A systematic approach for assessing spatially and temporally differentiated opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation measures in grasslands

Melanie Mewes, Martin Drechsler (), Karin Johst, Astrid Sturm and Frank Wätzold

No 15/2013, UFZ Discussion Papers from Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Division of Social Sciences (ÖKUS)

Abstract: Biodiversity loss in Europe is caused to a large extent by agricultural intensification. To halt this loss and to support species and habitat types in agricultural areas, agri-environment schemes have been introduced in Europe to compensate farmers for (costly) conservation measures. Currently, agri-environment schemes for grassland in general consider only a few conservation measures with fixed dates and a payment for average opportunity costs, e.g. for later mowing. A systematic approach that calculates farmers' opportunity costs in relation to the timing of grassland use is still lacking. We fill this gap by developing a systematic agri-economic cost assessment approach. Our approach is general enough to be applicable on a large spatial scale but can still sensitively differentiate among different timings. Moreover it is straightforward and time-saving enough to be suitable for implementation in regional scale optimisation procedures. We demonstrate this by applying the systematic cost assessment in the decision support software DSS-Ecopay using the example of grassland species and habitats conservation in the German federal state of Saxony.

Keywords: biodiversity conservation; cost-effectiveness; ecological-economic modelling; agri-environment scheme; grassland; DSS-Ecopay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
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Journal Article: A systematic approach for assessing spatially and temporally differentiated opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation measures in grasslands (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ufzdps:152013

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