Ecosystem Services Analysis: A Primer

07/04/2017
8
0
0

Audio no disponible. Inténtalo más tarde.

Preparando audio para descarga.

Escucha patrocinada. El audio empezará en pocos segundos...

Escucha sin anuncios y sin esperas con iVoox Premium

Pruébalo Gratis

Descripción de Ecosystem Services Analysis: A Primer

This lesson is intended as a primer for understanding environmental economics, focusing particularly on the valuation of ecosystem services. The first section of the presentation focuses on an economist’s typical perspective on how ecosystem services are to be analyzed – and in particular on the kinds of ecological analysis and outcomes needed for economic evaluation. Boyd stresses the importance of being able to describe the effect of specific management actions on changed ecological outcomes via ecological “production functions.” He also stresses the importance of measured or modeled ecological outcomes that can be understood by lay audiences. Ecological analysis that causally relates specific management actions to changes in socially understandable biophysical outcomes allows for those outcomes to be valued in monetary terms.The second section of the presentation focuses more heavily on how to economically quantify the importance of ecosystem services. In order to fix a monetary value on an environmental variable that will affect ecosystem services, a variety of factors need to be taken into account: how many people are affected by this environmental outcome? What is the scale of the problem you are trying to address? How scarce are the resources involved? Are there substitutes for the ecosystem services that are becoming damaged or lost? As a result, when one is trying to fix a monetary value on an ecosystem – or communicate its benefit in non-monetary terms – it is important to capture such factors in the analysis. Boyd also discusses reasons why many economic studies under-estimate the total value of ecosystems.