Operationalizing ecosystem services for the mitigation of soil threats: A proposed framework

Despite numerous research efforts over the last decades, integrating the concept of ecosystem servicesinto land management decision-making continues to pose considerable challenges. Researchers havedeveloped many different frameworks to operationalize the concept, but these are often specific to acertain issue and each has their own definitions and understandings of particular terms. Based on acomprehensive review of the current scientific debate, the EU FP7 project RECARE proposes an adaptedframework for soil-related ecosystem services that is suited for practical application in the preventionand remediation of soil degradation across Europe. We have adapted existing frameworks by integratingcomponents from soil science while attempting to introduce a consistent terminology that is understand-able to a variety of stakeholders. RECARE aims to assess how soil threats and prevention and remediationmeasures affect ecosystem services. Changes in the natural capital’s properties influence soil processes,which support the provision of ecosystem services. The benefits produced by these ecosystem servicesare explicitly or implicitly valued by individuals and society. This can influence decision- and policymak-ing at different scales, potentially leading to a societal response, such as improved land management.The proposed ecosystem services framework will be applied by the RECARE project in a transdisciplinaryprocess. It will assist in singling out the most beneficial land management measures and in identifyingtrade-offs and win–win situations resulting from and impacted by European policies. The framework thusreflects the specific contributions soils make to ecosystem services and helps reveal changes in ecosystemservices caused by soil management and policies impacting on soil. At the same time, the framework issimple and robust enough for practical application in assessing soil threats and their management withstakeholders at various levels.

The Potential of Tariff Policy for Climate Change Mitigation: Legal and Economic Analysis

This paper addresses a potential role that tariffs and tariff policy can play in encouraging countries to take part in a multilateral effort to mitigate climate change. It begins by assessing whether increasing tariffs on products from energy intensive or polluting industries amounts to a violation of WTO rules and whether protectionism in this case can be differentiated from genuine environmental concerns. It then argues that while lowering tariffs for environmental goods can serve as a carrot to promote dissemination of cleaner technologies, tariff deconsolidation is a legitimate stick to encourage polluting countries to move towards an international climate agreement. The paper further explores this view by undertaking a partialequilibrium simulation analysis to examine the impact of a unilateral unit increase in tariffs on the imports of the most carbon-intensive products from countries not committed to climate polices. Our results suggest that the committed importing countries would have to raise their tariffs only slightly to effect a significant decline in the imports of these products from the non-committed countries. For instance, a unit increase in the simple average applied tariffs on the imports of these carbon-intensive products in 2005 from our sample of non-committed exporting countries would reduce the imports of these products by an average 32.6% in Australia, 178% in Canada, 195% in the EU, 271% in Japan and 62% in the US, therebysuggesting the effectiveness of such a measure in pushing countries towards a global climate policy.