Is the non-market literature adequate to support coastal and marine management?

Habitat Scale Mapping of Fisheries Ecosystem Service Values in Estuaries

“…Benefit transfer was also required to assess WTP in five out of six of our recreational value estimates and, in the case of Weeks Bay, both our estimate of NOI taking part in recreational fisheries as well as the WTP for recreational fisheries at the site. Other authors have pointed to the paucity of, and variability in quality and transferability of, nonmarket valuation data (Woodward and Wui 2001, Brander et al 2006, Pendleton 2007. This paucity of data is of particular concern given the apparent dominance of the recreational value over commercial value in determining the economic importance of the estuary as a whole.…”

“…The lack of markets for many ecosystem services is a major obstacle to comprehensive economic evaluations of estuaries (Pendleton et al 2007). Wilson et al (2005) identified 242 potentially valuable ecosystem goods and services from 23 coastal landscape features and habitats.…”

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

“…The purpose of this paper is to examine whether economists are in a position to deliver such evidence for use in policy analysis, in terms of the conceptual basis of valuation, the availability of the scientific evidence that is required to implement valuation methods, and existing evidence on economic values. The focus of the paper is the European policy arena, but most of the issues discussed apply equally to other locations (for a USA perspective, see Pendleton et al, 2007 andLipton et al 2014). Whilst many different methods of environmental valuation can be used to estimate the non-market benefits or costs of changes in ecosystem condition, the focus of this paper is on stated preference approaches, although we do consider the extent to which alternative approaches can solve the apparent difficulties by applying stated preference methods in each of the case studies.…”

Valuing Ecosystem Services for Coastal Wetland Protection and Restoration: Progress and Challenges

“…A comprehensive review of non-market values estimates for US coastal and marine environments suggested that our knowledge of key habitat values was insufficient to support effective policy-making and management [19]. As this paper has indicated, in recent years there has been substantial progress in valuing a wide range of goods and services provided by coastal wetlands.…”

“…But for a number of important services very few or no valuation studies exist. In other words, despite the recent progress in valuing coastal wetland goods and services, the current state of valuation is not significantly improved from a mid-2000 review of valuation estimates for coastal and marine environments in the United States [19]. According to this review, with the exception of recreational fishing, the coastal and marine valuation literature is generally insufficient to support effective policy-making, as most coastal habitats such as wetlands have not been well studied, key values have not been estimated, geographical coverage is incomplete, and the application of methodologies is uneven [19].…”