Portugal has a unitary system in which the central government transfers funds to lower government levels for their public functions. In 2007, Portugal introduced Ecological Fiscal Transfers (EFT), where municipalities receive transfers for hosting Protected Areas (PA). We study whether...

Biodiversity loss is a serious global environmental problem. Economic instruments in biodiversity policies can contribute towards reconciling the conservation costs encountered at local level with the benefits of biodiversity conservation at higher levels of governance, from regional and...

We study the incorporation of ecosystem services in German water infrastructure planning exemplified by a projected deepening of the Lower Weser river channel. Therefore, we recalculate the project's benefit-cost ratio by integrating the monetary value of changes in different ecosystem services:...

From a theoretical point of view, result-based agri-environmental payments are clearly preferable to action-based payments. However, they suffer from two major practical disadvantages: costs of measuring the results and payment uncertainty for the participating farmers. In this paper, we propose...

Land use is at the core of today's complex sustainability challenges. Agricultural and environmental economics share a focus land and resource use but evolved in their own domains. Their specialized competencies can be complementary and thus strengthen policy analysis. We use structural topic...

To halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, various actors including companies need to engage, but it is not yet clear what drives voluntary business commitments. We explore leverage points that might increase corporate action for conservation. We apply a structural equation model...

This report constitutes the main deliverable of WorkPackage 2 of GoverNat, "Assessing multilevel activities in water and biodiversity governance", dealing with an assessment of state-ofthe- art European water and biodiversity governance, based on the analysis of a series of casestudies developed...

Ecological Fiscal Transfers (EFT) have recently gained attention as a promising instrument to provide incentives for nature conservation addressing public authorities. In parallel, both the EU and different European countries are exploring new mechanisms to mobilise funding to support...

A region of ecological importance which generates uncompensated cross-territorial positive spillovers has a comparatively higher fiscal need due to the direct and indirect costs it incurs for nature conservation. In order adequately to acknowledge fiscal needs relating to nature conservation, we...