Ecosystem Services and Economic Theory: Integration for Policy‐relevant Research

Abstract

It has become essential in policy and decision-making circles to think about the economic benefits (in addition to moral and scientific motivations) humans derive from well-functioning ecosystems. The concept of ecosystem services has been developed to address this link between ecosystems and human welfare. Since policy decisions are often evaluated through cost-benefit assessments, an economic analysis can help make ecosystem service research operational. In this paper we provide some simple economic analyses to discuss key concepts involved in formalizing ecosystem service research. These include the distinction between services and benefits, understanding the importance of marginal ecosystem changes, formalizing the idea of a safe minimum standard for ecosystem service provision, and discussing how to capture the public benefits of ecosystem services. We discuss how the integration of economic concepts and ecosystem services can provide policy and decision makers with a fuller spectrum of information for making conservation-conversion trade-offs. We include the results from a survey of the literature and a questionnaire of researchers regarding how ecosystem service research can be integrated into the policy process. We feel this discussion of economic concepts will be a practical aid for ecosystem service research to become more immediately policy relevant.

Economic Valuation of Marine and Coastal Ecosystems: Is it currently fit for purpose?

“…This means that policy-makers and regulators are placing increasing demands on economists to supply such values for use in policy analysis and management. There has also been a growing emphasis on basing environmental management and policy analysis on the ecosystem services (ES) approach (Fisher et al, 2008;UK NEA, 2011;Keeler et al, 2012). The consequence of this is a parallel requirement to link ecosystem function and service flows to environmental valuation.…”

Livestock and Ecosystem Services: An Exploratory Approach to Assess Agri-Environment-Climate Payments of RDP in Trentino

“…The growing interest in the study of ES [47][48][49] has stimulated an increasing demand for "tools" to identify, quantify, and assess them in order to facilitate and support policy and management decision-making. The spatially variable nature of ES in terms of generation and flow has led to the use of GIS systems to map and model them for planning purposes (e.g., [50,51]), to facilitate the creation of datasets for the evaluation of benefits transfer (e.g., [52]) and to compute values derived from biophysical and economic models (e.g., [53][54][55]).…”

Identifying robust response options to manage environmental change using an Ecosystem Approach: A stress-testing case study for the UK XXX

“…PES) that explicate ES values and provide a clearer role for human beneficiaries in decision making. However, resilience concepts have not yet been incorporated into economic valuation procedures to capture monetary (and non-monetary) benefits of longer-term stability for ES delivery (Fisher et al, 2008), representing an important research and policy development gap.…”

“…In the present study, notions of stress-testing were extended beyond a financial balance sheet to include application to natural capital and an ES framework. For ease of reference to previous work, conventional grouping of ES into four categories (regulating, provisioning, cultural, supporting) has been adopted (MA, 2005), retaining the distinctive underpinning role of ecological and environmental processes as E" that are important for long-term sustainable decision-making, whilst recognising they may be excluded from economic valuation to avoid notional double-counting (Fisher et al, 2008).…”