Environmental economics and management

Hej,

since one week now we have a new course, called “Environmental economics and management”. This course is organised by two female PhD students who are sharing the lectures: one is talking about the economic part and the other one is responsible for the management part with which we will deal later on in the course. Since it is a new semester, a lot of our fellow students lefts because they were here only for one semester (exchange students). That is a bit sad but some of our friends stayed which makes everything much more fun!

So far we learned the basics in economics which sounds now boring to you but it is really interesting. We are dealing with problems like how to measure the environment monetary, how can we deal with ecosystem services which have no market price and how can we maintain common goods which are over used by society. These are some examples which we are focusing on. Of course, to understand the principles and mechanisms of the economic system you have to learn at first the basics. If you have studied something with economics before it is a lot of repetition in the beginning, as it is for us, but there is always something new and we will more and more apply the principles we learned on real cases and the reality in general.
Today for example we had a role play where we represented different stakeholders who have to evaluate costs and benefits of an intervention in the environment. For this week we also have to do a lot of assignments: reading, answering questions in groups and prepare a 5 minute-presentation about a country and its efforts for a sustainable development. So as you can see, there is always something to do. But therefore we only have two days lecture during this week. 😉

Incidentally, we are working on organising the Agroecology day which is a lot of fun! More details about that are coming later, we are still in progress 🙂

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.