Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers coping with climatic risk that prevails in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...

We develop a general and unifying methodology for ecological economics which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a specific combination of...

Strong sustainability, according to the common definition, requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately. Yet, in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed. To therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an...

Commercial cattle farming in semi-arid regions is subject to high rainfall risk. At the same time, it is prone to rangeland degradation. Theoretical works suggest that rainfall risk management by means of financial instruments may stabilize farming-derived income over the short-term, but...

We clarify the definition and interpretation of “sustainability economics” (Baumgärtner and Quaas 2010) in response to recent comments by van den Bergh (2010), Bartelmus (2010) and others. For that sake, we distinguish between general and specific definitions of sustainability and...

While economists have been contributing to the discussion of various aspects of sustainability for decades, it is just recently that the term “sustainability economics” was used explicitly in the ecological, environmental, and resource economics community. Yet, the contributions that use the...

Resilience as a descriptive concept gives insight into the dynamic properties of a system. Sustainability as a normative concept captures basic ideas of inter- and intragenerational justice. In this paper we specify the relationship between resilience and sustainable development. Based on an...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...

While economists have been contributing to the discussion of various aspects of sustainability for decades, it is just recently that the term sustainability economicsʺ was used explicitly in the ecological, environmental, and resource economics community. Yet, the contributions that use the...