Biodiversity Economics

The Biodiversity Economics research group aims at improving the scientific basis for establishing sustainability in human-nature relationships. Main areas of research are the sustainable use of renewable natural resources (e.g. marine fish stocks, rangelands, forests) and the conservation of biodiversity from regional to global scales. We study how economic incentives shape human behaviour towards nature, how sustainability – understood as justice in human-nature relationships – can be conceptualized, and how economic policy instruments could contribute to this. Our methodical expertise comprises quantitative ecological-economic modelling, dynamic optimization, statistics, economic experiments, conceptual modelling, and approaches from game theory and capital theory. Our research group is internationally well connected. We engage in integrative interdisciplinary research with natural and social scientists and researchers from the humanities.