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Cities are major contributors to climate change and biodiversity loss, and at the same time particularly affected by some of their consequences. Urban green can help address these challenges and provide numerous other benefits to people. Economic valuation can estimate the value that people assign to these diverse urban ecosystem services. The environmental economics literature uses several valuation methods. This work examines the valuation of urban ecosystem services with choice experiments. It includes five articles that use empirical analysis to address three overarching research goals: First, to improve understanding of the value of urban ecosystem services to urban residents. Second, to contribute to improving the validity of choice experiments. Third, to develop modeling of spatial patterns in the value of urban ecosystem services.
Chapter 1 describes the background and motivation of the valuation of urban ecosystem services with choice experiments, gives an overview over the relevant literature, and sets out the research objectives and methods of this dissertation.
Chapter 2 presents a choice experiment on green spaces, street trees and green roofs in Bremen. It analyzes the effect of additional information that these measures are part of a climate adaptation strategy. The results show greater willingness to pay among informed respondents. Part of the effect can be explained by a higher credibility of the survey.
Chapter 3 describes a choice experiment on urban gardens in Berlin and Stuttgart. It explores how respondents process the information provided in the questionnaire. It finds that questions about the information do not significantly affect either recall or the responses in the choice experiment.
Chapter 4 is based on choice experiments on street trees, green spaces, and greenways in four German cities. It examines how choice experiment surveys should elicit perceived consequentiality. The results show advantages of elicitation before the choice experiment over the usual elicitation afterwards.
Chapter 5 explores how valid policy makers perceive the results of choice experiments on urban green in several German cities, and what consequences this has for their use of the results. Interviews show that most policy makers use the results in their city to raise awareness or justify positions. Perceptions of validity are mixed, but do not play a major role in this type of use.
Chapter 6 examines the spatial distribution of the value of urban ecosystem services using choice experiments on green spaces, urban trees, green roofs, and green facades in Berlin and Leipzig. It develops and tests new choice models that may better represent than the common approach how the value of urban green space decreases with distance.
Based on the findings of the articles, Chapter 7 derives recommendations for practitioners of choice experiments and for urban green policy makers. Finally, it identifies research gaps that would be promising for future studies.
Approaches to restore post-mining areas should provide sustainable solutions for recovering biodiversity and ecosystem services in regions experiencing massive deforestation. Key components that are impacted by surface mining activities and that restoration intervention should therefore target are biodiversity attributes and ecosystem service provisioning. The consequences of restoration decisions in post-mining areas in the Afrotropical region (here Ghana) remain understudied. To this end, l assessed levels of soil properties, biodiversity and ecosystem service in a post-mining area after two decades of active forest restoration by comparing them to attributes of the surrounding dominant land-use types. l hypothesized that (i) the interventions applied to restore and manage a post-mining area improve ecosystem attributes beyond conditions observed in the alternative dominant land-use types and even reaching levels comparable to reference forest (Chapter III), (ii) soil conditions and the functional structure of tree communities drive ecosystem functions and multifunctionality, with highest multifunctionality levels in the restored and natural forests (Chapter IV), (iii) the structure of tree communities coupled with pronounced climatic seasonality support a higher number of arthropods and arthropod functional groups particularly in the wet season and in structurally heterogeneous land-use types (Chapter V), and (iv) active forest restoration enhances the levels of ecosystem service provision similar to the reference forest with possible trade-offs or synergies among individual ecosystem services across forest types (Chapter VI). Chapter I provides an introduction to deforestation, and further highlights global and national initiatives, including active forest restoration, to reverse or minimize the impacts of tropical deforestation. Chapter II details the methodological approaches applied for sampling. Chapter III focussed on soil properties in addition to below and above-ground biomass of trees. The characteristic soil attributes for the restored forest were not significantly different from those in the reference forest, except for bulk density and base saturation, but differed significantly from attributes in all other land-use types. Chapter IV focussed on how the functional structure of tree communities affects the provision of ecosystem services. For functional composition, both the leaf economic spectrum and the seed mass dimensions separated different land-use types. Chapter V addresses the research question on how post-mining restoration affects arthropod communities. Communities of ground-active arthropods differed significantly between land-use types depending on the season. By quantifying the various ecosystem attributes in the field and transforming them into ecosystem service proxies, l could primarily identify synergies with no apparent trade-off between ecosystem services across the forest land-use types (Chapter VI).
Distributive aspects in the design of payments for ecosystem services and agri-environmental schemes
(2021)
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) and agri-environmental schemes (AES) are often introduced with the goal to counteract overexploitation of natural habitats and biodiversity loss in forests and agricultural landscapes. Their ecological effectiveness and cost-effectiveness have been, however, repeatedly questioned in the literature.
One way of increasing the cost-effectiveness of such schemes is spatial differentiation of payments, which reflects regional differences in conservation benefits and costs and thus maximizes the ecological effect achieved with available financial resources.
Another major critique for PES and AES is that they often pursue poverty alleviation and rural development objectives, which can compromise their cost-effectiveness. As the Tinbergen rule in economic theory suggests, each policy goal requires a separate policy instrument.
However, as other policy instruments, PES and AES have distributional effects. Especially in developing countries, where governments are often weak and less able to successfully implement multiple policies, the distributional effects might not be adequately addressed. The distributional implications of PES and AES could even have an adverse effect on the cost-effectiveness of the schemes, if due to low acceptance among the potential ecosystem service (ES) providers, participation rates in these voluntary schemes are lower than optimal or if transaction costs are affected. From an economic perspective, if distributional goals are important for the design of PES and AES, the fairness preferences of potential ES buyers should be considered.
This thesis uses three case studies to address selected aspects of distribution and fairness in PES and AES from different perspectives. It provides insights into the preferences of potential ES buyers in Germany for distribution and other fairness aspects in PES and AES using two choice experiments and analyses possible distributional effects of cost-effective homogeneous and regionalized payments in AES.
The surveys among potential ES buyers suggest preferences for maximin and equal distribution of payments, and preferences for animal welfare and biodiversity conservation (for local as well as for distant biodiversity), which could be directions for improvement of AES and PES.
Regarding distributional impacts of AES, a trade-off between equality and cost-effectiveness is confirmed. Equity generally increases with improved cost-effectiveness of homogeneous payments. Spatially differentiated payments improve the cost-effectiveness substantially, by aligning the payments to the regional costs and the measures to the regional specifics and potential ecological benefits. However, they have substantial redistribution effects, poorer regions are adversely affected. This shows the importance of analyzing the distributional implications of cost-effective AES and PES on different spatial levels and calls for a holistic approach in policy evaluation and implementation.