Surfaces of Willmore type in Riemannian manifolds Abstract: In this talk I present recent results on surfaces of Willmore type in three dimensional Riemannian manifolds. These are surfaces that are critical for the Willmore energy subject to an area constraint. I present an analysis of spherical surfaces of Willmore type with positive mean curvature in geodesic balls of small radius. As a result we obtain that such surfaces are well approximated by geodesic spheres. This enables us to derive necessary conditions for the existence of such surfaces related to the scalar curvature of the ambient manifold.