Ramsar Resolution XI.17 requested the Convention’s Scientific and Technical Review Panel to report on the state of the world’s wetlands and their services to people. As a contribution to this task, this Briefing Note summarizes and highlights for Contracting Parties and other decision makers...

The underlying research project was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the funding programme Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management (REFINA). REFINA is implemented by the BMBF in cooperation with the Federal...

In this article, Professor Kaswan argues that hoped-for greenhouse gas reductions cannot be achieved without reducing consumption. Given their control over land use and buildings, cities can play a key role in reducing consumption. She argues that, while existing federal proposals for a...

Urban land governance is one of the central challenges not just for urban but also more broadly for global development in times of rapid urbanisation. This paper advances a fresh perspective to look at urban land by exploring to what extent it could be characterised as a resource curse problem....

The empirical finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), suggests that as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration decelerates and thus becomes less of an issue. Focusing on the...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the impact of the main driving forces underling CO2 and SO2 emissions across political regimes. Depending on the air pollutant and the political regime, the relationship between per capita GDP and emissions levels is either linear or inverted-U...

Energy leapfrogging may have critical implications for a world that seeks to reduce its fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, and in which most future economic growth will be concentrated in rapidly growing, industrializing countries rather than in more mature economies. The current...

Does globalization lead to environmental degradation? What is the role of democracy for environmental performance and do left-wing governments really care more about the environment? Using a comprehensive measure of environmental performance, we test these three hypotheses for a panel of 134...

Underlying the management of revenues from natural resource extraction is a set of assumptions about how abundant and how valuable these resources are. Nevertheless, existing approaches to measuring the value of extractive resources are seriously flawed. This paper proposes two avenues for...