Andrew Plantinga

About

Andrew Plantinga’s research focuses on the economics of land use, climate change, and forests. Particular emphasis is given to the development of methods for econometrically modeling land-use decisions, the analysis of environmental policies that affect private land-use decisions, and the modeling of land development pressures. A current project, funded by the National Science Foundation, analyzes how risk salience affects decisions by public land management agencies to allocate wildfire management projects. Andrew Plantinga is also the director of the Productive Landscapes Group at the UCSB Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab). He has a background in agricultural and resource economics, with a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MS in Forestry from the University of Wisconsin, and a BA in English from Grinnell College.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Political Science
• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Business
• Archaeology
• Geology
• Physical geography

Selected publications

• The future of food from the sea

  Nature · 2020 · 841 citations

  . As food from the sea represents only 17% of the current production of edible meat, we ask how much food we can expect the ocean to sustainably produce by 2050. Here we examine the main food-producing sectors in the ocean-wild fisheries, finfish mariculture and bivalve mariculture-to estimate 'sustainable supply curves' that account for ecological, economic, regulatory and technological constraints. We overlay these supply curves with demand scenarios to estimate future seafood production. We f…

  DOI

• Long-term trends in wildfire damages in California

  International Journal of Wildland Fire · 2021 · 61 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  In 2017 and 2018, wildfires in California burned millions of hectares and caused billions of dollars in structure damages. This paper puts these recent fires in a long-term historical context by assembling four decades of data on wildfires in California. We combine administrative data of structure loss due to wildfire with economic data on replacement costs and spatial data on fire locations and sizes. We find that over the period 1979–2018, wildfires in California have been getting larger and t…

  DOI

• Do Environmental Markets Improve on Open Access? Evidence from California Groundwater Rights

  Journal of Political Economy · 2021 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Environmental markets are widely prescribed as an alternative to open access regimes for natural resources. We develop a model of dynamic groundwater extraction to demonstrate how a spatial regression discontinuity design that exploits a spatially incomplete market for groundwater rights recovers a lower bound on the market’s net benefit. We apply this estimator to a major aquifer in water-scarce southern California and find that a groundwater market generated substantial net benefits, as capita…

  PublisherDOI

• Natural climate solutions provide robust carbon mitigation capacity under future climate change scenarios

  Scientific Reports · 2023-11-03 · 37 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Natural climate solutions (NCS) are recognized as an important tool for governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Using California as a globally relevant reference, we evaluate the magnitude of biological climate mitigation potential from NCS starting in 2020 under four climate change scenarios. By mid-century NCS implementation leads to a large increase in net carbon stored, flipping the state from a net source to a net sink in two scenarios. Forest a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How are Insurance Markets Adapting to Climate Change? Risk Selection and Regulation in the Market for Homeowners Insurance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 20 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CNH: Collaborative Research: Integrated Dynamic Modeling of Ecosystem Services, Incentive-Based Policies, Land-Use Decisions, and Ecological Outcomes

  NSF · $145k · 2008–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Robert N. Stavins

  Harvard University Press

  51 shared

• David J. Lewis

  Oregon State University

  28 shared

• Ruben N. Lubowski

  Environmental Defense Fund

  18 shared

• Stephen Polasky

  University of Minnesota

  15 shared

• Erik Nelson

  14 shared

• Volker C. Radeloff

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  14 shared

• Junjie Wu

  People's Hospital of Yangzhong

  14 shared

• Sebastián Martinuzzi

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  14 shared

Labs

• Environmental Markets Lab (emLab)PI

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