Irene Ring

Towards regional sustainability: the need for interdisciplinary and applied research

In the face of global and long-term environmental problems, international political organisations such as the World Commission on Environment and Development have put forward the concept of sustainable development (WCED 1987). The origin and political career of this concept as well as debate on how the principles of sustainable development might be defined and put into practice have been the subject of numerous publications1.

Between Scylla and Charybdis? On the place of economic methods in sustainability science

The flaws of mainstream economic methodology are becoming widely acknowledged. Should we, therefore, reject all of its concepts within the quest for sustainability? A predicament looms: neither would it make sense to neglect useful tools, nor to redundantly replicate the mainstream’s narrow perspective on sustainability problems. We argue that avoiding both fallacies is possible because power of judgment facilitates non-dogmatic methodological decisions: the scientists’ judgment, that is, the capacity to apply general concepts to specific situations, supports their decisions concerning which methods are suitable for tackling a given sustainability problem. The intersubjective quality of judgment prevents the resulting methodological pluralism from drifting toward arbitrariness.

Exploring the policy mix for biodiversity financing: opportunities provided by environmental fiscal instruments in the EU: Carbon Taxes, Energy Subsidies and Smart Instrument Mixes

Existing public funding for biodiversity conservation is widely acknowledged to be inadequate to finance the actions required to meet the EU’s biodiversity conservation targets, contributing to the global targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity. Consequently, access to funding from other sectoral funding streams of the public domain, including through new and innovative means, is needed both in order to close the funding gap for biodiversity and to internalise the costs of conservation into sectoral activities that drive biodiversity loss. Environmental fiscal reform is considered to create several opportunities for complementing and mobilising resources for biodiversity funding. Environmental taxes, which either directly or indirectly support biodiversity, biodiversity-related environmental fees and charges (e.g. hunting charges and nature park entrance fees), and environmental tax relief mechanisms that reward certain biodiversity-friendly activities or behaviour are examples of fiscal instruments that can be used to mobilise more funding for biodiversity. Furthermore, redistributing tax revenue among government levels according to ecological criteria (i.e. ecological fiscal transfers) can also be used to support the delivery of conservation objectives. All of these instruments have so far not been widely explored in the EU and its Member States but have a potential to complement the existing policy mix for biodiversity finance. This chapter provides a review of these fiscal instruments, highlighting a number of successful examples, and explores their possible role within the context of the overall framework for biodiversity financing.