Latin America in the Anthropocene: development under planetary constraints

Abstract We describe the main insights from the papers included in this special issue, Challenges for the Development of Latin America in the Anthropocene: Current Research in Environmental Economics . The contributions are organized around three themes: the economic and welfare impacts of temperature variability, the role of institutions and user rights in shaping environmental governance and the effectiveness of regulatory instruments for managing ambient and atmospheric pollution. Together, these papers show that environmental outcomes in Latin America are deeply shaped by institutional capacity, governance quality and social inequality. By combining rigorous empirical analysis with attention to local contexts, they demonstrate how environmental economics can inform policy responses to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.