TY - THES A1 - Atenkeng Tendong, Jean Carlos T1 - The Economic, Social and Environmental Valuation of the Hambach Forest. N2 - Forest ecosystems provide mankind with economic, social and environmental benefits called ecosystem goods and services. More often than not, some of these benefits are either mutually exclusive or come with negative impacts on the society or the environment. Hence, estimating the monetary value of these benefits is essential in decision making and policies on scarce natural resources. This thesis aims at estimating the monetary value of about 200 ha of the remaining Hambach forest which was once about 8,500 ha. In recent years, this forest has been the focus of numerous protests from environmentalists who believe that the German energy company RWE should not continue cutting down forest trees in order to extract its rich lignite reserves for electricity production. The environmentalists cite the loss of biodiversity and climate change as the base of their argument but fail to support this statement with an actual valuation study of the existing forest. On the contrary, RWE values the Hambach mine at €4 to €5 billion. In this light, this thesis makes a generous attempt at placing a monetary value on the 200 ha of Hambach forest using benefit transfer and meta-analysis as the main valuation techniques. Moreover, other techniques for a possible primary valuation project are elucidated. Besides, the social and environmental impacts of lignite mining are examined. Eventually, the obtained results are analyzed and discussed along with a concluding chapter on possible solutions and subsequent developments. KW - Hambach forest KW - Ecosystem services KW - Valuation KW - Benefit transfer KW - RWE Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:1383-opus4-3732 ER -