Suchergebnisse

Practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, land management, and biodiversity conservation are increasingly interested in using economic instruments that promise "win-win" solutions for conservation and human livelihoods. However, practitioners often lack guidance for selecting and implementing suitable economic approaches that take the specific local needs and the cultural, legal, and ecological context into account. This paper extracts from the academic debate a series of key aspects to be considered by practitioners who wish to accomplish change of behaviour via economic approaches. The paper then presents a practice-oriented framework for identifying the "ecosystem service opportunities" to conserve biodiversity and improve livelihoods in a specific local setting, and for preselecting suitable economic instruments. The framework is illustrated by describing its application in two pilot sites of the ECO-BEST project in Thailand, as part of which it was developed and road-tested.

It is well established that adaptation and technological investment in each case may serve as a commitment device in international climate politics. This paper for the first time analyzes the combined impact of these two strategic variables on global mitigation within a noncooperative framework where countries either decide on mitigation before or after adaptation. By investment, which is assumed to be made in the first place due to its considerable lead time, countries commit to lower national contributions to the global public good of mitigation. We find that the sequencing of adaptation before mitigation reinforces this strategic effect of technological investments at least for sufficiently similar countries. As a consequence, the subgame-perfect equilibrium yields a globally lower level of mitigation and higher global costs of climate change when adaptation is decided before mitigation. Besides this theoretical contribution, the paper proposes some strategies to combat the unfortunate rush to adaptation which can be currently observed in climate politics.

Pesticides are an important pillar of food production today. The use of pesticides has increased in recent years as the world's population has grown and food production has increased. The large‐scale application of pesticides in nature leads to pesticides also reaching non‐target areas. Here, they can cause lasting damage to existing ecosystems and natural communities. One important pathway is the flushing of pesticide residues from agricultural fields into adjacent streams. It has been observed that the surface runoff leads to high concentrations of pesticides in surface waters and alters the community there. This raises the question on how exactly the input takes place and how risk mitigation measures such as vegetated buffer strips (VBS) can optimally retain pesticides in the field. These questions, among others, were the objectives of the "Kleingewässermonitoring" (KgM), in which small streams in agricultural environments were sampled on a large‐scale basis in 2018 and 2019 using rainfall‐related and grab samples

The purpose of this discussion paper is to test how a Nexus Footprint could be operationalized empirically. To examine the applicability of this method across different settings, three case study cities with diverging resource management situations were selected. The Nexus Footprint is an emerging indicator that aims to quantify the intersections within the highly interconnected food-water-energy web of a given region.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of land-use policies on wind power deployment at the regional levels in Germany and Sweden, respectively. We use data on added wind capacity at the German district level and the Swedish municipality level over the time period 2008-2012. These data are analysed with a model specification permitting the probability of having any capacity addition (1/0) during this period to be independent of the level of the installed capacity (in MW). The results confirm that the regional variations in wind power deployment can to a significant extent be attributed to land-use policies, not least in the form of priority areas and the designation of restricted areas. The quantitative results display interesting differences across the two countries, not least concerning the role of priority areas, which is found to be much more profound in the German case. The assignment of protected areas appears instead to have constituted a more stringent policy tool in Sweden. Furthermore, cross-country differences in the relevance of various explanatory variables are also found to be related to geographical patterns, the overall extent of wind power deployment, as well as the design of the support schemes for wind power. Overall, the results highlight the need for better understanding of the critical role of land-use policies for future renewable energy development in various national and institutional contexts.

Bottom-up processes of policy convergence are increasingly discussed as a substitute for the absence of supranational energy policy coordination and harmonization in the EU. The overall objective of this paper is to analyse the development of government support to renewable energy R&D across EU countries over time: does the empirical evidence suggest bottom-up convergence? In order to answer this question, we first construct country-specific R&D-based knowledge stocks, and then investigate whether the developments of these stocks tend to converge or diverge across EU countries. A data set covering 12 EU Member States over the time period 1990-2012 is employed to test for the presence of conditional β-convergence using a bias-corrected dynamic panel data estimator. The empirical results are overall robust and suggest divergence in terms of public R&D-based knowledge build-up in renewable energy technology. This finding is consistent with free-riding behavior on the part of some Member States, and the presence of industrial policy motives in other States in combination with agglomeration effects in the renewable energy sector. Energy import dependence and electricity regulation are found to influence the growth of the R&D-based knowledge stock, and the deregulation of the EU electricity markets has tended to contribute to a lower speed of divergence.

In order to achieve cost-effective RES-E deployment it is often argued that technology-neutral support schemes for renewables are indispensable. Against this background, RES-E support policies making widely use of technology differentiation in remuneration settings, e.g. across the EU, are frequently criticized from a theoretical point of view. However, in this paper we provide a systematic critique of the technology neutrality concept as a foundation for designing policy support schemes in the RES-E technology field. Specifically, the main objective of the paper is to scrutinize the arguments for technology-neutrality, and discuss three conceptual arguments for why technology-specific support schemes could in fact help minimize the societal costs of reaching future RES-E targets. We also briefly address different political economy concerns, which could constrain the choice of cost-effective policy support schemes, and that have to be taken into account for economic policy advice. For empirical illustration of the key arguments we refer to the case of German RES-E support.

Mit dem EEG 2012 wurde die gleitende Marktprämie in das Förderregime der erneuerbaren Energien zunächst als Option eingeführt. Das EEG 2014 baut diesen Ansatz durch verpflichtende Direktvermarktung weiter aus, ohne die Grundstruktur der Prämie anzutasten. Mit dem Instrument verbinden sich hohe Erwartungen an Kostensenkungen, die durch eine Steigerung
der Vermarktungseffizienz und eine verstärkte Bedarfsorientierung von erneuerbaren Energien erzielt werden sollen. Der Beitrag wertet die bisherigen Erfahrungen mit der Marktprämie
aus und geht der Frage nach, welche Effizienzgewinne durch die Weiterentwicklung im EEG 2014 realistisch sind.

Biodiversity loss in Europe is caused to a large extent by agricultural intensification. To halt this loss and to support species and habitat types in agricultural areas, agri-environment schemes have been introduced in Europe to compensate farmers for (costly) conservation measures. Currently, agri-environment schemes for grassland in general consider only a few conservation measures with fixed dates and a payment for average opportunity costs, e.g. for later mowing. A systematic approach that calculates farmers` opportunity costs in relation to the timing of grassland use is still lacking. We fill this gap by developing a systematic agri-economic cost assessment approach. Our approach is general enough to be applicable on a large spatial scale but can still sensitively differentiate among different timings. Moreover it is straightforward and time-saving enough to be suitable for implementation in regional scale optimisation procedures. We demonstrate this by applying the systematic cost assessment in the decision support software DSS-Ecopay using the example of grassland species and habitats conservation in the German federal state of Saxony.