Against the background of a rapid biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes, increasing attention is being paid to farming practices that enhance ecosystem services. Therefore developing a cost-efficient and effective conservation-compatible land use policy to influence private land...

We perform a model analysis to study the origins of limited resilience in ecological-economic systems. We demonstrate that the resilience properties of the ecosystem are essentially determined by the management institutions and consumers' preferences for ecosystem services. In particular, we...

Studying the sustainable use of ecosystem services under uncertainty requires the consideration of the stochastic dynamics of the system under study, risk and time preferences, risk management strategies and normative views pertaining to sustainability. To gather this information for an...

Bush encroachment is one of the most extensive changes in land cover in Namibia and an urgent problem for cattle farming, rapidly reducing the productivity of the rangeland. Despite the severity of these consequences, a complete and accurate assessment of bush encroached areas is still missing...

Ecosystem resilience, i.e. an ecosystem's ability to maintain its basic functions and controls under disturbances, is often interpreted as insurance: by decreasing the probability of future drops in the provision of ecosystem services, resilience insures risk-averse ecosystem users against...

Der langjährige Einsatz und die große Bedeutung des Conservation Reserve Program begründen seine Sonderstellung als marktorientierten Ansatz zur Honorierung von Umweltleistungen. Mit diesem Beitrag wird herausgearbeitet, welche Lehren aus dem Conservation Reserve Program für die...

We study optimal adaptive grazing management under uncertain rainfall in a discrete-time model. As in each year actual rainfall can be observed during the short rainy season, and grazing management can be adapted accordingly for the growing season, the closed-loop solution of the stochastic...

Resilience as a descriptive concept gives insight into the dynamic properties of a system. Sustainability as a normative concept captures basic ideas of inter- and intragenerational justice. In this paper we specify the relationship between resilience and sustainable development. Based on an...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail 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...

Das ökonomische Potential des Einsatzes von Ausschreibungen für Umweltleistungen konnte nunmehr auch in Europa aufgezeigt werden. Jedoch stellen diese Modellprojekte bislang nur einen ersten Schritt auf dem Weg zur Implementierung von Ausschreibungen in europäische Politikmaßnahmen dar. Dies...