Understanding what influences the value of nature is crucial for informing environmental policy. From a sustainability perspective, economic valuation should not only seek to determine willingness to pay for environmental goods to devise an efficient allocation of scarce resources, but should...

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 economics” (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...

Resilience as a descriptive concept gives insight into the dynamic properties of a system. Sustainability as a normative concept captures basic ideas of inter- and intragenerational justice. In this paper we specify the relationship between resilience and sustainable development. Based on an...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...