrated manner, ensuring that no one is left behind. The implementation of 2030 Agenda is science hectic and science driven. 

The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international climate change treaty adopted by 196 participants at COP21 in Paris in 2015, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century below 1.5°C. The 6th IPCC Report also shows that climate change impacts will exacerbate the food crisis, while almost 40 percent of the global population is deprived of a nutritious diet. It also highlights that climate change is also contributing to the loss of biodiversity, which stresses ecosystem functions and the food systems on which we all depend. UN and many multilateral institutions vocally suggest the need for financial reforms to invest in a fairer distribution of world income aiming at better life quality in terms of healthcare, education, nutrition, and other basic needs, and more resources in low-income countries. Humankind needs a heroic transformation towards sustainability, which needs to be based on solid interdisciplinary science.

Frontiers in Environmental Economics publishes pioneering scientific work on innovative, human-centric, interdisciplinary systems, for better understanding of the transformations that can enable the transition to a sustainable interaction between the economy, society, and nature. The focus is on the applications of economic theory and methods to better understand this interaction and provide solution pathways for the transformation of this interaction into a sustainable one. Published work can include robustly identified empirical findings, insightful theoretical analyses, or creative methodologies that are novel. We recognize the boundaries of environmental and resource economics are subjective and evolving, but topics of interest, which will constitute specialty sections within Frontiers in Environmental Economics are:

• Economics of Climate Change

• Ecological Economics

• Agricultural Economics

• Energy Economics

• Sustainable Development

• Natural Resource Economics Modelling and Applications: Water, Marine, Forest, Fisheries, Biodiversity, Mining

• Urban Economics and Natural Resources

• Transport Economics and the Environment

• Health Economics and the Environment

• Behavioral, Experimental and Valuation Environmental Economics

• Cost-Benefit Analysis and Environmental Economics

• Spatial Issues in Environmental Economics

• Statistics and Econometrics for the Environment

• Interdisciplinary Systems Approaches for Natural Resource Economics

• Economics of Institutions and the Environment

• Environmental Economics, Law, and Policy

• Environmental Economics and ICT

• Industrial and Innovation Economics for the Environment

• Reviews in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

We also welcome interdisciplinary work from diverse teams of researchers as long as the paper's primary contribution focuses on economic questions and solution pathways, including socio-economic, financial and technological aspects.  

We also publish literature reviews aiming at identifying and synthesizing lessons learned from recent and ongoing environmental economics research and provide economic analysis of environmental policy issues. Moreover, literature reviews may focus on strengthening the linkages between environmental economics research and environmental policy and offer suggestions for future research.

Finally, we publish policy briefs that assess characteristics of a specific policy or set of policies.

Submission

Frontiers in Environmental Economics is composed of the following Specialty Sections:

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