We empirically study personal norms of sustainability, conceptualized according to the normactivation theory and operationalized under the notion of strong ecological-economic sustainability, for commercial cattle farmers in semi-arid rangelands of Namibia, a system that is subject to extensive...

We study how human preferences affect the resilience of economies that depend on more than one type of natural resources. In particular, we analyze whether the degree of substitutability of natural resources in consumer needs may give rise to multiple steady states and path dependence even when...

Agro-biodiversity 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 such as e.g. CO2 storage. We analyze the choice of agro-biodiversity by...

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...

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 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...

Agro-biodiversity can provide natural insurance to risk averse farmers. We employ a conceptual ecological-economic model to analyze the choice of agrobiodiversity by risk averse farmers who have access to financial insurance. We study the implications for individually and socially optimal...