Economic assessment of climate change impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being : an application to European forest ecosystems

This doctoral dissertation is inspired by the major environmental and socio-economic challenges faced by biologists, climate scientists, economists and policymakers today, and is dedicated to the state-of-the-art literature in the cross-cutting research area where biodiversity economics and climate economics blend. In particular, this work is conducted by (1) developing a holistic, well-accepted approach that explores the mapping of complex links between climate change, biodiversity, ecosystem services and human welfare in numerical terms; (2) further extending the state-of-the-art methodologies so as to monetize the climate change induced impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing; and, (3) promoting and discussing the incorporation of the valuation results into the support of policy making, including ecosystem-based climate change mitigation policies as well as ecosystem-based welfare re-distributional policies. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that the implementations of social and environmental policies are not always conflicting, but rather supplementary to each other.