Recent decades have witnessed substantial losses in biodiversity in Europe, principally driven by the ecological changes associated with intensification of agricultural production. These changes especially affected the biodiversity in the marginal areas, such as the uplands in UK, since the...

Hill farming in UK is experiencing very difficult economic circumstances and many farmers rely on subsidies provided by the government for a large fraction of their income. The Peak District National Park is used as a case study to examine how farmers might respond to current policy changes –...

This research analyzes how the size of protected areas influences the ecological and economic effectiveness through a return-on-investment in conservation (ROI) to help conservation organizations prioritize protected areas. Using the case study, we focus on whether the size variation has...

The size of the protected area is recognized as one of the key attributes for assessing the effectiveness of investing in protected areas. We evaluate the effectiveness of protected areas by examining economies of scale in size and the average cost of acquiring protected areas depending on the...

Market failure results in more human conversion of ecosystems for development and other uses than likely socially desirable. In response, many government agencies and nonprofits focus on conservation, often acquiring land rights to establish protected areas on which further conversion of...

Tackling the problem of ecosystem services degradation is an important policy challenge. Different types of economic instruments have been employed by conservation agencies to meet this challenge. Notable among them are Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that pay private landowners to...

There is much interest among economists and policy makers in the use of reverse auctions to purchase habitat conservation on private lands as a mechanism for minimizing public expenditures to achieve desired conservation outcomes. Examples are the Conservation Reserve Program (US) and...

Tackling the problem of ecosystem services degradation is an important policy challenge. Different types of economic instruments have been employed by conservation agencies to meet this challenge. Notable among them are Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that pay private landowners to...

Agri-environmental schemes (AES), implemented to address a wide range of environmental issues, suffer from what has been referred to as the “end of the contract problem”, in the sense that many of the land management practices adopted under the scheme cannot be expected to persist in the...

This paper describes the results of an ecological-economic modelling exercise of the management of a scarce habitat, namely heather moor/and. The Orkney Islands of Scotland are used to illustrate a modelling approach which could be easily applied elsewhere, and to other habitats. We describe the...