The diffusion of greenhouse gases in the earth atmosphere confronts us with problems demanding both national and international cooperation. For every single state it is attractive that other countries commit themselves to climate protection whereas the own state - using the free-rider-strategy -...

The expansion of renewable energy is a central element of the German Federal Government's climate and energy policy. The target for 2020 is to produce 30% of the electricity from renewable energies. Wind power has been selected to be a major contributor to this change. Replacing old wind...

Standard risk economic analysis suggests that global environmental risk is lower in the case of risk aversion than in the case of risk neutrality or risk seeking. Maybe the reason why the Advisory Council of the German Government on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) explicitly recommends to...

This article develops eleven criteria focusing on the relative importance and strength of different, especially socio-economic drivers of and pressures on biodiversity. These refer to the syndrome concept designed to assess global environmental risks and the DPSIR framework developed to guide...

Land-use conflicts arise if land is scarce, land-use types are mutually exclusive, and vary in their effects with regard to more than one incongruent policy objective. If these effects depend on the spatial location of the land-use measures the conflict can be mediated through an appropriate...

Among the measures discussed as remedies for CO2 emissions reduction renewable energies are prominent as they already provide marketable alternatives to fossil fuels. This holds true especially for wind power, which has multiplied more than twelve-fold on the global scale from 4,800 MW to over...

Many environmental problems are large scale in terms of geographical units and long-term with regard to time. We therefore find a coincidence of different causes and impacts that qualify the interplay between humans and nature as highly uncertain (“transparency challenge”). In consequence we...