Browsing by Author "Dixon, Natalie"

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Open Access
2023 Annual Trends in Plastics Policy: A Brief
(2023-08-31) Karasik, Rachel; Vegh, Tibor; Utz, Ria; Dominguez, Andrew; Skarjune, Melissa; Merlo, Juan; Dixon, Natalie; Virdin, John
In the first annual update of Annual Trends in Plastics Policy, Nicholas Institute researchers find that plastics policy enactment continues to surge and was not negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, researchers found more than 300 additional policies to index in the Plastics Policy Inventory, upon which this report is based, for a total of 894 policies. The 2022 update to the inventory increased the total by more than 50%. However, gaps in scope and implementation remain. Though more policies address additional types of single-use plastics, most still target only plastic bags. Microplastics and marine sources remain relatively unaddressed, and economic instruments are a minority of policy instruments used. To better gauge policy implementation, researchers established a new effectiveness policy library to accompany the 2022 update. These studies indicate that, while underused in existing policy, greater governmental use of economic instruments (e.g., taxes, fees, levies) and information instruments (e.g., awareness campaigns to communicate other instruments to the public, education initiatives, etc.) would aid in enacting effective policies in the future.
Open Access
Initial Assessment of Gender Considerations in Plastics Policy
(2023-08-31) Dixon, Natalie; Skarjune, Melissa; Mason, Sara; Karasik, Rachel; Virdin, John
Globally, women are disproportionately burdened and impacted by the harmful effects of plastic across the life cycle of products. These burdens vary across cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts, and based on how women engage with plastic, but broadly include health and safety impacts, access to opportunities in the waste sector, and exposures to harmful plastic-associated chemicals. This initial assessment considers how women, people who are assigned female at birth and have been socialized as females, and/or female-identified people are considered in plastics policy scope and implementation. Researchers identified 25 documents at the intersection of plastics policy and gender, indicating gender is rarely considered when crafting plastics policy. However, evidence of gender-differentiated impacts of plastics policy is emerging. Plastics bans, waste management policies, and economic development funds often ignore or do not consider women’s roles as heads of households or informal waste sector workers, both of which expose women to excesses of plastics and their negative effects. Despite this, some policies that do consider gender were identified. Most are primarily focused on incorporating women in the waste management sector and alleviating the burden of low-income women from complying with plastic bag fees. None address the risks associated with chemical exposure across the plastics life cycle. These policies, alongside expert interviews, suggest that the path toward tangible consideration of gender-differentiated impacts associated with plastic and plastics policies requires, at a minimum, ensuring the inclusion of women in policymaking, waste management industries, and research and development. The reviewed literature emphasizes that only when power structures are reexamined and corrected for will there be meaningful changes to the ways humanity designs plastics, manages waste, and informs the public about the products they consume.
Open Access
Surfonomics Nosara: Surf Tourists' Potential to Contribute to Environmental Protection
(2023-04-28) Dixon, Natalie
Maintaining healthy ecosystems often requires monetary resources, in developed and developing countries alike. These resources can, in part, come from businesses and activities that benefit from the ecosystems being maintained. For example, millions of surfers each year travel to beaches far from their homes in pursuit of the perfect wave (Mach and Ponting, 2020). Through expenditures on accommodations, food and activities, these surf tourists often provide some level of monetary benefit to the towns adjacent to the beach that is home to the wave they are chasing. However, the consumer surplus benefit that surfers enjoy from surfing itself is primarily unrealized and is not financially contributing to the preservation and conservation of the natural resources upon which these tourists depend. There are an abundance of studies trying to capture the surplus economic benefit of other ocean-related activities, such as fishing, diving, and beach-going, with little attention being paid to the economic benefit that surfers and surf tourists could provide (Nelson, 2007). Since surfing has grown “to become, after swimming, the most popular water sport in the world,” it is important to attempt to determine the economic benefit that surfers provide and how this might be leveraged to conserve integral ecosystems (Young, 1983). The concept of “surfonomics,” the combination of surfing and economics, aims to determine the economic benefit that surfing brings to coastal communities. The goal of surfonomics is to use surfing as a conservation tool through both accounting for the economic benefit of surfing, while also appealing to the millions of surfers around the world. The site for this study, Playa Guiones, is in the town of Nosara in the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica, along the Nicoya Peninsula on the west coast of the country. Nosara originally became popularized because of the plethora of yoga and wellness retreats that used Nosara as their destination. Further, Playa Guiones is a world class surfing destination, known for having some of the most consistently breaking waves in the world, accessible to all levels of surfers (Francis, 2021). Nosara is the largest of the five Blue Zones in the world (Johnson). A Blue Zone is an area of the world where people, on average, live the longest and are the healthiest (History of Blue Zones, 2021). On top of the benefits from the yoga/ wellness and surfing communities, its designation as a Blue Zone has created a hyper-attractive destination for both tourists and expatriates. This increase in notoriety and tourism has come with a 42% increase in the level of development from 2017-2018 alone (Nosara Civic Association). The environmental effects of this increase in development are being seen through the salinization in aquifers in Nosara due to the large amount of water that the new construction requires (Nosara Civic Association). The goal of this study is to determine if surf tourists can provide economic resources sufficient to protect the surf ecosystem at Playa Guiones in Nosara, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The study sought to answer this question through 1) conducting a survey analysis to determine each surfer’s willingness to pay a beach entrance fee in the low season (May-Dec) and 2) calculating the conservation finance gap in Playa Guiones and determining how many surf tourists would need to pay a fee each year in order to close it. The specific methods used to achieve the study goal were as follows: 1) Designing a survey and surveying surf tourists along Playa Guiones from June- August of 2022. 2) Conducting analysis using regression models to determine which environmental attributes were most important to surf tourists. 3) Obtaining conservation finance data from the Ostional Wildlife Refuge to determine if surf tourists would be able to provide money sufficient to close the conservation finance gap that exists along Playa Guiones. The results from this study show that the two most important environmental attributes to surf tourists are high levels of beach cleanliness and low levels of new development in Playa Guiones. Further, the study shows that closing the conservation finance gap along Playa Guiones with the introduction of a $7 daily beach entrance fee is feasible.