Description
Conduct economic analysis of the use, allocation, and conservation of natural resources—such as water, forests, fisheries, minerals, and ecosystems. Evaluate and quantify scarcity, depletion, ecosystem services, and the costs, benefits, incentives, and impacts of alternative extraction, allocation, and conservation policies using economic theory, bioeconomic models, and statistical techniques.
- • Prepare and deliver presentations on resource economics findings, policy options, and management implications.
- • Monitor and analyze resource markets, commodity prices, and biophysical stock trends.
- • Interpret indicators of resource stock health, such as groundwater levels, timber inventories, or fish populations.
- • Identify and recommend resource-efficient and conservation-oriented business practices.
- • Demonstrate the economic benefits of sustainable harvest limits, water allocation rules, and habitat protection.
- • Write technical reports, policy briefs, and academic articles on natural resource economics.
- • Write social, legal, or economic impact statements for resource extraction or conservation policies and programs.
- • Prepare research proposals and grant applications for resource and ecosystem valuation studies.
- • Analyze resource exhaustibility and long-term costs of depletion and rehabilitation.
- • Develop systems to collect, manage, and analyze resource, ecological, and economic data.
- • Plan natural resource economics research projects with budgets, goals, timelines, and deliverables.
- • Build and calibrate economic and bioeconomic models to forecast extraction, regeneration, and prices.
- • Collect and analyze data to compare the resource and environmental effects of policy or management alternatives.
- • Perform dynamic modeling and simulation of coupled resource, ecological, and economic systems.
- • Study links between resource extraction, land or water use, and patterns of production and consumption.
- • Conduct research on fisheries management, forestry economics, water allocation, minerals policy, rangeland, and wildlife conservation.
- • Develop cost-effective policy recommendations for resource conservation and sustainable yield management.
- • Assess the costs, benefits, risks, and distributional impacts of activities, regulations, or investments affecting resource stocks.
- • Design and evaluate market-based instruments such as taxes, tradable permits, and pricing schemes for resource management.
- • Teach courses in natural resource economics or related subjects.
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O*NET occupational data (work activities, skills, knowledge).
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Last reviewed: Jan 2026
