Dear Colleagues,

Economic activity can pose serious threats to the current and future conservation of environmental goods and the associated ecosystem services by polluting natural systems, overexploiting natural resources, transforming land from biodiversity habitats to cropping or housing, and contributing to global change. Appropriate economic incentives may contribute to overcoming these environmental issues, promoting sustainable actions by economic agents. Public intervention may lead the role to internalize environmental externalities by both regulation and promoting incentives.

Economic analysis is particularly relevant to guide policy decision-making to conserve and improve the environment. Indeed, economic analysis is key to achieve an efficient allocation of scarce resources and promote a sustainable management of environmental goods, providing a useful set of tools to safeguard sustainability. Even though in the literature we can find a wide range of economic analyses that allow a better understanding of how policies can be implemented to ensure the efficient allocation of environmental goods, there is still some room for improvement, at methodological and practical levels.

This Special Issue aims to contribute to such a field, assessing environmental policies through economic analysis. We encourage authors to submit research papers in which specific policies are analysed and applied to case studies, in both developed and developing countries. Papers should include a careful discussion of the policy implications based on economic analysis.

This Special Issue might include, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Economic valuation of environmental goods, emphasizing the role of ecosystem services to maintain social welfare and in particular, the methodological issues related to the valuation of final and intermediate ecosystem services as well as the integration of socio-ecological indicators in economic valuation methods;
• Analysis of institutional mechanisms for conserving environmental goods, including payments for ecosystem services and tradable entitlement systems, among others;
• Protected natural areas and species conservation, including aspects such as ecotourism, endangered and invasive species;
• Integration of economic and ecological modelling, supporting the assessment and design of environmental policies.

As mentioned above, papers should follow a critical and constructive analysis of specific environmental policies, including themes such as biodiversity, water, agriculture and climate change. For this purpose, we suggest that authors conduct interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research of the environmental goods and policy under scrutiny.

Dr. Angel Perni
Prof. Dr. Laura Riesgo
Guest Editors

• economic valuation
• environmental policies
• ecosystem services
• economic modelling
• ecological modelling
• institutional analysis