Environmental problems with unknown emission abatement cost and damage are analyzed. The game under consideration is static, and its expected payoff structure displays a prisoners’ dilemma. Even in this most unfavorable setting cooperation might arise if the involved countries are sufficiently...

Many environmental problems are large scale in terms of geographical units and long-term with regard to time. We therefore find a coincidence of different causes and impacts that qualify the interplay between humans and nature as highly uncertain ("transparency challenge"). In consequence we see...

Although wind power is currently the most efficient source of renewable energy, the cost of wind electricity still exceeds the market price. Subsidies in the form of feed-in tariffs (FIT) have been introduced in many countries to support the expansion of wind power. These tariffs are highly...

Standard risk economic analysis suggests that global environmental risk is lower in the case of risk aversion than in the case of risk neutrality or risk seeking. Maybe the reason why the Advisory Council of the German Government on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) explicitly recommends to...

To limit global environmental risks, countries must cooperate. However, the prisoners' dilemma-type of the problem suggests that international environmental agreements are difficult to obtain and to maintain. In this paper, the role of countries' risk preferences for the prisoners'...

This paper models global environmental policy in a stochastic setting: reducing pollution not only reduces expected environmental damage but also its spread. The national incentives to cooperate are analysed under adverse conditions: expected payoffs are taken to have the structure of a (static)...

This article develops eleven criteria focusing on the relative importance and strength of different, especially socio-economic drivers of and pressures on biodiversity. These refer to the syndrome concept designed to assess global environmental risks and the DPSIR framework developed to guide...