Past and future impacts of land-use changes on ecosystem services in Austria.

Environmental and socio-economic developments induce land-use changes with potentially negative impacts on human well-being. To counteract undesired developments, a profound understanding of the complex relationships between drivers, land use, and ecosystem services is needed. Yet, national studies examining extended time periods are still rare.

Estimating money laundering flows with a gravity model-based simulation.

It is important to understand the amounts and types of money laundering flows, since they have very different effects and, therefore, need different enforcement strategies. Countries that mainly deal with criminals laundering their proceeds locally, need other measures than countries that mainly deal with foreign illegal investments or dirty money just flowing through the country. This paper has two main contributions.

Ecosystem Services of Mangrove Forests: Results of a Meta-Analysis of Economic Values.

Mangrove forests are paramount for sustaining and enhancing ecosystem services benefitting both local and regional communities, and the global environment. Scholars have long studied the values of ecosystem services of mangrove forests. However, the number of recent primary studies monetizing ecosystem services is rather limited.

Development and dematerialization: an international study.

Economic development and growth depend on growing levels of resource use, and result in environmental impacts from large scale resource extraction and emissions of waste. In this study, we examine the resource dependency of economic activities over the past several decades for a set of countries comprising developing, emerging and mature industrialized economies. Rather than a single universal industrial development pathway, we find a diversity of economic dependencies on material use, made evident through cluster analysis.

Temporal stability of individual preferences for river restoration in Austria using a choice experiment.

Temporal stability of values (environmental preferences) is usually considered to be an indicator of the reliability of a valuation instrument because the values can be "reproduced" by follow-up experiments. The objective of this paper is to test temporal stability of individual preferences for river restoration by employing two identical choice experiments with a time difference of one year. We compared the results of two surveys carried out on the stretch of the Danube River between the Austrian capital of Vienna and the border to the Slovak Republic in 2007 and 2008.

Investigating public decisions about protecting wetlands.

Quantitative analyses of species protection decisions taken by public authorities regularly show that ecological factors, such as the probability of extinction, often play a minor role in the decision-making process. The taxonomy of the species or its potential conflict with economic development is a more powerful factor. This paper presents quantitative empirical research on the protection of wetlands in Austria.