Prof. Dr. Stefan Baumgärtner

CV

Stefan Baumgärtner holds the Chair of Environmental Economics and Resource Management at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His expertise in research, teaching and outreach is in ecological, environmental and resource economics, with a focus on sustainability.

Stefan Baumgärtner’s research interests include sustainability economics; biodiversity and ecosystem services; risk, resilience and insurance in ecological-economic systems; sustainable rangeland management in semi-arid regions; thermodynamics and joint production in economy-environment systems; as well as intergenerational justice and responsibility for sustainability.

Stefan Baumgärtner served as a Professor of Sustainability Economics (2006–2014) and Director of the Research Center Futures of Ecosystem Services (2011–2014) at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. He was an assistant professor and head of a junior research group in ecological economics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (2000-2006). He held visiting research and teaching appointments at the Universities of California, Berkeley, USA (2001–2002), Arizona State, Tempe, USA (2011), Augsburg, Germany (2006–2007), Zurich, Switzerland (2007–2015) and in Namibia (2004, 2007, 2010).

Stefan Baumgärtner serves as an expert advisor on the economics of biodiversity and ecosystem services to several public interests, including the European Commission, the German Federal Ministry of the Environment, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment, and various agencies of the Republic of Namibia.

Stefan Baumgärtner is the author of several books, including Joint Production and Responsibility in Ecological Economics (2006) and Philosophy of Interdisciplinary Environmental Research (2005, in German), and more than 100 scholarly articles. His research results have been published in renowned international academic journals such as Conservation Biology, Ecological Economics, Economic Theory, Environmental and Resource Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Industrial Ecology and Natural Resource Modeling. He is a co-editor of the journal Ecological Economics.

Selected Publications

• Baumgärtner, S., M.A. Drupp, J.N. Meya, J.M. Munz and M.F. Quaas (2017), Income inequality and willingness to pay for environmental public goods, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 85: 35–61.
• Abson, D.J., H. von Wehrden, S. Baumgärtner, J. Fischer, J. Hanspach, W. Härdtle, H. Heinrichs, A.M. Klein, D.J. Lang, P. Martens and D. Walmsley (2014), Ecosystem services as a boundary object for sustainability, Ecological Economics 103, 29–37
• Baumgärtner, S. and M.F. Quaas (2010), What is sustainability economics? Ecological Economics 69(3), 445–450
• Baumgärtner, S. (2007), The insurance value of biodiversity in the provision of ecosystem services, Natural Resource Modeling 20(1), 87–127
• Baumgärtner, S., M. Faber and J. Schiller (2006), Joint Production and Responsibility in Ecological Economics. On the Foundations of Environmental Policy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham

FRIAS Research Project

FRIAS Research Focus Environmental Forecasting

Environmental models are the main tool through which our understanding of natural processes is transferred into practice in a human-dominated world: weather forecasts, flood warnings, carbon balances of forests, landslides, recycling budgets are computed using environmental models along with a range of complexity. Such environmental models comprise representations of the natural processes as well as human impacts and include economic models, such as those simulating trade and environmental impacts at local to global scales.

Environmental disciplines have evolved strikingly divergent modelling cultures, of different scientific credibility. The aim of the proposed Research Focus at the FRIAS is to understand modelling cultures as reflecting distinct goals, distill a best practice from disciplinary experiences that makes environmental forecasts credible across environmental disciplines, and to formulate a research agenda for those areas where we can identify deficits without an existing solution. In addition to publications documenting the results of these activities, we want to write an application for a DFG Research Training Group to train a cohort of PhD researchers in a critical and cutting-edge approach to model development and application in the environmental sciences.