Managing ecological-economic systems under uncertainty
Thinking about the environment and environmental services is not only thinking about species and habitats and their interactions but also thinking about economics and the processes of human intervention, which are directly or indirectly responsible for the systems stability. Therefore within my dissertation thesis I consider not only the mechanisms of incentives to initiate certain actions to conserve or maintain a particular environmental good but also analyze the dynamics of the underlying systems resilience in relation to sustainability to give an answer to the question of how conservation contracts might be optimally designed.
Within a setting of model simulation of the resilience of ecological-economic systems and an agent-based model to analyze optimal conservation contracts my detailed research questions are:
1. Is resilience necessary and / or sufficient for a sustainable development?
2. How do preferences change the resilience of ecological-economic systems?
3. What are Payments for Environmental Services (PES) and what and who is to be paid?
4. Which combination of currently used payment schemes for environmental services obtains the socially optimal result while environmental uncertainty and information asymmetries are considered?
5. How does the consideration of the systems resilience interact with or change the requirements of the optimal payment scheme?