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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 10th Sept 2026, 07:07:35pm CEST (Norway)

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Daily Overview

Session

Land use and ecosystem services
Location: Auditorium J: Aina Uhde
Session Chair: Stefan Baumgaertner, University of Freiburg

Presentation 3

Is ecosystem resilience an economic insurance? Evidence from the Goulburn-Broken Catchment farmland in Australia

Moritz A. Drupp¹, Stefan Baumgärtner²

1: University of Hamburg, Germany; 2: University of Freiburg, Germany

Discussant: Phoebe Koundouri (Athens University of Economics and Business and Denmark Technical University)

It is often claimed that ecosystem resilience serves as an insurance for ecosystem users. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience for the Goulburn-Broken Catchment farmland in South-East Australia, which is threatened by salinization due to rising groundwater tables. We build on Walker et al. (2010) who provide an empirical estimate of the total economic value of resilience in this system assuming risk neutrality, and on Baumgärtner and Strunz (2014) who propose a model-based definition of the economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience under the assumption of risk aversion. We find that for constant relative risk aversion, ecosystem resilience does not provide a positive economic insurance value in this case because the system is already close to a regime shift and additional investment in resilience thus leads to higher uncertainty. We estimate an insurance value of around -2 million 1991 Australian Dollars, which amounts to 45 percent of the expected value of resilience estimated by Walker et al. (2010). Our analysis shows that assuming risk neutral ecosystem users may produce very imprecise estimates of the total economic value of ecosystem resilience.