Making decisions about optimal investments in green infrastructure necessitates setting social discount rates. This paper suggests a practical way for determining the discount rate for projects or programmes in which one of the options is to maintain or improve land in its natural state. We...

Whether Information and Communication Technology (ICT) constitutes a threat to or a cure for environmental deterioration is a matter of controversy. Empirical evidence on the impacts of ICT is rare, so few generalisable lessons can be drawn. This study addresses precisely this critique by...

In recent years there has been considerable scientific and public debate on climate change and its direct and indirect effects on human health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2006), some 2.5 million people die every year from non-infectious diseases directly attributable to...

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the context of climate change is of great importance in the scientific community, but can also play an important role in the policy context. On the one hand, the results achievable for mitigation and adaptation are influencing the...

Since the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Approach (MEA), the number of studies valuing ecosystem services has grown. As a consequence of this growing literature, different interpretations exist on the classification of services as derived from MEA, and several studies have argued that this...

The case study presented in this section aims to estimate the economic value of the water services used for hydropower in tropical forests in Costa Rica, and to assess the expected economic impact due to climate change. The model developed allows estimating the economic impacts of climate change...

This paper presents a bottom-up methodological framework for estimating some of the key ecosystem services provided by forests biomes worldwide. We consider the provision of wood and non-wood forest products, recreation and passive use, and forests’ contribution to climate regulation in...