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4.1
INTEGRATING ECOSYSTEM AND BIODIVERSITY VALUES INTO POLICY ASSESSMENT
UNDErsTANDING ThE vALUE
of EcosysTEM sErvIcEs
Earlier chapters of this report explained how current
losses of biodiversity and associated ecosystem
services, driven by unsustainable patterns of production
and consumption, have significant economic
costs for local, national and international communities.
This begs an important question: if biodiversity loss is
so detrimental, then why do we allow it?
Part of the answer lies in our failure to understand and
incorporate the long-term value of ecosystem services
when we make policy decisions that build in assessments
of trade-offs. A much more robust approach is
needed to correct the current bias in decision-making
towards short-term narrowly-focused economic benefits.
4.1.1 THE NATURE OF VALUE AND
VALUING NATURE
What do we mean by the ‘value’ of ecosystem services?
When people think of value, they consider an
item’s usefulness and importance. This value is rarely
the price we actually pay for ecosystem services:
on the contrary, these are often free to the 'user'
or cost much less than their value to society as a
whole. Many ecosystem services tend to be outside
traditional markets and so do not have a market price.
In a few cases, such as provision of timber or seafood,
some output from an ecosystem does have a market
price. This reflects the fact that those outputs are
bought and sold on an open market where the price
reflects what people are willing to pay for them. Even
in this situation, the price charged does not necessarily
reflect their true value as it will only be partial. More
specifically, there are likely to be impacts on the wider
ecosystem beyond those considered in the market
transaction.
The absence of markets for most ecosystem services
arises for a number of reasons, including the lack of
clear property rights attached to such services (see
chapter 2). In many cases, ecosystem services have
a ‘public good’ characteristic which would not be
priced accurately by markets even if property rights
were defined (e.g. genetic diversity of crops that has
insurance value for future food security).
Difficulties in obtaining monetary estimates of ecosystem
services mean that decisions tend to be based on
incomplete cost-benefit assessments and, as noted,
are biased towards short-term economic benefits. Because
we underestimate the economic and social importance
of such services, we have few incentives to
safeguard them and society as a whole loses out.
4.1.2 THREE WAYS TO ANALYSE VALUE:
QUALITATIVE, QUANTITATIVE AND
MONETARY
To put an economic value on changes to ecosystem
services, we first need to understand what
those changes are. figure 4.1 illustrates the series of
steps that have to be considered in turn. valuation usually
comes at the end of the process and has to build
on scientific information collected in the earlier stages.
TEEB for NATIoNAL AND INTErNATIoNAL PoLIcy MAKErs - chAPTEr 4: PAGE 4