Society-Environment Interactions Research Group

Director: Liesbet Vranken

PhD students: Jeremy De Valck, Pieter Van Turnhout, Pieter Vlaeminck

Research themes

Sustainable land management
Valuation of ecosystem services
Land markets and land institutions
Corporate Social Responsibility
Impact analysis of agricultural and environmental policies

Background

Population growth puts a lot of pressures on natural resources so that human activity, rather than natural succession, is currently the most common cause of environmental change. Measures in different policy fields (agriculture, forestry, spatial planning, environment) affect changes in resource use and the provision of ecosystem services through their impact on human activities. In order to arrive at integrated resource management, one needs to understand the decision making process of economic agents, the policy context and institutional framework in which these decisions are taken and how these decisions interact with the ecological environment. Furthermore, to be able to prioritize between policies or resource management practices, one also needs to be able to value the benefits of ecosystems to humans and society.

Focus

The Society-Environment Interactions Research Group studies the link between economic and ecological models by refining functions of socio-economic drivers that are used to model resource use change and changes in ecosystem services, and how institutions (policy decisions and regulations) affect this link. The research group focuses on understanding the adoption of sustainable land management practices, assessing their impact and understanding how policies affect society-environment interactions. They develop methods to valuate ecosystem services and transfer valuation results to other sites while dealing with the uncertainty surrounding the future consequences.

Approach

Up-to-date empirical approaches are used to estimate economic, social and environmental impacts. Socio-economic effects are quantified using instrumental variable and two-stage estimation techniques, difference in differences estimations, and experimental techniques. Environmental effects are evaluated using valuation techniques. Integrative quantitative models of human and environmental systems are developed based on spatial econometrics for the analysis of land management policies. By combining quantitative economic and social data with spatial data, methods to valuate ecosystem services are developed while taking into account spatial effects.

Current Research Projects

-    Valuation and Mapping of Ecosystem Services
-    Landslides in Flanders: Economic Damage, Causes and Remediating measures 
-    The Economics of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Land Management