Agrobiodiversity can provide natural insurance to risk-averse farmers by reducing the variance of crop yield, and to society at large by reducing the uncertainty in the provision of public-good ecosystem services, for example, CO2 storage. We analyze the choice of agrobiodiversity by risk-averse...

We clarify the definition and interpretation of sustainability economicsʺ (Baumgärtner and Quaas, 2010) in response to recent comments by van den Bergh (2010), Bartelmus (2010) and others. For that sake, we distinguish between general and specific definitions of sustainability and...

While economists have been contributing to the discussion of various aspects of sustainability for decades, it is just recently that the term sustainability economicsʺ was used explicitly in the ecological, environmental, and resource economics community. Yet, the contributions that use the...

The ecological literature suggests that biodiversity reduces the variance of ecosystem services. Thus, conservative biodiversity management has an insurance value to risk-averse users of ecosystem services. We analyze a conceptual ecological-economic model in which such management measures...

We develop a comprehensive multi-level approach to ecological economics (CML-approach) which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a...