Biodiversity provides insurance against the uncertain provision of ecosystem services which are being used by risk-averse economic agents. I present a conceptual ecological-economic model that combines (i) current results from ecology about the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem...

Our aim in this essay is to identify and analyze some of the difficulties with interdisciplinary integration of economic and ecological contributions to the study of biodiversity loss. We develop our analysis from a widely accepted definition of economics which is based on the concept of...

In this paper I address the question of exactly how to measure biodiversity by reviewing and conceptually comparing ecological and economic measures of biodiversity. It turns out that there are systematic differences between these two classes of measures, which are related to a difference in the...

Agrobiodiversity can provide natural insurance to risk-averse farmers by reducing the variance of crop yield, and to society at large by reducing the uncertainty in the provision of public-good ecosystem services, for example, CO2 storage. We analyze the choice of agrobiodiversity by risk-averse...

The ecological literature suggests that biodiversity reduces the variance of ecosystem services. Thus, conservative biodiversity management has an insurance value to risk-averse users of ecosystem services. We analyze a conceptual ecological-economic model in which such management measures...

The ecological literature suggests that biodiversity reduces the variance of ecosystem services. Thus, conservative biodiversity management has an insurance value to risk-averse users of ecosystem services. We analyze a conceptual ecological-economic model in which such management measures...