Systematic nature positive markets.

Environmental markets are a rapidly emerging tool to mobilize private funding to incentivize landholders to undertake more sustainable land management. How units of biodiversity in these markets are measured and subsequently traded creates key challenges ecologically and economically because it determines whether environmental markets can deliver net gains in biodiversity and efficiently lower the costs of conservation. We developed and tested a metric for such markets based on the well-established principle of irreplaceability from systematic conservation planning.

Farmers' valuation and willingness to pay for vaccines to protect livestock resources against priority infectious diseases in Ghana.

Introduction: Livestock vaccination coverage rates remain low in many lower and middle income countries despite effective vaccines being commonly available. Consequently, many preventable infectious livestock diseases remain highly prevalent, causing significant animal mortalities and threatening farmers' livelihood and food security. This study sought to assess farmers' maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP), and peste-des-petits-ruminants (PPR) vaccination of cattle, and sheep and goats, respectively.

Self-reported benefits and risks of open water swimming to health, wellbeing and the environment: Cross-sectional evidence from a survey of Scottish swimmers.

Engaging with natural environments benefits human health by providing opportunities for social interactions, enhancing mental wellbeing and enabling outdoor spaces for physical exercise. Open water swimming has seen a rapid increase in popularity, partly due to the physical health benefits it can provide but also with the growing interest in (re)connecting with nature for environment-health interactions. Using a national-scale online survey of 717 open water swimmers, the aim of this study was to investigate patterns and trends in the perceived benefits and risks of open water swimming to both public health and the environment; and to understand whether these perceived risks and benefits vary across different typologies of swimmers and open water, or 'blue space', environments.

Challenges of integrating economics into epidemiological analysis of and policy responses to emerging infectious diseases.

COVID-19 has shown that the consequences of a pandemic are wider-reaching than cases and deaths. Morbidity and mortality are important direct costs, but infectious diseases generate other direct and indirect benefits and costs as the economy responds to these shocks: some people lose, others gain and people modify their behaviours in ways that redistribute these benefits and costs. These additional effects feedback on health outcomes to create a complicated interdependent system of health and non-health outcomes.

Ecological and economic implications of alternative metrics in biodiversity offset markets.

Policy tools are needed that allow reconciliation of human development pressures with conservation priorities. Biodiversity offsetting can be used to compensate for ecological losses caused by development activities. Landowners can choose to undertake conservation actions, including habitat restoration, to generate biodiversity offsets.

Increasing the cost-effectiveness of nutrient reduction targets using different spatial scales.

In this paper, we investigate the potential gains in cost-effectiveness from changing the spatial scale at which nutrient reduction targets are set for the Baltic Sea, with particular focus on nutrient loadings from agriculture. The costs of achieving loading reductions are compared across five levels of spatial scale, namely the entire Baltic Sea; the marine basin level; the country level; the watershed level; and the grid square level. A novel highly-disaggregated model, which represents decreases in agricultural profits, changes in root zone N concentrations and transport to the Baltic Sea is used.

Socially vs. Privately Optimal Control of Livestock Diseases: A Case for Integration of Epidemiology and Economics.

This paper aims to illustrate the interdependencies between key epidemiological and economic factors that influence the control of many livestock infectious diseases. The factors considered here are (i) farmer heterogeneity (i.e.

Spontaneous divergence of disease status in an economic epidemiological game.

We introduce a game inspired by the challenges of disease management in livestock farming and the transmission of endemic disease through a trade network. Success in this game comes from balancing the cost of buying new stock with the risk that it will be carrying some disease. When players follow a simple memory-based strategy we observe a spontaneous separation into two groups corresponding to players with relatively high, or low, levels of infection.

Freshwater blue space and population health: An emerging research agenda.

Growing evidence suggests that access and exposure to water bodies or blue spaces can provide a variety of health and well-being benefits. Attempts to quantify these 'blue-health' benefits have largely focused on coastal environments, with freshwater blue spaces receiving far less attention despite over 50% of the global population living within 3 km of a body of freshwater and populations living in landlocked areas having limited coastal access. This critical review identifies opportunities to improve our understanding of the relationship between freshwater blue space and health and well-being and outlines key recommendations to broaden the portfolio of emerging research needs associated with the field of blue-health.

Non-monetary numeraires: Varying the payment vehicle in a choice experiment for health interventions in Uganda.

Schistosomiasis is a serious health problem in many parts of Africa which is linked to poor water quality and limited sanitation resources. We administered a discrete choice experiment on water access and health education in rural Uganda, focussing on interventions designed to reduce cases of the disease. Unlike previous studies, we included a payment vehicle of both labour hours supplied per week and money paid per month within each choice set.

On the functional relationship between biodiversity and economic value.

Biodiversity's contribution to human welfare has become a key argument for maintaining and enhancing biodiversity in managed ecosystems. The functional relationship between biodiversity () and economic value () is, however, insufficiently understood, despite the premise of a positive-concave relationship that dominates scientific and political arenas. Here, we review how individual links between biodiversity, ecosystem functions (), and services affect resulting relationships.

Valuing inland blue space: A contingent valuation study of two large freshwater lakes.

Water bodies, or blue spaces, offer a range of health and well-being benefits. Many of these benefits occur in waterside spaces and do not require direct water contact. For example, non-water based physical activity (e.

The Effects of Disease on Optimal Forest Rotation: A Generalisable Analytical Framework.

The arrival of novel pathogens and pests can have a devastating effect on the market values of forests. Calibrating management strategies/decisions to consider the effect of disease may help to reduce disease impacts on forests. Here, we use a novel generalisable, bioeconomic model framework, which combines an epidemiological compartmental model with a Faustmann optimal rotation length model, to explore the management decision of when to harvest a single rotation, even-aged, plantation forest under varying disease conditions.

Driving improvements in emerging disease surveillance through locally relevant capacity strengthening.

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) threaten the health of people, animals, and crops globally, but our ability to predict their occurrence is limited. Current public health capacity and ability to detect and respond to EIDs is typically weakest in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Many known drivers of EID emergence also converge in LMICs.

User fees across ecosystem boundaries: Are SCUBA divers willing to pay for terrestrial biodiversity conservation?

While ecological links between ecosystems have been long recognised, management rarely crosses ecosystem boundaries. Coral reefs are susceptible to damage through terrestrial run-off, and failing to account for this within management threatens reef protection. In order to quantify the extent to that coral reef users are willing to support management actions to improve ecosystem quality, we conducted a choice experiment with SCUBA divers on the island of Bonaire, Caribbean Netherlands.

The effects of invasive pests and pathogens on strategies for forest diversification.

Diversification of the tree species composition of production forests is a frequently advocated strategy to increase resilience to pests and pathogens; however, there is a lack of a general framework to analyse the impact of economic and biological conditions on the optimal planting strategy in the presence of tree disease. To meet this need we use a novel bioeconomic model to quantitatively assess the effect of tree disease on the optimal planting proportion of two tree species. We find that diversifying the species composition can reduce the economic loss from disease even when the benefit from the resistant species is small.

Payment for multiple forest benefits alters the effect of tree disease on optimal forest rotation length.

Forests deliver multiple benefits both to their owners and to wider society. However, a wave of forest pests and pathogens is threatening this worldwide. In this paper we examine the effect of disease on the optimal rotation length of a single-aged, single rotation forest when a payment for non-timber benefits, which is offered to private forest owners to partly internalise the social values of forest management, is included.

Understanding the distribution of economic benefits from improving coastal and marine ecosystems.

The ecological status of coastal and marine waterbodies world-wide is threatened by multiple stressors, including nutrient inputs from various sources and increasing occurrences of invasive alien species. These stressors impact the environmental quality of the Baltic Sea. Each Baltic Sea country contributes to the stressors and, at the same time, is affected by their negative impacts on water quality.

Do we care about sustainability? An analysis of time sensitivity of social preferences under environmental time-persistent effects.

Environmental cost-benefit analysis has traditionally assumed that the value of benefits is sensitive to their timing and that outcomes are valued higher, the sooner in time they occur following implementation of a project or policy. Though, this assumption might have important implications especially for the social desirability of interventions aiming at counteracting time-persistent environmental problems, whose impacts occur in the long- and very long-term, respectively involving the present and future generations. This study analyzes the time sensitivity of social preferences for preservation policies of adaptation to climate change stresses.

Valuing the benefits of improved marine environmental quality under multiple stressors.

Many marine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from multiple stressors. In the Baltic Sea, these stressors include oil and chemical spills from shipping, nutrient run-off from land and the introduction of non-indigenous species. All of these pressures have been growing over recent years.

Molecular tools for bathing water assessment in Europe: Balancing social science research with a rapidly developing environmental science evidence-base.

The use of molecular tools, principally qPCR, versus traditional culture-based methods for quantifying microbial parameters (e.g., Fecal Indicator Organisms) in bathing waters generates considerable ongoing debate at the science-policy interface.

Valuing the commons: An international study on the recreational benefits of the Baltic Sea.

The Baltic Sea provides benefits to all of the nine nations along its coastline, with some 85 million people living within the catchment area. Achieving improvements in water quality requires international cooperation. The likelihood of effective cooperation is known to depend on the distribution across countries of the benefits and costs of actions needed to improve water quality.

Trophy hunters' willingness to pay for wildlife conservation and community benefits.

In the face of fundamental land-use changes, the potential for trophy hunting to contribute to conservation is increasingly recognized. Trophy hunting can, for example, provide economic incentives to protect wildlife populations and their habitat, but empirical studies on these relationships are few and tend to focus on the effects of benefit-sharing schemes from an ex post perspective. We investigated the conditions under which trophy hunting could facilitate wildlife conservation in Ethiopia ex ante.

Can macrophyte harvesting from eutrophic water close the loop on nutrient loss from agricultural land?

Eutrophication is a major water pollution issue and can lead to excessive growth of aquatic plant biomass (APB). However, the assimilation of nutrients into APB provides a significant target for their recovery and reuse, and harvesting problematic APB in impacted freshwater bodies offers a complementary approach to aquatic restoration, which could potentially deliver multiple wider ecosystem benefits. This critical review provides an assessment of opportunities and risks linked to nutrient recovery from agriculturally impacted water-bodies through the harvesting of APB for recycling and reuse as fertilisers and soil amendments.

How can we identify and communicate the ecological value of deep-sea ecosystem services?

Submarine canyons are considered biodiversity hotspots which have been identified for their important roles in connecting the deep sea with shallower waters. To date, a huge gap exists between the high importance that scientists associate with deep-sea ecosystem services and the communication of this knowledge to decision makers and to the wider public, who remain largely ignorant of the importance of these services. The connectivity and complexity of marine ecosystems makes knowledge transfer very challenging, and new communication tools are necessary to increase understanding of ecological values beyond the science community.