Chair of Environment and Economics

Environmental issues like climate change and resource scarcity are gaining increasing relevance and importance in society, in political decisions and for businesses. A predictive analysis of a sustainable economy opens up opportunities for innovation and the ability of market leadership in the environmental sector. The new Chair of Environment and Economics - founded in the summer of 2011 - picks up these topics in innovative ways. In teaching, knowledge of current environmental problems is provided jointly with the economic and environmental instruments for their solution, as well as operational scope and opportunities in dealing with them. The Chair also represents the subject of Economics where it focuses in particular on behavior- and decision-theoretic approaches of advanced microeconomics.

In research, behavioral economic approaches are also linked to environmental issues. Here, innovative methods, such as multi-agent systems/genetic algorithms for behavior modeling in simulation models are used in order to increase understanding of the behavior of economic actors. Environmental issues of interest are climate change, water scarcity and water use conflicts, resource scarcity and sustainable development.