When designing compensation payments for biodiversity conservation measures setting appropriate incentives so that landowners select spatially connected land parcels for conservation is of key importance for many species. The proposition of an agglomeration bonus, where landowners receive a...

Biodiversity loss in Europe is caused to a large extent by agricultural intensification. To halt this loss and to support species and habitat types in agricultural areas, agri-environment schemes have been introduced in Europe to compensate farmers for (costly) conservation measures. Currently,...

The importance of compensation payments for biodiversity-enhancing land-use measures has grown over the past decade, particularly in connection with agri-environmental policy. Given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity-enhancing land-use measures are subject to spatial variation,...

Connected habitats are ecologically more valuable than isolated habitats for many species. A key challenge when designing payments for biodiversity in fragmented landscapes is to increase the spatial connectivity of habitats. Based on the idea of an agglomeration bonus we consider a scheme in...

This paper is concerned with the cost-effective allocation of habitat for species under spatio-temporally heterogeneous economic development. To address the dynamic dimension of the problem we consider tradable development rights as the instrument of choice. A particular challenge in applying...

One of the key challenges in designing agri-environmental schemes targeted at conservation is the determination of the amount of financial resources that should be allocated towards a particular aim such as the conservation of an endangered species. Economists can contribute to an answer by...

Given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity-enhancing land-use measures are subject to spatial variation, considerations of allocational efficiency call for spatially differentiated compensation payments for such measures. However, when deciding whether to implement uniform or...

Recent political developments and academic debate indicate that future political commitment to the protection of natural resources is uncertain. This political uncertainty is particularly problematic when the danger of irreversible damage such as the extinction of species looms. Accordingly,...

Flexible conservation management, where measures are selected in each decision period and depending on the current state of the ecological system, are generally perceived as superior to fixed management, where the same measure is applied in each decision period independent of the current state...