Suzanne Elizabeth Vedel

University of Copenhagen · Institute of Food and Resource Economics

The evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of Payments for ecosystem services (PES) in fostering positive environmental outcomes has been central to the scientific debate on their implementation. PES cost-effectiveness can be affected by a myriad of environmental, institutional and socio-economic factors operating at different spatial and temporal sc...

Forests provide ecosystem services, including timber production. In some cases, private forest owners perform management actions in order to enhance the provision of such services, or they may be encouraged by public policies and payments. This paper focuses specifically on the decision to set forest land aside for biodiversity conservation, as par...

Policies aiming at improving biodiversity often consist of costly agri-environmental schemes, i.e. subsidized grazing or mowing of semi-natural areas. However, these practices have widely been found to be insufficient to mitigate biodiversity loss. Rewilding, i.e. restoring natural processes in self-sustaining biodiverse ecosystems, has been propos...

In the environmental psychology literature, the new environmental paradigm (NEP) scale has been used to measure environmental attitude as a multidimensional concept. This study is conducted based on this multidimensionality concept to analyse willingness to pay for forest management targeting non-use value ecosystem services. In most previous studi...

Objective The objective of the present study is to investigate the effects of improvements made to two large, interconnected bicycle infrastructure in the western suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark, on bicycle volumes and mode share, and cyclists' behaviour, perceptions, and experiences. Methods Effects are assessed by analysing data from automatic...

Cycling as a mode of transportation is increasingly being advocated due to the many positive effects it has on people’s health, the environment and to counteract increasing congestion on the transportation infrastructure. There is a long tradition of using cycling as a mode of transportation among the Danish public and this is widespread across peo...

The EU Water Framework Directive aims to ensure restoration of Europe’s water bodies to “good ecological status” by 2027. Many Member States will struggle to meet this target, with around half of EU river catchments currently reporting below standard water quality. Diffuse pollution from agriculture represents a major pressure, affecting over 90% o...

Achieving food security in an environmentally sustainable manner is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Using insects as food can serve this purpose because they are nutritionally valuable and environmentally friendly. Embracing insects as food requires information on potential consumer demand as this would determine the success of product d...

The domestication of new crops would promote agricultural diversity and could provide a solution to many of the problems associated with intensive agriculture. We suggest here that genome editing can be used as a new tool by breeders to accelerate the domestication of semi-domesticated or even wild plants, building a more varied foundation for the...

Because edible insects provide nutritional and environmental benefits, there is a focus on establishing and optimizing the insect production sector and developing the value chain. However, little is known about consumers' reactions to insects as food. This paper provides a first insight into consumers' preferences for termite-based food products (T...

A key prerequisite to ensure that payment for ecosystem services is effective is that the management measures landowners are paid to undertake are in fact additional to the status quo and hence bring about a change in provision. We investigated Danish forest owners' preferences for conditional contracts for the provision of ecosystem services in Na...

Organic farming is based on the concept of working 'with nature' instead of against it; however, compared with conventional farming, organic farming reportedly has lower productivity. Ideally, the goal should be to narrow this yield gap. In this review, we specifically discuss the feasibility of new breeding techniques (NBTs) for rewilding, a proce...

Sustainable agriculture in response to increasing demands for food depends on development of high-yielding crops with high nutritional value that require minimal intervention during growth. Focus so far has been on changing plants by introducing genes that impart new properties, which the plants and their ancestors never possessed. By contrast, we...

The proper balance between costly monitoring and non-compliance have often been studied, however, the costs of monitoring from landowners’ perspective have only received little attention. We designed a Choice Experiment where landowners expressed their willingness to accept afforestation contracts with varying attributes, one of them being the like...

In this study we have addressed appropriate modelling of heterogeneity in willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental goods, and have demonstrated its importance using a case of forest access in Denmark. We compared WTP distributions for four models: (1) a multinomial logit model, (2) a mixed logit model assuming a univariate Normal distribution, (3...

The stated preference approach to costs of provision

’Den grænseløse by’ er temaet for den forskning, der blev udført i Center for Strategisk Byforskning 2004-2012. Denne betegnelse valgte vi for at udfordre vores vante begreber og forestilling om byerne: At der er et centrum, en forstad og et åbent landskab udenom, at en by har sin egen befolkning, sit eget erhvervsliv, sit eget opland og sine egne...

Agri-environmental contracts are used to provide incentives for nature management on private land in, e.g. the European Union. The aim of this article is to investigate preference heterogeneity for agri-environmental contracts among farmers in order to discuss potential policy improvements utilising heterogeneity. We used a choice experiment to eli...

Most nature-based recreational goods have traditionally been viewed as positive externalities of forestry and other land uses. They have been characterised by low degrees of excludability and rivalry and have therefore mainly been public goods. Due to increased rivalry among various user groups as well as an increasing demand for new recreational e...

The importance of ecosystem services for mankind stresses the issue of identifying different institutional solutions to effectively secure their adequate provision. Much focus has been on services of the public good type, and instruments like payments for environmental services. We extend this work to consider the possible social gains from support...

The Danish government gives a grant to consultant companies offering advisory services to private forest owners. The Danish Forest and Nature Agency and the consultant companies constitute a principal–agent system. The forest owner is not directly part of this relationship, but he has a main impact on it. The consultant companies have private infor...