Research Projects

Consortium: Martin Quaas, Aletta Bonn, Julian Sagebiel, Sophie Lokatis, Maria Schnabel, Deutsches Zentrum für integrative Biodiversitätsforschung (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig; Stefan Baumgärtner, Nadja Leschka, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (ALU); Moritz Drupp, Björn Bos, Pier Basaglia, Simon Disque, Jonas Grunau, Universität Hamburg (UHH); Britta Tietjen, Fanny Langerwisch, Freie Universität Berlin (FU); Harry Gölz, Beyhan Ekinci, Veronika Liebelt, Bundesamt für Naturschutz (BfN); Björn Bünger,  Astrid Matthey, Jan Philipp Schägner, Umweltbundesamt (UBA); Burkhard Schweppe-Kraft

Biodiversity and natural capital contribute fundamentally to human well-being. So far, societal decision-making only partly takes these values into account. One major reason are large information gaps and uncertainties. The few existing original valuation studies have not been systematically selected, typically consider only a subset of values, and treat ecological-economic dynamics and uncertainties only implicitly. ValuGaps responds to the need for comprehensive, reliable, and scalable values of natural capital and biodiversity for societal decision-making, as experienced by public authorities in Germany, especially the German Environment Agency (UBA) and the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN).

ValuGaps considers multi-dimensional economic, relational, and health values and asks the following questions:

1. Where do societal decision-makers and stakeholders face the largest information gaps and uncertainties with respect to different values of biodiversity and natural capital?
2. How to scale, transfer, and bridge different types of values across (i) space and time, (ii) groups of beneficiaries, and (iii) types of ecosystems in a practical, scientifically and normatively sound way? By means of integrated ecological-economic modelling, behavioural experiments, and surveys, we specifically ask
   1. What are the key parameters required to value natural capital in a scalable and transferable way, and how can their values be quantified or constrained?
   2. How do uncertainties propagate when scaling, transferring or bridging values?
3. How can societal decision-makers make best use of valuation, and how do and how should they deal with uncertainties?

ValuGaps will develop the interdisciplinary scientific basis for comprehensively taking into account natural capital values in policy making, accounting and planning. The approach will be exemplified and tested for grasslands as the prime case study, and for smaller case studies on temperate forests, marine fish and urban green space. As a transdisciplinary project where scientists closely cooperate with the key federal agencies in the domain, UBA and BfN, and by establishing a reference-stakeholder network, ValuGaps will significantly contribute to mainstreaming the value of biodiversity in decision-making, a political commitment under the CBD Aichi Target 2.

If you would like to have more information on the project, please visit: https://valugaps.de/en

ValuGaps is funded for its main phase by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of its research initiative for the conservation of biodiversity:

https://www.feda.bio/de/

marEEshift pursues the following overall scientific aims:

1. identify processes that increase or decrease the resilience of marine ecological-economic systems.

2. identify and initiate measures, institutions, and processes that could foster a resilient ecological-economic system of marine resource use in a regime of sustainability. This may require a regime shift from the current state of over-use towards a new resilient regime of sustainability.

To achieve these aims, we will study historical regime shifts in the Western Baltic Sea and beyond. We will explore the combinations of ecological, environmental (incl. climate-related), economic, social, and political drivers that have caused tipping points in the Western Baltic Sea and in cod-fisheries throughout the Northern Atlantic in the past.

In addition to that, we will study the effects of environmental change as well as multi-species interactions and multiple stakeholders on the resilience of the Western Baltic marine ecological-economic system, where commercial and recreational fisheries on cod and herring interact.

Besides analyzing what a regime of sustainability would be in the context of this specific ecological-economic system, we will explore the potential for a shift towards a regime of sustainability for the Western Baltic as a model case.

If you would like to have more information on the project, please visit: www.idiv.de/en/mareeshift.

This project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for a period of three years.

Partners are the University of Hamburg, University of Freiburg, Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries, and Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in the Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V.

Sustainable food production is a central element of a future bioeconomy. However, many food production systems on land and in the oceans are under pressure from intensive human use and global environmental changes.

FOCUS aims to globally assess the economic effects of climate change on marine ecosystem services and agriculture. Together with partners from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities and Dalhousie University, we will couple a global agricultural sector and land-use model in combination with a new global bio-economic fisheries model to quantify climate change effects on food production, food security and rural livelihoods for the coastal areas around the world.  In collaboration with practitioners, we will develop policy approaches for integrating a well-managed, linked land-ocean system into the bioeconomy.

SOMBEE addresses the role of eco-evolutionary dynamics and their consequences for the sustainable exploitation of fish resources in the future. To this end, we will build and test scenarios of the combined pressure of fishing and climate change on both intra- and inter-specific marine biodiversity, by explicitly modelling the phenotypic plasticity of fish life-history traits, their selection and adaptive evolution, and their genetic drift for multiple interacting species. The objectives are to:

• develop a cutting edge evolutionary ecosystem model with primary focus on fish;

• apply it to a set of 6 contrasting ecosystems to better understand the selective pressures exertedby fishing and climate change;

• project future changes in intra- and inter-specific biodiversity and related fishing production and economic profit under combined climate and fishing scenarios and

• quantify the synergistic and antagonistic ecological, evolutionary and economic impacts of these drivers.

SOMBEE will advance knowledge on the capacity of fish communities to adapt to global change and our ability to forecast their persistence and the future sustainability of fisheries and food production.

This project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for a period of three years.

The project assesses the risk of decreases in marine ecosystem productivity as a tipping point for the interlinked ecological, economic and social systems of the Northern Humboldt Upwelling System (HUS). The extreme variability in climate-related productivity of this upwelling system impacts local livelihoods and worldwide markets. One focus of the project is the pelagic, offshore system supplying the industrial Peruvian anchoveta fishery and its regional and global repercussions through export to international markets. The second focus are coastal and insular (Galapagos) systems, where artisanal fisheries, aquaculture and ecotourism are key maritime activities for provision of livelihoods. With a consortium of biogeochemists, fisheries ecologists, ocean and ecosystem modellers, economists, social scientists and key stakeholders, both from Germany and Peru, we will work on understanding feedbacks between ecological, social and economic dynamics in the HUS. Based on an array of modelling efforts and tightly linked input from stakeholders, we will explore possible adaptation schemes and derive governance recommendations to reduce the risk of impacts of tipping points on the regional economy and increase the resilience of coastal communities in Peru.

This project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for a period of three years.

Partners are GEOMAR, University of Bremen, University of Hamburg, ZMT Bremen, Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú, and IMARPE, Peru.

Climate engineering (CE) has been proposed as a means of last resort to combat dangerous global change. However, numerous concerns arise when considering a possible implementation, or even a large field experiment. In particular, questions arise with respect to the incentives for a party to conduct a field experiment or deploy CE, the consequences for other parties, and the changing incentives for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions (ongoing research in LEAC-I). Yet, CE can be differentiated and scaled in many dimensions, and the transition from a field experiment to the deployment of CE is blurred.

LEAC-II will address the following questions:

1. Feasibility: To which extent is it possible to generate a localized climate response to a localized forcing?

2. Incentives: What is the spatial correlation of economic preferences with respect to climate variables?

3. Economic implications: What are possible welfare implications of limited-area CE when countries implement limited-area CE and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in an uncoordinated way?

4. Traceability: What does it take to detect and attribute a limited-area effect of a CE measure, and to reject the hypothesis that climate events outside the targeted area are affected by the CE measure?

5. Governance: How to regulate limited-area CE most efficiently, given the uncertainties in predictability and traceability?

This project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for a period of three years.