Editors: Prof. Dr. Rainer Marggraf, Dr. Jörg Cortekar, Dr. Uta Sauer, Dr. Katharina Susanne Raupach

ISSN 2194-1149 (print)
ISSN 2940-6463 (online)

The preservation of a healthy environment and the protection of natural resources are two of the major challenges of the 21st century. A series of regulations and guidelines that have been issued in the past, still await implementation - on a national, European, and global level. For this, the insight is needed that to implement these regulations adequately, ecological aspects and economic interests must be considered together.

With the publication series Economic Research Contributions to Environmental Policy, the editors hope to open the dialogue between science, politics, and administration in various topics concerning environmental policy. This dialogue is aimed at dismantling existing reservations concerning the often-quoted economisation of the environment. The individual volumes aim to illustrate where opportunities and limits are in their respective fields, and in this way to contribute to a successful implementation of political programs and regulations.

The editors:
Prof. Dr. Rainer Marggraf is an economist and is part of the leading experts in the assessment of non-market goods. He was the head of the department for environmental and resource economics at the University of Göttingen until he retired and led several national and international research projects. Along with Dr. Uta Sauer he is a partner of webod.gbr, a consulting company for profitability, efficiency, and economic evaluation of public and ecosystem services.
Dr. Jörg Cortekar is Head of the Department Capacity Building and Upscaling at the Climate Service Center Germany. He has many years of experience in implementing projects at the interface of science and practice. In recent years, his work focuses on adaptation to the expected impacts of climate change in urban areas, the co-development of decision support tools with users, the empowerment of decision-makers to use these tools, and transfer to regions facing similar challenges.
Dr. Uta Sauer is an economist and a partner of webod.gbr. The consulting company developed implementation procedures for the economic requirements within the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MFSD) and the Water Framework Directive (WFD). In this context, she already conducted numerous Cost-Benefit-Analyses of measures to improve the water quality on behalf of Germany. She has profound knowledge in the fields of participative environmental politics as well as the application of quantitative and qualitative methods for determining public preferences within environmental evaluation.
Dr. Katharina Susanne Raupach has a degree in agricultural engineering. She has been working in the Unit for Surface and Coastal Waters, Marine Protection of the Lower Saxony Ministry for the Environment, Energy and Climate Protection since December 2017. There she is primarily responsible for the implementation of the socio-economic requirements of the Water Protection Directives. Previously, she worked for more than 10 years as a research assistant in the Department of Environmental and Resource Economics at the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development of the Georg-August-University Göttingen. There, her most recent focus was on the evaluation of environmental improvements in the water sector.