Bo Jellesmark Thorsen

European countries have committed to ambitious upscaling of privately funded nature conservation. We review the status and drivers of biodiversity finance in Europe. By implementing semistructured interviews with 25 biodiversity finance key informants and three focus groups across Europe, we explore opportunities and challenges for upscaling private investment in nature. Opportunities arise from macroeconomic and regulatory changes, along with various technological and financial innovations and growing professional experience. However, persistent barriers to upscaling include the ongoing lack of highly profitable investment opportunities and the multitude of risks facing investors, including political, ecological and reputational risks influencing supply and demand of investment opportunities. Public policy plays the foundational role in creating and hindering these mechanisms. Public policy can create nature markets and investment opportunities, meanwhile agricultural subsidies and poor coordination between public funding sources undermine the supply of return-seeking investment opportunities. Investors demand derisking investments from uncertainties; in part caused by political uncertainty. These markets require profound state intervention to enable upscaling whilst achieving positive ecological outcomes; private investment will probably not upscale without major public policy change and public investment.

European countries have committed to ambitious upscaling of privately-funded nature conservation activities. We review the status and drivers of biodiversity finance in Europe. By implementing semi-structured interviews with 25 elite biodiversity finance key informants and three focus groups across Europe, we then explore opportunities and challenges for upscaling private investment in nature. We find that opportunities arise from macroeconomic, political and regulatory changes, along with various technological and financial innovations and growing professional experience. However, persistent barriers to upscaling include the ongoing lack of highly profitable investment opportunities; and the multitude of risks facing investors, including political, ecological and reputational risks influencing the supply and demand of private investment opportunities. Public policy plays the foundational role in both creating and hindering these mechanisms. Public policy can create nature markets and investment opportunities, meanwhile agricultural subsidies, public spending rules and poor coordination between public funding sources limit enrolment of land for conservation and undermine the supply of return-seeking investment opportunities. Investors demand de-risking private capital investments from uncertainties; in part caused by political uncertainty. These markets require profound state intervention and reregulation to enable upscaling whilst achieving positive ecological outcomes, demonstrating that any perceived divide between public and private funding for biodiversity is a false dichotomy.

Biodiversity credits are an emerging vehicle for pro-environmental financing. Here we define and delimit biodiversity credits, explore their impact pathways, discuss potential future supply and demand, bundling/stacking options, and needed social safeguards. We scrutinize early evidence from 34 pilots and suggest lessons from other market-based incentives for conservation and climate mitigation, including biodiversity offsets and forest carbon credits. These have attracted large private funding flows, but have been questioned regarding their additionality, permanence, and leakage. All these issues apply to biodiversity credits, on top of another challenge: rendering biodiversity commensurable and marketable. While new monitoring technologies can help quantify biodiversity, trade-offs exist between simple metrics enabling liquid markets, and costlier ones more adequately representing biodiversity. To avoid past mistakes, biodiversity credit design, implementation, and impact evaluation require more robust crediting baselines, standards, and governance. Quality credits will be more expensive than those cutting integrity corners, which may dampen the expected biodiversity credit boom.

So far, consumer housing values have not been addressed as factors affecting the market diffusion potential of multi-storey wood building (MSWB). To fill the void, this study addresses different types of consumer housing values in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden (i.e., Nordic region), and whether they affect the likelihood of prejudices against building with wood in the housing markets. The data collected in 2018 from 2191 consumers in the Nordic region were analyzed with exploratory factor analysis and logistic binary regression analysis. According to the results, consumers’ perceptions on ecological sustainability, material usage and urban lifestyle were similar in all countries, while country-specific differences were detected for perceptions on aesthetics and natural milieus. In all countries, appreciating urban lifestyle and living in attractive neighborhoods with good reputation increased the likelihood of prejudices against wood building, while appreciation of aesthetics and natural milieus decreased the likelihood of prejudices. In strengthening the demand for MSWB and sustainable urbanization through actions in businesses (e.g., branding) and via public policy support (e.g., land zoning), few messages derive from the results. In all, abreast with the already existing knowledge on the supply side factors (e.g., wood building innovations), more customized information is needed on the consumer-driven issues affecting the demand potential of MSWB in the housing markets. This would enable, e.g., both enhancing the supply of wooden homes for consumers appreciating urban lifestyle and neighborhoods and fortifying positive image of wood among consumers especially appreciating good architecture and pleasant environmental milieus.

The behavior among peers may be interpreted as useful information in individuals' decision processes, although such observational learning is typically not accommodated in consume choice models. This study incorporates information about other consumers' behavior in a choice experiment to evaluate if it affects choice probabilities. Market share is used as a proxy to signal that a product is chosen by many of the individual's peers. Although the effect is associated with diversity, there is a segment of individuals that perceive high market shares to carry relevant information for their food purchasing decision. Respondents who expect to hold similar or more positive preferences towards an unfamiliar food attribute relative to their peers are positively affected by a high market share. Taking information signals from peers' behavior into account may improve understanding of consumer behavior and improve our ability to predict the reception of new food aspects. [EconLit Citations: Q18; D12; D83].

Two important aspects of global environmental problems are that (1) the actions of past generations affect the opportunities of the present, and (2) both in the past and the present generations, collaboration across different countries is needed to provide global public goods. In this paper, we study how these two aspects influence public good provisions by running simultaneous intercountry laboratory experiments using a modified public goods game in Denmark, Spain and Ghana. While the theoretical predictions of the modified public goods game do not differ from that of the standard public goods game, our experimental results show otherwise. Pooling across results from our Danish, Spanish and Ghanaian participants, we find that present-generation individuals contribute a higher percentage of their endowments when they have better institutions and a lower percentage of their endowments when they have higher endowments. We also find that present-generation individuals contribute less to transnational public goods only when their initial conditions have not been affected by past-generation contributions.