COLLEGE Profile
Environmental economist Dr. Laura Taylor makes the collaborative connections to ensure public policy aligns with smart economics.
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C State University environmental economist Dr. Laura Taylor has always loved the ocean and even grew up planning to become a marine biologist. That plan took a detour when she got to college and fell in love with the social science of economics. Yet the ocean is still part of her professional purview, as she works to help shape policy on issues that impact the environment. Taylor, a professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Science’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE), is director of the university’s Center for Environmental and Resource Economic Policy (CEnREP). Established in 2001 under the leadership of Dr. Kerry Smith, ARE professor emeritus, the center provides expertise in economic research and outreach programs to promote forward-thinking environmental policy for the state and the nation. Its faculty members are actively engaged in economic research that addresses natural resource and environmental management problems. Taylor pulls together the interdisciplinary teams to tackle challenges and to guide the forward motion of policy makers, assisting their understanding of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies. And she’s doing this at home and around the world. Most recently, Taylor advised the government of Chile on ways to update their economic assessment of policies designed to reduce air pollution in Santiago and other cities. The reason a center such as CEnREP was needed, says Taylor, “and the reason that it exists today is to help solve the big hairy challenges: feeding an expanding population under increased water stress, climatic variations, storms and droughts; urban and rural water pressures and conflicts; and creating energy solutions that are sensitive to the waterenergy-food nexus.”
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perspectives
Becky Kirkland
by Terri Leith
In December, Taylor was elected president of the national Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
Whether the solutions to the challenges are technical or engineering solutions, she says, “None of them succeeds unless we understand the human dimension.” A key aspect of understanding that human dimension is the economics – and in this context, economics means understanding how people will respond to the incentives of various policies and understanding what kinds of impacts policies will have on communities and constituents. “The tools we use in economics to understand how people interact with the environment, with each other and with policy are critical to develop solutions that work in the real world,” Taylor says. “If the economics aren’t aligned, it’s going to be very difficult to get solutions that the community can support. Smart public policy typically is aligned with smart economics.” That’s where CEnREP comes in.
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he center was established as a means to elevate and integrate the work of NC State economists into the interdisciplinary research and outreach and engagement and extension across the university, Taylor says. As center director, she identifies opportunities for research partnerships among her colleagues at NC State, across disciplines and across colleges. A key goal of the center is “to provide the economic basis for management solutions to environmental challenges we face and to add
an economic dimension to the policy process focused on the environment,” Taylor says. “The environment is at the heart of what we do, whether it’s agriculture, energy or water resources, wildlife conservation or thinking about how land-use change impacts all of these things. One of the nice things we do as economists is we cut across many environmental domains – including energy, air quality, water quality, water quantity, land use, urbanization, loss of farmland, wildlife management – and the public policies that address all of these. We work in all those dimensions, because economics is the fundamental component of the decision-making process, for addressing any of these problems.” Current CEnREP research projects and study areas include the impact of voluntary and mandatory water restrictions on residential water consumption; estimating how water reuse systems impact household outdoor irrigation choices; estimating the monetary benefits of improving water quality in North Carolina’s fresh and saltwater bodies; designing optimal management strategies for endangered and invasive species; improving management of wildlife habitat for migratory birds along the Outer Banks; improving regulations for harvesting game animals; estimating the impacts of offshore wind development on the state’s tourism economy; and estimating the cost to local fishermen of potential off-road vehicle restrictions on Cape Hatteras beaches, where the National Park Service
