At the 45th Congress of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Benjamin Görlach and Eduard Interwies presented some research results on the valuation of environmental and resource costs in Germany. The lecture took place as part of a special session on water and economics in the frame of the 45th ERSA Congress, held at the Free University of Amsterdam. The special session was organised with support by the Dutch RIZA, and was chaired by Eduard Interwies.

In his lecture, Benjamin Görlach presented the results of the project "Environmental and Resource Costs in the Water Framework Directive: the Case of Germany" carried out by Ecologic in 2004 on behalf of the German Federal Environment Agency. The lecture first presented the economic aspects of the European Water Framework Directive, and then explained the concept of environmental and resource costs from a theoretical economic perspective. In the following, Benjamin Görlach discussed the main results of the European Working Group DG Eco 2, which had sought to clarify some concepts and approaches related to environmental and resource costs, and showed how these results could be applied to the WFD implementation in Germany.

The presentation and the conference paper can be downloaded here:

• Presentation [pdf, 461 KB, English]
• Conference paper [pdf, 82 KB, English]