Estuaries provide advantageous sites for both harbors and fish habitats. In many countries, harbor expansion in estuaries contributed to the decline of fish populations with impacts at the global scale. Restoring these habitats is important to prevent a global biodiversity crisis but is costly and potentially unaffordable for polluters under the Polluter Pays Principle. Such affordability issues prompt decisionmakers to reduce environmental targets of restoration programs. Harbor infrastructures destroy fish habitats but generate benefits for society and contribute to the public interest, raising some questions on who is responsible for environmental degradations and who can afford environmental restoration costs? One way to allocate restoration costs is to analyze the amount of harbor services consumed by economic sectors. This paper addresses these questions by computing burden sharing scenarios with an input–output matrix. These scenarios are simulated under the shared responsibility principle to distribute restoration costs among stakeholders in the Seine estuary, France.

In this article we present the role of social proximity in the formation of the interest rate in the informal credit market in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. This paper is unique in the sense that it deals with social proximity and the formation of interest rate. If a lot of articles deal with the interest rate and social capital, none of them have attempted to link the two variables. A qualitative and quantitative survey was conducted on debt bondage in 2003-2004. The impact of social proximity defined as strong and weak is captured by a simple regression model. We show that a strong social proximity has a negative impact on the interest rate. Furthermore, the frequency of transactions has a positive impact on the interest rate, which means that asymmetrical information does not play a central role in our study. We then explain the relation between social proximity and interest rate by using the concept of rights and obligations.

As an output of the Saigon Dong Nai Sustainable Flood Risk Management Project (International expert Jean-Paul Vanderlinden from CEARC) a vulnerability assessment risk mapping handbook has just been released.

In the Washington Post (in English) and on Radio in Switzerland (en français) and in the IRD news (en français).