Topic 1.1 Ecosystem Services
Valuation of Ecosystem Services
Additional Readings
ESS valuation has become a central theme in ecosystem services science with increasing efforts to incorporate consideration of maintaining ESS into environmental policy decisions.
Why Value Ecosystem Services?
Activity 1.5
Read
and answer the following:
- State 4 main reasons for the need to value ecosystem services?
- In a table list three advantatges and disadvantages of attempting to value ESS.
- What was the economic value given to the Earth's natural ecosystems by Costanza et al. 1997. For those interested in this work, refer to the paper in the e-reserve by Costanza et al. 1997. The Web Links folder includes references about this work.
The Development of Markets for Ecosystem Services
One of the main ways proposed to successfully incorporate ecosystem services into decision making is to develop markets to value and trade these services.
We will return to this issue in the final module, for now refer to the Stanford University article 'Finding a market for 'ecosystem services' for an overview.
