Florian V. Eppink

Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

The exclusive economic zone of the Cook Islands, nearly 1,960,000 km2 of ocean, is 7,000 times larger than the country’s land area of just 240km2. Coastal and marine resources provide the Government of the Cook Islands, businesses and households with many real and measurable benefits. This report describes, quantifies and, where possible, estimates...

Invasive mammals are a primary threat to New Zealand’s endemic species. In remote areas, aerial delivery of poison is the preferred method of pest management, although it faces some public backlash. Novel pest control technologies are currently being investigated as alternatives but may face similar concerns. To investigate potential social and dem...

Acid mine drainage (AMD) often requires management long after mining operations have ceased. Cost-effective long-term passive treatment systems (PTS) are required for closure of mine sites. However, PTS research seldom defines well-constrained operational and financial parameters to enable confident decision making by mining companies. PTS are gene...

The Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD) is a follow-up to the “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) database which contained over 1,300 data points from 267 case studies on monetary values of ecosystem services across all biomes. The TEEB database had not been updated since 2010 and naturally many gaps exist across biomes,...

Marine ecosystems and the services they provide contribute greatly to human well-being but are becoming degraded in many areas around the world. The expansion of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) has been advanced as a potential solution to this problem but their economic feasibility has hardly been studied. We conduct an economic assessment of the cos...

This study examines the most effective way to present complex information in the context of ecosystem service-based assessments of landscape-level decision-making, using choice consistency as a way of measuring what is “most effective”. The experiment compares a verbal presentation of information with a variety of visualisations of the same informa...

Mining is an important economic activity in New Zealand, and it has a long history that is often linked with important cultural developments. The process of mineral extraction inevitably affects the surrounding environment, but there are few tools available to help mining companies and regulators assess and predict the environmental impacts of mini...

Mining is an important economic activity in New Zealand, and it has a long history that is often linked with important cultural developments. The process of mineral extraction inevitably affects the surrounding environment, but there are few tools available to help mining companies and regulators assess and predict the environmental impacts of mini...

Monetary valuation is often used as a measure of ecosystem service value but is not appropriate for all Ecosystem Services. The ecosystem service literature has devised various formats to present monetary values together with other types of ecosystem service information, but these are rarely tested in a decision-making context. We search the litera...

National scale initiatives are being attempted in New Zealand (NZ) to meet important environmental goals following land-use intensification over recent decades. Riparian restoration to filter agricultural spillover effects is currently the most widely practised mitigation measure but few studies have investigated the cumulative value of these pract...

In support of natural resource and ecosystem service policy, monetary value estimates are often presented to decision makers along with other types of information. There is some evidence that, presented with such ‘mixed’ information, people prioritise monetary over non-monetary information. We conduct a discrete choice experiment among New Zealand...

Choice experiment responses. This file contains the data ready for use with Stata. (DTA)

Decisions about cultural and historical heritage conservation can be contentious. Improved insight into the economic benefits derived from preservation could be achieved through a better understanding of the underlying economics. In response to this challenge, a growing number of studies estimate the economic value of heritage sites. The purpose of...

Between 2014 and 2018, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has contracted CRL Energy, Landcare Research, Otago University, Canterbury University and O'Kane Consulting to complete a project called 'The NZ Mine Environment Life Cycle Guide'. This project encompasses the bulk of central government funding for onshore minerals se...

This chapter illustrates the process of mapping ecosystem service values with an application to coral reef recreational values in Southeast Asia . The case study provides an estimate of the value of reef-related recreation foregone, due to the decline in coral reef area in Southeast Asia , under a baseline scenario for the period 2000–2050. This va...

Many countries in West Asia, defined in this study as the Arabic-speaking countries of the Arabian Peninsula plus Turkey and Iran, have enacted environmental conservation laws but regional underlying drivers of environment change, such as rising incomes and fast-growing populations, continue to put pressure on remaining wetlands. This paper aims to...

Land management - the organisation of the use and development of land - is an important instrument for addressing problems of rising greenhouse gas emissions and loss of natural resources. Natural-social systems in which land management policies are implemented are poorly understood yet, thus decreasing the effectiveness of these policies. Local or...

Land management, the organisation of the use and development of land, is an important instrument for addressing problems of rising greenhouse gas emissions and loss of natural resources. Yet, natural-social systems in which land management policies are implemented are poorly understood, thus decreasing the effectiveness of these policies. Local stu...

1. Ecosystem services are defined as the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. Employing the ecosystem service concept is intended to support the development of policies and instruments that integrate social, economic and ecological perspectives. In recent years, this concept has become the paradigm of ecosystem management. 2. The prolific u...

Ecologists usually argue for a proactive approach to species conservation—it should start before a species is endangered and under substantial risk of extinction. In reality, however, conservation often only starts when species populations are already in a critical state. This may be the result of a policy process in which those actors who see only...

Migration dynamics and local biodiversity are interrelated in a way that is likely to affect patterns of regional specialisation. We assess this relationship with a New Economic Geography model that has been extended with biodiversity. Biodiversity is heterogeneous, and responds to habitat availability. The results indicate that a symmetric pattern...

The EU Habitats Directive provides in Annexes II and IV a list of species that need to be conserved. In response to this obligation, Member States have implemented a variety of conservation measures. These measures include the rejection, modification or delay of land development plans, payments to landowners for implementing conservation measures a...

The Land Use Scanner (LUS) is a decision support system for land use planning that is widely used in the Netherlands. The model yields solutions that have a high resolution (500×500 m) and reflect economic equilibrium in the land market, in which eighteen types of land use and nine aggregated habitat types competitively bid for locations. Here, an...

We evaluate how well environmental-economic models describe biodiversity loss and conservation issues. Four types of economic models turn out to dominate economic research into biodiversity conservation. For each of these, we assess the extent to which they integrate relevant ecological theories and indicators of biodiversity loss. A main conclusio...

The EU Habitats Directive provides in Annexes II and IV a list of species needing to be conserved. Member States have implemented a variety of conservation measures in response to this obligation. These measures include the rejection, modification or delay of land development plans, payments for landowners to perform conservation measures and manag...

Grain and extent of spatially explicit studies in landscape ecology and spatial economics have been reviewed in an assessment of differences between these two disciplines and possibilities for integration. In the latter field, (1) such papers were substantially less frequently found, and (2) median study area grains as well as extents were higher....

Wherever human land use is located near sensitive natural areas, such as wetlands, it has significant impacts on biodiversity in those areas. Both species richness and species composition are affected. As biodiversity is lost, conservation efforts increase and act as a constraint on land use options. Given these links, land use is a central factor...

The wage level in The Netherlands is, by a large part, determined in collective labour agreements. However, the result of the processes of job destruction, job creation and job-to-job mobility is that workers move from less productive to more productive jobs. The empirical analysis shows that the resulting productivity gains are reflected in the wa...

Eén van de omvangrijkste milieuproblemen van dit moment is het verlies aan biodiversiteit: plant- en diersoorten sterven uit in een veel hoger tempo dan natuurlijk is. Een scala aan menselijke activiteiten, voornamelijk die activiteiten ten behoeve van materiële productie en consumptie, is hiervoor verantwoordelijk. Planten- en diersoorten zijn via...