M.Sc. Umweltwissenschaften / Environmental Sciences und M.Sc. Forstwissenschaften / Forest Sciences
Format: Lecture + Tutorial
Frequency: Winter semester
Description
In this course, students will learn how to analyze the natural environment and natural resources from an economic perspective. To this end, students will learn intermediate and advanced concepts and methods from ecological, environmental and resource economics, and apply them to analyze economy-environment systems.
Topics to be covered include the following:
- Review of basic concepts from microeconomics (utility, scarcity, optimization, efficiency, markets)
- Welfare analysis of markets, market failure and market regulation:
- public goods
- common-pool-resources
- externalities
- Economic valuation of environmental quality and natural resources
- Decision-making under uncertainty: risk, resilience, and insurance
Literature
There is no single textbook for this course. References for several chapters of the course include:
- M. Common and S. Stagl: Ecological Economics. An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2005
- H.E. Daly and J. Farley: Ecological Economics. Principles and Applications, Washington DC: Island Press, 2004
- Endres and V. Radke: Economics for Environmental Studies. A Strategic Guide to Micro- and Macroeconomics, Springer, 2012
- N. Hanley, J.F. Shogren and B. White: Environmental Economics in Theory and Practice, 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
- R. Perman, Y. Ma, J. McGilvray and M. Common: Natural Resource and Environmental Economics, 3rd edition, Pearson Education, 2003
Exam
wirtten exam (90. minutes)
Teaching language: english
Format: Lecture + Tutorial
Frequency: Winter semester
Description
In this course, students will study biodiversity and ecosystem services from an economic perspective. Biodiversity is understood here as ‘the variability among living organisms from all sources ... and the ecological complexes of which they are part’ (United Nations Convention on Biodiversity 1992). Ecosystem services are “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). This includes provisioning services (e.g. the provision of food, fiber, fuels or clean drinking water), regulating services (e.g. climate regulation, erosion control, or the regulation of pests and diseases), and cultural services (e.g. aesthetic satisfaction, education, recreation, or spiritual fulfillment).
While biodiversity is an issue of biology in the first place, the economic perspective can add valuable insights into why we are currently loosing biodiversity and ecosystem services at unusually high rates, why this is a problem that we should be concerned about, and what we can do in order to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystem services in an efficient manner.
To this end, students in this course will learn advanced concepts and methods from ecological, environmental and resource economics, and integrate them in an interdisciplinary manner with concepts and methods from ecology, to gain an encompassing and methodologically sound economic understanding of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Literature
There is no single textbook for this course. References to books and journal articles for each chapter will be given in class. References to start with are
- The TED talk of Dr. Pavan Sukhdev on Put a value on Nature! (16 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU9G2E_RYJo
- TEEB – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (www.teebweb.org):
Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature: Synthesis of the Approach, Conclusions and Recommendations (2010)
Summary for Policy Makers: Responding to the Value of Nature (2009) - 3.The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity (2021): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review
Exam
wirtten exam (90. minutes)
Teaching language: english