Kahn, Mwai, Kazi, and Marseille explain how economics brings together estimates of disease burden and the costs needed to reduce that burden so that policymakers can choose which intervention strategies will maximize health gains with available resources. The authors introduce and illustrate key health economics methods, including econometrics, cost-benefit analysis, micro-costing, behavioural economics, work force projections, financing, and discrete choice experimentation.

Vision 2030, Kenya’s development blueprint for the period 2008–2030, envisions transforming the country into middle-income status where citizens enjoy a high quality of life. The blueprint has three pillars: economic, political and social. The thread that binds the three pillars is the natural environment, which supplies both renewable and non-renewable resources. Unfortunately, development in the other sectors may easily compromise the conditions of the natural environment and put the supply of clean water, food and fiber in jeopardy.

Timberland investment opportunities in Colombia are expected to increase as a result of the peace agreement recently signed between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This new socio-political environment may facilitate the expansion of commercial forest plantations on a wider range of site conditions that are currently considered in existing biometric tools.

Commodity price cycles can arise when there is a tendency to invest more (less) when current prices are high (low). Traditionally this behavior is interpreted as based upon naïve expectations. However, weak financial institutions can also cause this behavior. When borrowing is hard and saving is risky farmers cannot invest

Highlights

Expected mainstreaming of the Ecosystem Services Approach (ESA) has not been fulfilled.

Sectors involved in ESA and their relationships drive pathways of mainstreaming in Latin America.

Incorporation of knowledge and consensus over values are key factors for mainstreaming.

Researchers need to adopt new roles for an effective mainstreaming of ESA.

Opportunities for new roles lay in the interfaces among sectors involved in ES management.

In recent decades, the literature on ecosystem services has pointed to the need to quantify and characterise Soil Natural Capital (SNC) under different types of land use and cover. This points to the need of understanding the SNC processes which define the provision of ecosystem services, as well as their changes through anthropogenic time. Tropical regions are subjected to a high rate of land use transformation which may change the properties of the soil, and consequently the potential provision of ecosystem services.

Understanding the influence of social variables on a beneficiary´s vulnerability to environmental change might improves the design of policies of mitigation and adaptation to global, regional and local environmental change. In the context of socio-ecological systems, there is a wide variety of conceptual and methodological approaches for the assessment of social vulnerability in face of environmental change. However, there is a need for making these approaches more operational.