Reducing atmospheric carbon concentration by removing past emissions can extend our rapidly diminishing emission budgets corresponding to the target of limiting the temperature increase to 2 °C above preindustrial levels. Forestation measures to offset carbon emissions have already entered...

We study the effectiveness of environmental policy in a model with nonrenewable resources and an unavoidable implementation lag. We find that a time lag between the announcement and the implementation of an emissions quota induces an increase in emissions in the period between the policy's...

We explore how the intertemporal distribution of well-being affects the social cost of carbon. In contrast to the literature that studies parameters of a particular social welfare function, such as the discount rate, we shift the focus and directly assume a parametric form for the intertemporal...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...