M.Sc. Environmental Governance

Format: Lecture + Tutorial

Frequency: Summer 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. 

In this module students learn to:
understand the particularities of an economic approach and economic instruments to address environmental problems (2);
differentiate the core principles of different schools of economics dealing with environmental problems (2);
apply an economic approach to current environmental problems (3);
analyze the influence of different schools of economics in conceptualizations of sustainability and their subsequent effect in policy making and implementation (4);
comparatively assess the differences between traditional Environmental Economics and Ecological Economics (4).

Literature

A list of relevant texts will be made available at the start of the course; obligatory readings (and part of the voluntary readings) will be made available online in electronic form. Preliminary readings:

• Tietenberg, T., Lewis, L. 2009. Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. Pearson, Addison Wesley, Boston.
• Common, M., Stagl, S. 2005. Ecological Economics. An introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Mankiw, N. G. 2004. Principles of Economics , 3rd Edition, Mason: South Western.
• Freudenberger, A. 2008. Mikroökonomik - frisch gezapft!: Knappe Ressourcen am Kneipentisch. Gabler, Wiesbaden.
• Biesecker, A., Hofmeister S. 2010. Focus: (Re)productivity. Sustainable relations both between society and nature and between the genders. Ecological Economics 69:1703-1711.

Exam

Presentation (15 min) and exam (90 min)

Prequisites

• good working knowledge of intermediate microeconomics
• advanced calculus (derivatives and maximization of functions of several variables)
• willingness and capability for interdisciplinary work in economics and ecology (basic knowledge of ecology is a plus, but no prerequisite)
• willingness to actively engage in course work and to address open questions
• good commandment of English

Teaching language: english