The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)
Yale University, F&ES 865 01 (11312), Fall 2011
Lectures: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:00-5:20 pm, Burke Auditorium, Kroon Hall
Pavan Sukhdev
Kroon Hall
Room 139
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:30-6:30 pm
pavan.sukhdev@yale.edu
TA: Kavita Sharma
TA sessions: TBD
Course Overview
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) course is designed to train
students in the foundations of valuation of ecosystem services, dynamic interactions of
people and ecosystems and their impacts on local communities, sub-national and
national policy and international agreements. Issues covered will include challenges in
valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services, particularly in developing countries, some
core frameworks & methodologies for such valuation, local and national policy solutions,
and business responses. The course will use case studies to explore the impacts on
biodiversity of fiscal & economic policies and market mechanisms, including subsidies,
property rights regimes, PES schemes, REDD+, and industry studies.
The course will be conducted by Pavan Sukhdev together with several external expert
speakers who are practitioners in the fields of natural resource management, international
development and ecosystem services. These external speakers shall usually spend several
days at FES and will be available to the students for extra office hours.
Course pre-requisites:
The course is geared towards teaching students a practical treatment of inter-disciplinary
problems that draw from economics, ecology and policymaking. While there are no
formal pre-requisites for the course, the topics covered in class shall assume some
knowledge of the basic concepts of economics and ecology. Students not comfortable
with these are strongly encouraged to attend the TA sessions that will be conducted every
week to cover these concepts.
Course Requirements and Grading
The course is designed to equip students with the skills to be able to engage in real-world
problems involving ecosystem valuation. Class assignments shall therefore be tailored to
ensuring that students are working through realistic case studies and problems. The
grading of the course is divided as follows: a case study with a problem set that will be
assigned within the first three weeks of class (15%), a mid-term exam (25%), and a final
project (45%) which will culminate in final presentations (15%) . The midterm exam is
scheduled for October the 4th during class time. Final presentations are scheduled for 2nd
week December. Please do not submit assignments late - no grade shall be assigned for
late submissions, since it is fair that everyone in class have the same time for each
assignment.
Website
Links to readings for the course will be posted at the following site :https://classesv2.yale.edu
Readings and Schedule
The readings shall be divided into background readings, required readings and
supplementary readings .
Background readings shall lay the foundation for the topics to be discussed in class and
ensure that the students have well-grounded knowledge in the topic to be discussed. The
required readings shall be drawn mostly from the TEEB reports and case studies. The
supplementary readings will be resources that cover aspects of the topics that the lecturer
was unable to discuss in class as well as more in-depth treatment of the aspects covered
in class.
The guest lecturers shall assign the background readings the week before their class at the
latest. The TA shall send regular notifications of the readings and TA sessions.
Please look at the attached course spreadsheet for the schedule of topics and readings.
(Attached : course spreadsheet, with dates, lecturers, lecture topics, background reading
and supplementary readings)
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