EcolEconMod: Developing a framework to assess the total cost of conservation measures

Kurzbeschreibung

Reconciling potentially conflicting human activities such as agriculture or forestry with biodiversity conservation requires the integrated consideration of the benefits and costs associated with the different conservation policies available. There is therefore a need to include economic and political dimensions into ecological models to assess conservation measures and ecosystem management strategies. Ecological-economic modelling is a useful tool to integrate these multiple dimensions on the evaluation of nature conservation measures.

Part of the project’s contribution includes the development of suitable methods to assess the costs of conservation measures, including opportunity costs that may arise when certain land use measures are changed or abandoned. The cost assessment methods will be applied to various projects, including the model-based evaluation of the precautionary principle in the design of species protection policies. A workshop will also be offered to share knowledge on the topic of cost assessment.