Goals

From a widespread economics point of view, environmental problems arise because air, water, soil and other natural resources are considered as evident and available everywhere. Everything that is accessible can therefore be used.

For several years now, attempts have been made to change this mindset based on the concept of ecosystem services or environmental benefits. Clean air, fresh water and fertile soil were defined as services nature provides for humankind/human societies. Based on this idea, these natural resources became economically valuable. This then raised questions such as: How much would it cost to preserve the filtering capacity of soils? How much would society be willing to pay for beautiful landscapes?

CIVILand examines how economic incentives such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) can be developed and how they can be applied to preserve ecosystem services or to maintain cultural landscapes.

Non-governmental initiatives, especially those from civil society are in the focus of interest. What is civil society’s financial contribution to the preservation and development of ecological benefits? What innovative contribution did civil society make in the development and implementation of PES? CIVILand pursues these issues by comparing Germany, Great Britain and the US.

The research will contribute according to the CIVILand agenda to identify civil society’s potential for innovation in this field and to provide sustainable landscape development.

• CIVILand-project-and-goals.pdf
• Civiland-Project-Schedule.pdf

Objectives of the subprojects

• Subproject 1Significance and innovation potential of non-governmental versus governmental PES in dependence of the institutional framework
• Subproject 2Who pays for which ecosystem service – where, how much and why? The social and cultural comparison of PES
• Subproject 3Analysis of the nature of the remunerated ecological and cultural landscape services and the use of ecological models in the course of the instrument design
• Subproject 4Analysis of the relevant civil society organizations with focus on foundations and trusts
• Subproject 5Participation in the designing of payments for ecosystem services (PES) - a comparison of PES design processes in Germany and Great Britain
• Subproject 6Civil Society Initiatives and Payments for Ecosystem Services: A New Institutional Economics Approach
• Subproject 7Strengths and weaknesses of governmental PES in the three study areas