We clarify the definition and interpretation of "sustainability economics" (Baumgärtner and Quaas, 2010) in response to recent comments by van den Bergh (2010), Bartelmus (2010) and others. For that sake, we distinguish between general and specific definitions of sustainability and...

While economists have been contributing to the discussion of various aspects of sustainability for decades, it is just recently that the term "sustainability economics" was used explicitly in the ecological, environmental, and resource economics community. Yet, the contributions that use the...

We develop a general and unifying methodology for ecological economics which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a specific combination of...

Resilience as a descriptive concept gives insight into the dynamic properties of an ecological-economic system. Sustainability as a normative concept captures basic ideas of intergenerational justice when human well-being depends on natural capital and services. Thus, resilience and...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevails in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...

In the face of uncertainty, ecosystems can provide natural insurance to risk averse users of ecosystem services. We employ a conceptual ecological-economic model in which ecosystem management has a private insurance value and, through ecosystem processes at higher hierarchical levels, generates...

Strong sustainability, according to the common definition, requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately. Yet, in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed. To therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an...

Ecosystem services research has become a major academic field, drawing in various academic disciplines, perspectives, and research approaches. The multifaceted concept of “ecosystem services” includes a normative component, which has strong implicit links to the notion of sustainability....

Fish stocks can be considered as natural capital stocks providing harvestable fish. Fishing at low stock sizes means borrowing from the natural asset. While fishing a particular quantity generates immediate profits and income, an interest rate has to be paid in terms of foregone future fishing...

Payments for environmental services (PES) are widely adopted to support the conservation of biodiversity and other environmental goods. Challenges that PES schemes have to tackle are (i) environmental uncertainty and (ii) information asymmetry between the provider of the service (typically a...