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.

News

19.03.2021 | Open Position

Junior Professor (f/m/n) in Nature’s Values

The Faculty of Economics and Management Science of Leipzig University seeks to fill the junior professorship in Nature’s Values, funded by the Tenure Track Programme of the German Federal Government and the Federal States, from 1 April 2022. More information can be found here.

01.02.2021 | Report

COVID-19 in Germany: Results of panel survey available online

As part of our sustainability research, we are interested in how people make decisions under uncertainty and what their private contributions to public goods depend on. To this end, we analyse the natural experiment of the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 disease (COVID-19) in Germany. Individuals can contribute to public health by, for example, keeping physical distance or increasing their hygiene measures. To investigate these questions, we launched a panel survey with more than 3,000 participants in March 2020 and repeated it in August and December 2020. Selected survey results on income expectations, heterogeneity in vaccination readiness, support for infection control and return to "normality" are available interactively here.

22.06.2020 | Paper at SPIEGEL ONLINE
„Faktor Mensch“

Voluntary contact reductions would stabilize the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, but at higher rates of infection and death. Optimal regulation would substantially restrict physical social contacts at the beginning of the pandemic, well beyond the voluntary restrictions for self-protection and the protection of others. SPIEGEL ONLINE, one of the leading German newspapers, reports on the new study by Martin Quaas, Jasper Meya, Hanna Schenk (iDiv, UL) with co-authors from Kiel and Hamburg (press release).