Alongside climate change, the preservation of biodiversity is one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time. This is because an intact natural environment safeguards the essentials of life – including healthy food, clean water and fertile soil – but it is also an indispensable resource for many sectors of the emerging bioeconomy. Nevertheless, year after year, further valuable ecosystems and rare species are disappearing irretrievably from the Earth – mainly as a result of human activities. According to a growing number of experts, a reversal of this trend can only be achieved by not only valuing biological diversity in general, but also by assigning it concrete economic value through economic methods. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals, current status and prospects of economic instruments for assessing and valuing biodiversity; it discusses their scope and limitations, as well as the controversies surrounding economic approaches to nature conservation. Particularly in the international context, it becomes clear that the protection of biodiversity is, more than ever, an overarching political task that should not be left to the market alone.