This article investigates the outcomes of mainstream coffee voluntary sustainability standards for high-biodiversity coffee diversification. By viewing voluntary sustainability standards certifications as performative marketing tools, we address the question of how such certification schemes affect coffee value creation based on unique biodiversity conservation properties in coffee farming. To ...

In this study, we use the Contingent Valuation (CV) method to estimate households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the aquatic ecosystem health (biodiversity) improvement. This paper extends CV studies by dealing with the endogenous effect of a proxy variable, namely the subjective experience of negative environmental quality changes. The results show that the correction for the endogeneity bias f...

Carbon storage by ecosystems is valuable for climate protection. Biodiversity conservation may help increase carbon storage, but the value of this influence has been difficult to assess. We use plant, soil, and ecosystem carbon storage data from two grassland biodiversity experiments to show that greater species richness increases economic value: Increasing species richness from 1 to 10 had twi...

More than US$21 billion is spent annually on biodiversity conservation. Despite their importance for preventing or slowing extinctions and preserving biodiversity, conservation interventions are rarely assessed systematically for their global impact. Islands house a disproportionately higher amount of biodiversity compared with mainlands, much of which is highly threatened with extinction. Inde...

This paper is concerned with the empirical relationship between biodiversity conservation values and income. We use random effects panel models to examine the effects of income, and thenGDP per capita, on willingness to pay for habitat and biodiversity conservation. In a meta-analysis, 145 Willingness To Pay estimates for biodiversity conservation where existence value plays a major role were c...

Rapid deforestation has occurred in northern Thailand over the last few decades and it is expected to continue. The government has implemented conservation policies aimed at maintaining forest cover of 50% or more and promoting agribusiness, forestry, and tourism development in the region. The goal of this paper was to analyze the likely effects of various directions of development on the regio...

With the high rate of ecosystem change already occurring and predicted to occur in the coming decades, long-term conservation has to account not only for current biodiversity but also for the biodiversity patterns anticipated for the future. The trade-offs between prioritising future biodiversity at the expense of current priorities must be understood to guide current conservation planning, but...

International organizations and biodiversity scientists recognize three levels of biodiversity: genetic, species, and ecosystem. However, most studies with the goal of assessing biodiversity collect data at only a single level--that of the species. Even when multiple levels of biodiversity are considered, usually only ecosystem diversity is also evaluated. Genetic diversity is virtually never c...

In the face of unprecedented global biodiversity loss, conservation planning must balance between refining and deepening knowledge versus acting on current information to preserve species and communities. Phylogenetic diversity (PD), a biodiversity measure that takes into account the evolutionary relationships between species, is arguably a more meaningful measure of biodiversity than species d...