The restitution of parkland to the Khomani San “bushmen” and Mier “agricultural” communities in May 2002 marked a significant shift in conservation in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and environs in South Africa. Biodiversity conservation will benefit from this land restitution only if...

The extent to which conservation is feasible is constrained by budgets and the financial sacrifice stakeholders are willing to bear. Therefore a possible objective for conserving a species is to minimise the cost of achieving that stated aim. For example, if a minimum viable population (MVP) of...

The introduction of invasive alien species (IAS) is generally acknowledged to depend both on the propagule pressure imposed by openness to international trade and on the health of the receiving ecosystem. Bio-geographic factors however play a crucial role in determining the level of risk...

The need for energy due to economic and population pressure has resulted in a great expansion of hydroelectric dam projects around the world, especially in Asia. These hydroelectric projects have resulted in considerable environmental, economic, and social damage. Typically, the economic...

This article provides a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of sustainability economics. Baumgärtner and Quaas (2010a, b) have proposed as an alternative to ecological economics the new field of sustainability economics, which has triggered various replies. The purpose here is to order and to...

Many scholars argue that environmental issues can be addressed through technological innovation, a proposal which echoes a lasting debate between environmental and ecological economics about the substitution rate between natural and manufactured capital. In addition to these two established...

Agenda 21 required countries to develop and regularly update a national set of indicators for sustainable development. Several countries now have such sets also including separate indicators for climate change. Some of these indicators typically report global concentration of green house gasses...

Climate change scenarios predict an increase of extreme rain events, which will increase the risk of wastewater flooding and of missing legal water quality targets. This study elicits the willingness to pay to reduce ecological and health risks from combined sewer overflows (CSOs) in rivers and...

The conversion of natural areas to human-dominated land uses results in loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat which often lead to species endangerment and local extinction. The risk of endangerment may be particularly acute for species that exist as metapopulations in which...

Most conservation reserve design models presented in the literature are static and ignore the dynamic economic aspects of site selection. Typically conservation programs operate under time-related (e.g. annual) budgets and purchase land over time in a sequential manner. The uncertainty of land...