Volker Mauerhofer

Mid Sweden University · Department of Engineering and Sustainable Development

Maintaining peace and conserving biodiversity hinge on an international system of cooperation codified in institutions, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings recent progress to a crossroads. Against this backdrop, we address some implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the governance of biodiversity conservation both within and beyond Ru...

This Letter outlines the EU's & UN's latest environmental principle towards Net-Gains. It defines this principles' progress compared to recent “No-Net-Loss"/“Reduce-the-Rate-Of-Loss” approaches. Furthermore it introduces Environmental Net-Gain Governance as normative transition pathway and provides first practical approaches for increasing the worl...

Invasive alien species (IAS) constitute a trans‐ and intracontinental challenge. With this article, we exemplify obstacles met during the implementation of the Regulation (EU) No. 1143/2014 against IAS and comparatively assess them through two case studies from two Member States, Austria and Romania, via qualitative content analysis. Challenges are...

Bioculturally significant plants, which have played a key role in sustaining the livelihoods of tribal communities of Arunachal Pradesh, India, are facing threats from changing land use patterns, climatic aberrations and socioeconomic stressors. This study highlights two unique grassroots approaches to conserving these species and their associated...

The book was inadvertently published with few typesetting errors in chapters 10 and 22 which have now been corrected as below:

This chapter provides an overview of the main findings and the related conclusions of the 34 chapters in total included into the five parts of general aspects and five parts of specific aspects.

This chapter starts from the angle of the necessity of an absolute reduction of the Global North’s use of Earth’s sink and source capacities due to the unchangeable biophysical limitations and assesses the instruments therefore available to different types of stakeholders. In terms of methodology, this subchapter applies in a hermeneutic manner the...

The aims of this Special Issue (SI) are to provide a broad and structured overview on literature published related to Law and Ecological Economics (EE) as well as to offer latest insights into this wide and further emerging combined field of research by means of contributed papers. Thus, this introduction into the SI firstly implements a systematic...

Multilateral Environmental Agreements—MEAs—are indispensable legal frameworks for environmental sustainability and also define the operating rules of their implementation bodies (“Secretariats”). The contribution assesses in how far the norms defining Secretariats’ functions differ and also reflect on actual functions for three MEAs, namely (1) the...

More and more environmental cases are being heard and decided by international courts and tribunals which lack special environmental competence. This situation raises fundamental questions of legitimacy of the environmental practice of international courts. This book addresses inter alia questions of who has legal standing to bring an environmental...

Coordination and cooperation are necessary topics to strengthen international environmental agreements that improve action against worldwide challenges towards sustainable development and environmental protection, such as invasive alien species (IAS). This study aims to assess to what extent national and transnational cooperation and coordination i...

This paper aims firstly to provide a conceptual overview on the two main objectives that should be addressed when modifying international environmental law and subordinated law in a more sustainable direction in the sense of Ecological Economics. This first aim is addressed based on ongoing research on ‘3-D Sustainability’, a concept providing deci...

In developing and emerging countries, rapid urbanization at an unprecedented pace and degradation of ecosystem services at an alarming rate have caused many regions, especially those in environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs), to encounter the "regional development dilemma" (RDD), in which regions can hardly divert their current development pattern...

Forest-related legal questions appear often interwoven with complicated networks of numerous other themes at several geographical levels. This paper introduces a new analytic tool based on 3-D Sustainability to restructure complex question bundles from policy practice to ease and support practical legal solution prioritization. This approach is app...

Conservation is often operationalized as a minimization of human intervention in nature. However, many social-ecological systems depend on human interventions to maintain characteristics of biological diversity. Therefore, reduced use or full abandonment of such systems can diminish rather than enhance biological diversity and its related cultural...

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This paper assesses EU nature conservation and EU climate protection policies within the context of their local implementation in Vienna/Austria in order to gain insights into the decision-making process as well as to show the extent of achievements and experienced difficulties. In this connection, this paper also investigates based on published kn...

Measures that aim to enhance different environmental assets are increasingly conflicting also in urban areas and there is a lack as well as a need for science-based assessment tools that also provide solution-oriented approaches which work in practice. This paper aims to provide a new analytical framework for conflicts of interest between such meas...

This introductory contribution to a Special Issue (SI) titled “Legal Aspects of Ecosystem Services” intends to provide both a short introduction on the SI-topic as well as a brief overview on the content of each paper therein. The introduction aims to provide an overall entry point into the topic from a legal as well as an interdisciplinary perspec...

Ecosystem services have constituted a highly discussed topic especially since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. This is in particular valid for the literature in environmental sciences and related economic sciences. The topic has gained less attention in other social sciences and up until now legal scholars have hardly taken up the issue for an...

Ecosystem services have been particularly since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 a broadly analysed issue. This discussion has been widely led by scholars from environmental and related economic sciences, while social scientists have paid less attention and legal scholars have hardly entered a deeper controversy about the topic. This pap...

The paper offers a new conceptual framework based on property rights and financial compensation in different nature conservation situations in order to provide a globally applicable system for the assessment of participation of public and private stakeholders in envisaged changes within those situations. These situations of change represent a modif...

During the past decades numerous environmental performance evaluation programs have been developed and implemented on different geographic scales. This paper develops a taxonomy of environmental management behavioral patterns in order to provide a practical comparison tool for environmental performance evaluation programs. Ten such programs purposi...

Development of a bioeconomy is seen to offer significant possibilities to address the challenges faced by a world with a growing population, resource scarcity, environmental degradation and climate change. The technical potential for a bioeconomy is impressive. It has been estimated that over 90 per cent of oil-based products could be replaced by b...

Floodplain ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots and supply multiple ecosystem services. At the same time they are often prone to human pressures that increasingly impact their intactness. Multifunctional floodplain management can be defined as a management approach aimed at a balanced supply of multiple ecosystem services that serve the needs of th...

Freshwater biodiversity continues to decline. Protected areas are recognized as critical tools in its conservation. Concurrently, despite global efforts to ensure water supplies, billions of people remain without access to pure water. Conversely, flooding kills tens of thousands of people each year. While designated primarily for nature conservatio...

Europe still retains large areas which play host to numerous native and free-functioning ecosystems and lack roads, buildings, bridges, cables and other permanent manifestations of modern society. In the past such areas were considered wastelands, whose value lay only in their potential for cultivation and economic exploitation. Today, these wilder...

Europe still retains large areas which play host to numerous native and free-functioning ecosystems and lack roads, buildings, bridges, cables and other permanent manifestations of modern society. In the past such areas were considered wastelands, whose value lay only in their potential for cultivation and economic exploitation. Today, these wilder...

This paper aims to provide a global and comparative overview of Public Participation in Environmental Matters in the sense of the Aarhus convention. The method applied is an in-depth literature review in particular of research papers, legal documents, policy papers, which was implemented by means of electronic databases (Web of Science, Scopus) as...

This paper aims to comparatively analyze the carbon reduction potential of several low carbon technologies by means of different assessment and planning methods for regional development. Seven commonly used building energy saving technologies are evaluated and the priority-setting among them is identified on the example of the building sector in Ch...

This book addresses legal aspects of sustainable development and offers the latest thinking on a wide range of current themes. By taking a cross-cutting approach, it adds considerably to the exploration of this emerging scientific field. Twenty-nine original contributions present innovative thoughts and replicable ideas from this exciting, new are...

Environmental, social and economic capitals, capacities and carrying capacities provide the theoretical construct of the three dimensions of a sustainable development. Based thereon, this chapter aims firstly to provide a conceptual overview on two main objectives of multilevel rule of law systems that should be addressed when adapting these system...

The growing worldwide demand for Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction has led to a new age of energy saving. Besides the energy saving extent, the costs of energy saving measures as well as the environmental and social impacts are also necessary to be evaluated in order to make sure that the application of these measures can also meet sustainabl...

This paper aims to provide judicial perspectives for Public Participation in Environmental Matters in East Asia based on the example of the European Union (EU). This is done both by means of an in-depth literature review which covers research papers, legislative documents and court decisions, and by means of a comparative analysis of court cases. T...

Building sector accounts for a large percentage of the total national energy consumption in most of the countries, thus it is critical to formulate and implement appropriate energy saving policies in the building sector. This paper focuses on energy saving policies in the building sector by conducting a comparative study between Japan and China. Th...

The concept of green infrastructure has been recently taken up by the European Commissionfor ensuring the provision of ecosystem services (ESS). It aims at the supply of multiple ESS in a given landscape, however, the effects of a full suite of management options on multiple ESS and landscape multifunctionality have rarely been assessed. In this pa...

Should society have the right to freely available clean air and water, or should people be required to pay for these as commodities just as they do for many other goods or services that they consume? With this question and further questions on environmental governance in mind, we reviewed the paradigm shift in natural resource management from the p...

This article aims to contribute to the continued development of a coherent theory and practical implementation of sustainable development in the social context. It does so by presenting a systematic discussion on ‘social capital’, ‘social capacity’ and ‘social carrying capacity’ under the umbrella of environmental carrying capacity regarding enviro...

This discussion paper was funded by WWF-UK and the Planetary Boundaries Initiative.

Abstract Background: Floodplains are among the most diverse, dynamic, productive and populated but also the most threatened ecosystems on Earth. Threats are mainly related to human activities that alter the landscape and disrupt fluvial processes to obtain benefits related to multiple ecosystem services (ESS). Floodplain management therefore requir...

The Biosphere Reserve (BR) concept aims at encouraging sustainable development (SD) towards sustainability on the ground by promoting three core functions: conservation, development, and logistic support. Sweden and Ukraine exemplify the diverse governance contexts that BRs need to cope with. We assessed how the BR concept and its core functions ar...

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive explanation for the likely failure in the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation, and also intends to offer perspectives on the new role of competition in a steady state or a degrowth economy. The analysis is based on five different scenarios, and uses the European Union as an example...

This paper describes the so-called ‘Governance-Check’, a new approach for assessing governance structures and making them more sustainable, and also applies it on the example of Austrian environmental institutions and organisations. Three parts are analysed mainly by means of the concept ‘3-D Sustainability’ (Mauerhofer, 2008a): (1) the constitutio...

In order to meet the goals of GHG reduction and sustainability in industry development, strategies are needed that are reducing GHG emissions without compromising other economic, environmental and social priorities. In this paper, existing low carbon and sustainability requirements and evaluation methods are comparatively analyzed based on an in-de...

This paper aims to provide a new and practical approach called ‘Legislation-Check’ to identifying shortcomings in national legislation in terms of how well it implements sustainable development, and ways of improving the legislation. National legislation was chosen as it represents a sort of ‘skeleton of society’ and defines the status quo, as well...

This paper introduces the so-called 'Convention-Check' as a new bottom-up approach of assessing the contribution of large-scale protected areas to the implementation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) that are introduced from the top down. The assessment consists of three major sub-sequential parts: the current contribution of a protec...

This comment looks at opportunities available to individuals alone or as a member of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to enforce reserve policy at the EU level to improve the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation. Based on a literature review, recent developments in certain EU policies (i.e., Nature Conservation Policy, Common Agricultura...

This paper aims to provide an introduction into a new method on assessing the contribution of local protected areas to the implementation of international environmental conventions and agreements on the practical example of an Austrian National Park. The local regulative acts and thereon based practical activities by the National Park Administratio...

In economics, the issue of ‘future generations’ is mainly related to the environmental problems of resource consumption and pollution and their distribution over long time horizons. This paper critically discusses fundamental concepts in economics, such as efficiency and optimality, in relation to the incorporation of future generations in present...

Wildökologische Korridore stehen in einem thematischen Spannungsfeld zwischen verschiedenen Bereichen des öffentlichen Rechts, wie Straßen-, Bau- und Raumordnungsrecht sowie Jagd- und Naturschutzrecht, und dem privaten Recht. Daraus ergeben sich aber auch viele Möglichkeiten der rechtlichen Umsetzung solcher Korridore, fanden sie doch juristisch bi...

The Environmental Liability Directive (‘ELD’) of the European Union entered into force on 30th April 2004 and had to be implemented by 30th April 2007. It had been already from the early beginning up to today subject to multiple considerations by many scholars and is implemented quite differently in the different EU Member States. The ELD contains...

This paper aims to provide a new approach to objectively assess hierarchies and priority setting in the relationship between environmental, social and economic sustainability within Sustainable Development. After a literature review, several widely used conceptual figures (diagrams) describing this relationship were assessed using SWOT analyses in...

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