Prof Andreas Kontoleon (Department of Land Economy, Cambridge University) co-hosted the 21st annual BIOECON conference on the economics of biodiversity conservation between the 11th and the 13th of September 2019 at Wageningen, The Netherlands. This year’s conference was titled “Inequality and poverty in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management” and was co-hosted with the University of Wageningen and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig.
The 2019 event took BioEcon to the wonderful city of Wageningen that hosts one of Europe’s largest and dynamic research-business hubs working on life sciences and environmental issues. The event was attended by around 110 delegates from academia, government, NGOs and the policy world at large. The conference was generously funded by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
As in previous years, BIOECON 2019 consisted of parallel, policy and plenary sessions covering topics at the core of the Network’s focus, ranging from land-use change to biodiversity measurement, from fisheries to forestry to wildlife management, and from sustainability to natural capital via intergenerational equity. Around 70 scientific papers were presented in parallel sessions, and two policy plenary sessions. Keynote talks were provided by Prof Katharine Sims (Amherst College) and Marten Scheffer (Wageningen University). Full details of the 2019 conference can be found at: www.bioecon-network.org.
Many thanks especially to the local organizers, led by Erwin Bulte, Rolf Groeneveld, Andries Richter, Francisco Alpizar Rodriguez, Hans-Peter Weikard, and Edwin van der Werf.
Next year’s conference will be held at the University of Wyoming making this first BioEcon conference to be held outside Europe.
Follow the BIOECON network on twitter at @bioecon1