Interest in ecosystem services provided by agroecosystems has grown over the last decades with research focusing on the type of environmental, economic and social benefits delivered by agroecosystems. Researchers suggest that, besides the provisioning of food, fuel, and fiber, agroecosystems...

This paper reviews the historic development of the conceptualization of ecosystem services and examines critical landmarks in economic theory and practice with regard to the incorporation of ecosystem services into markets and payment schemes. The review presented here suggests that the trend...

While technological progress has fostered the conception of an urban society that is increasingly decoupled from ecosystems, demands on natural capital and ecosystem services keep increasing steadily in our urbanized planet. Decoupling of cities from ecological systems can only occur locally and...

Should we reject money when we value nature? Like most environmentalists, ecological economists are increasingly divided on this question. Synthesizing political ecology with ecological economics, we argue that this way of framing the question is limited. We propose a reformulation of the...

A major strength of the ecosystem services (ESS) concept is that it allows a succinct description of how human well-being depends on nature, showing that the neglect of such dependencies has negative consequences on human well-being and the economy. As ESS refer to human needs and interests,...

The Amazon rain forest harbors some of the world's richest biological diversity. During the twentieth century, two types of actors cleared that forest: native Amazonians and outside encroachers. Of the two actors, we know more about what drives outside encroachers to clear forest than about what...

Researchers propose sustainable degrowth as an alternative economic model to face current environmental crisis. Standard economic theory criticizes the viability of degrowth under the assumption that there is a causal link between wellbeing and the consumption of goods and services. Here we test...