Tradable permits have already been applied in many areas of environmental policy and may be a possible response to increasing calls for flexible conservation instruments which are able to successfully conserve biodiversity while allowing for economic development. The idea behind applying...

Most problems related to biodiversity management have an ecological as well as a socio-economic dimension. Consequently, there has been a growing recognition that adequate management recommendations directed at such problems can only be developed if knowledge from ecology, economics and various...

Given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity-enhancing land-use measures are subject to spatial variation, considerations of allocational efficiency call for spatially differentiated compensation payments for such measures. However, when deciding whether to implement uniform or...

Recent political developments and academic debate indicate that future political commitment to the protection of natural resources is uncertain. This political uncertainty is particularly problematic when the danger of irreversible damage such as the extinction of species looms. Accordingly,...

Flexible conservation management, where measures are selected in each decision period and depending on the current state of the ecological system, are generally perceived as superior to fixed management, where the same measure is applied in each decision period independent of the current state...

What factors shape environmental policies across Europe? In order to answer this question most economists would probably adopt a Public Choice approach. This approach has explained some aspects of environmental policies that exist in a similar fashion across Europe convincingly. But why do many...

This paper is concerned with the cost-effective allocation of habitat for endangered species under spatio-temporally heterogeneous economic development. To address the dynamic dimension of the problem we consider tradable development rights (TDR) as the instrument of choice. A particular...

Compensation schemes in which land owners receive payments for voluntarily managing their land in a biodiversity-enhancing manner have become one of the most important instruments for biodiversity conservation worldwide. One key challenge when designing such schemes is to account for the spatial...

The introduction of conservation-friendly farming measures is an important tool for biodiversity conservation. Recently, a debate has started whether this money is spent effectively, i.e. whether it successfully contributes to conserve biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Several types of...

Issues related to the cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation policies have not yet been prominent in European conservation research and policy-making. Nevertheless, there is a small but growing literature which analyses such cost-effectiveness issues on both a conceptual and an applied...