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Gesellschaftswissenschaftliches Kolleg
4. Sustainability in Natural Resource Use: An Ecosystem
Services and Policy Making Perspective
Leitung
Dr. Jadwiga Renata Ziółkowska
Department für Agrarökonomie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Dr. Christian Schleyer
Nachwuchsgruppe Ökosystemleistungen, Berlin-Brandenburgi-
sche Akademie der Wissenschaften
Sustainability and sustainable development have been defined as a goal of policy making
in the Brundtland Report “Our Common Future” resulting from the United Nations Con-
ference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Since then, policy
makers and stakeholders have been supporting the idea of establishing and implementing
sustainable policies, measures, projects, and actions. A sustainable policy can be generally
defined as a policy meeting economic, environmental and social needs of current genera-
tions without diminishing the chances of future generations to have their needs satisfied
in the same way and to the same extent.
In this course, we will focus on different aspects of sustainable natural resource use from
the broad perspective of ecosystem services. The term ‘ecosystem services’ describes be-
nefits people obtain from ecosystems, e.g., a) provisioning services, such as food and wa-
ter; b) regulating services, such as flood and disease control; c) cultural services, such as
spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits; and d) supporting services, such as nutrient
cycling, etc.
We will address a broad range of issues related to socio-ecological systems in general, fo-
cusing particularly on water management, biodiversity conservation, agro-environmental
programs, bioenergy and renewable energy, climate change in the agricultural sector, food
security as well as on evaluation frameworks that can be used to optimize natural resource
use and to design sustainable policies. In order to point out the linkages between the theo-
ry and practice of policy making in these areas, we will provide country specific examples
of regulatory and incentive-based policy instruments, e.g., the Kyoto Protocol, the Re-
newable Energy Roadmap, and rural development programs, fostering sustainable natural
resource use and the provision of ecosystem services.
The course will offer a series of presentations by the lecturers, group discussions as well as
individual and interactive group work assignments.
