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...

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...

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...

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

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...

We argue that economics – as the scientific method of analyzing trade-offs – can be helpful (and may even be indispensable) for assessing the trade-off between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the “opportunity set” of politics with respect...

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...