We perform a model analysis to study the origins of limited resilience in ecological-economic systems. We demonstrate that the resilience properties of the ecosystem are essentially determined by the management institutions and consumers’ preferences for ecosystem services. In particular, we...

Strong sustainability, according to the common definition, requires that different natural and economic capital stocks have to be maintained as physical quantities separately. Yet, in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed. To therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in...

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...

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

Studying the sustainable use of ecosystem services under uncertainty requires the consideration of the stochastic dynamics of the system under study, risk and time preferences, risk management strategies and normative views pertaining to sustainability. To gather this information for an...

We study the role of bush encroachment control for a farmer’s income and income risk in a stochastic ecological-economic model of grazing management in semiarid rangelands. In particular, we study debushing as an instrument of risk management that complements the choice of an adaptive grazing...

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 study optimal adaptive grazing management under uncertain rainfall in a discrete-time model. As in each year actual rainfall can be observed during the short rainy season, and grazing management can be adapted accordingly for the growing season, the closed-loop solution of the stochastic...

We study how society's preferences affect the resilience of economies that depend on more than one type of natural resource. In particular, we analyze whether the degree of complementarity of natural resources in consumer preferences may give rise to multiple steady states and path dependence...

We empirically study personal norms of sustainability, conceptualized according to the norm-activation theory and operationalized under the notion of strong ecological-economic sustainability. Our case study is commercial cattle farming in semi-arid rangelands of Namibia, a system that is...