Welcome to CIVILand

CIVILand is a junior research group, which is engaged in payments for environmental and cultural landscape services also called Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) in the context of civil society initiatives.

Through their work, CIVILand hopes to raise a new perspective in the current international discussion on the PES. The junior research group will conduct empirical studies in Germany, Great Britain and the US.

The research group is based at the Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and will conduct research in cooperation with various partners in Germany and the US. The Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) funds this junior research group through the research program “Social-ecological Research” (SÖF).

Runtime: 2009 – 2013
Budget: 1.22 Mio. € + co-financing via individual equity stake from ZALF

Events and News

• July 2010New colleague:Carolin Bauer will be supporting us in Subproject 2. Welcome aboard Carolin!

• June 2010Research stay at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont:Thomas Krikser and Claudia Sattler are spending 2 years at the Gund Institute as visiting scholars. They will be selecting the final US case studies and thereafter collecting the data.

• 7-11 June 2010International Conference and Workshop – Salzau Castle and Kiel University. Titel: Solutions for Sustaining Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services Bettina Matzdorf together with Klaus Müller led a session on "Environmental, social and economic trade offs". Bettina Matzdorf also held a lecture for the "Public Lectures" section of the conference program. Jens Jetzkowitz presented during a session of a workshop, a lecture on “The individual, the community, society, civil society – who is the subject of sustainable development?”.

• February 2010 Exposés: The junior research team’s PhD candidates submitted the Exposés for their theses to the PhD commission. They have therefore received the official status as PhD students at ZALF.

Looking ahead

• Early 2011Workshop at Cardiff University:"The search for a successful mixture: Engagement and co-operation among business, civil society and state for nature conservation and ecosystem services" (Work in progress)

• Fall 2011Workshop in Berlin:“PES - current and future implementation approaches (CI + GI)” (Work in progress)