Die Regionalstudie über das Gebiet um die Stadt Lübbenau (Spreewald) zeigt auf, dass die Bevölkerung (wie es die Nomenklatur Biosphärenreservat nahelegt) zwar an vielen Punkten in die Entscheidungen eingebunden wird, dass jedoch Konflikte zu verschiedenen Themen auftauchen, die nicht in einer Weise gelöst werden, die allen beteiligten Interessengruppen eine gleichberechtigte Mitsprache zugesteht. Zudem fällt die Mittelverteilung zwischen Naturschutz und regionaler Wirtschaftsförderung oder Agrarförderung deutlich zu Ungunsten der regionalen Entwicklung aus. Dies hat überwiegend politische Gründe und ist vielmehr in einer gesamtdeutschen Agrarpolitik verankert, als in lokalen Entscheidungsstrukturen. Dennoch fokussiert sich der Unmut in der Bevölkerung vor allem auf die Verwaltung des Biosphärenreservats. Die Arbeit beleuchtet die verschiedenen Konfliktfelder, zeigt die Hintergründe auf und stellt innovative Projekte und Finanzierungsinstrumente dar, die sich im Forschungsgebiet als Antwort auf die als unzureichend empfundene staatliche Finanzierung entwickelt haben. Die den Unterschiedlichen Umgangsformen mit und Einstellungen zur natürlichen Umwelt zugrundeliegenden Wahrnehmungsmuster werden analysiert und in den Kontext verschiedener Akteursgruppen gestellt. / The regional study of the area around the town of Lübbenau (Spreewald) shows that the population (as suggested by the nomenclature Biosphere Reserve) is indeed involved at many points in the decisions making process. however, conflicts arise on different topics that are not resolved in a manner that all stakeholders admits an equal say. In addition, the resource allocation between nature conservation and regional economic development and agriculture falls clearly to the disadvantage of regional development. This has mainly political reasons and is merely rooted in an all-German agricultural policy, than in local decision-making structures. Nevertheless, the discontent among the population primarily focuses on the management of the biosphere reserve. This work describes the various areas of conflict, analyzing the background and presents innovative projects and funding instruments that evolved in response to the fact that state funding is felt to be inadequate. The different ways of dealing with and attitudes towards the natural environment and their underlying perceptual patterns are analyzed and placed in the context of various stakeholder groups.

Up to now, politics and societies from all over the world have sought an economy that is built on the idea of continual growth to establish a wealthy future and achieve societal prosperity. At the same time, people have neglected to consider that the resulting environmental pollution is the largest cause of disease and death in the world today. Therefore, it appears sensible to ensure that people’s well-being and nature’s well-being is uncoupled from profit-orientated aims. To break the circle of continual growth and the decreasing well-being of humans and nature, individual sustainability traits that are able to foster a transition to sustainable development need to be explicitly identified. Today’s young people will presumably face an even more severe level of consequences resulting from continual growth, which will reach far into the future, thereby affecting the living environment of future generations even more drastically. Therefore, this dissertation aims to answer the question of how young people possess and profit from their sustainability traits in terms of well-being. This work approaches this question by empirically investigating different interrelations between environmental values, the perception of environments (including the perception of naturalness and the perception of aesthetics), environmental concern and well-being in the context of young people. The empirical section is divided into three parts that investigate the different relationships step by step. These three parts are based on three different quantitative questionnaire surveys of young people in Germany. In the first survey (N = 229; Mage = 13.27 years, SD = 2.37 years), the relation between secondary school students’ human-nature relationship as a sustainability trait and their well-being was investigated. Analyses showed that the sustainability trait of human-nature relationships was significantly related to young people’s age-dependent well-being through nature perception in terms of naturalness and aesthetics as well as through individual nature connection. Young people were shown to profit from nature as resource for their own well-being. A positive human-nature relationship could be described as an important requirement for people to achieve sustainable development. In a second inquiry, university students (N = 237; Mage = 22.12 years, SD = 3.09 years) with a focus on the interrelations of sustainability traits that showed relations to people’s well-being in past research were surveyed. The results describe the interrelations between the specified sustainability traits of environmental values, a newly developed scale that theoretically and empirically validated affective nature connection, cognitive nature connection, and environmental concern. The findings indicate that the chosen sustainability traits mutually contribute to each other’s impact and do not preclude each other. Future research based on the results of the two described studies will likely show that sustainability traits are desirable characteristics and useful attributes that are available all over the world, no matter what a person’s age. As a final step, secondary school students’ environmental concern and well-being were quantitatively surveyed (N = 2173; Mage = 14.56 years, SD = 1.45 years) to analyze how environmental concern as a sustainability trait predicts young people’s well-being. The children’s and adolescents’ sustainability trait of environmental concern was able to predict young people’s well-being, with a clear dependence on age. The obtained outcomes supporting the aim to possess nature as a resource of well-being need to be considered in terms of young people’s age. Youth seem to experience sensitive periods of time in which the youth’s sustainability traits evidently act differently than in other stages of life. Hence it is important to point out that especially young people need age-appropriate treatment in terms of education for sustainable development to successfully foster young people’s sustainability traits. The main goal of this dissertation was to explore and identify in-depth insights into young people’s sustainability traits and their interrelations as well as the connections to young people’s well-being. As such interrelations between sustainability traits and well-being meet the aims of sustainable development as well as political and societal aims for a healthy future life environment for everyone which is expected of continual (economic) growth up to the present time, age-dependent education for sustainable development could address the need for young people to become progressive decision makers who create future-proof solutions for themselves and others, considering the constitution of a worthy life for present and future generations.