Limitations of monetary valuation of ecosystem services and ways to - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Limitations of monetary valuation of ecosystem services and ways to improve it Dr. Luuk Knippenberg BIOMOT Radboud University Nijmegen October 7 2013

What is BIOMOT http://www.biomotivation.eu/  The FP7 EU BIOMOT project addresses the problem of motivation to act for biodiversity by means of rethinking of what value and motivation actually are for people.  Many economists and ecologists claim that biodiversity has total economic values running into the trillions of euros worldwide.  The problem addressed by the BIOMOT project is that, in spite of these immense economic values biodiversity is still declining. Why is that? Why are total economic values not compelling? What could really work to motivate publics and politics into action for biodiversity?

The economic solution for environmental problems 1. Create actual markets for environmental goods 2. Create hypothetical markets if that is not (yet) possible  Use valuation methods (WTP/WTA) to determine shadow prices for those environmental goods not in the market  Enter those prices in cost benefit analyses

Economic valuation and ecosystem services  Economic environmental valuation is used to measure the total economic value of an ecosystem, by means of the concept of ecosystem services TEV = the total net economic value of the change of ecosystem services to society occasioned by some marginal change to the conditions of that ecosystems  The development of a project is good if the sum of the generated values by a project outweighs its costs to the (use, non-use or option) values of an ecosystem.

Problems with economic environmental valuation of ES Manchester University/Leiden University 1. EEV fails to respect the ecological nature of ecosystems and biodiversity 2. Economic valuation is not neutral science but a political act 3. EEV ignores equity issues 4. EEV methods reduce the world to a list of things 5. Good societal decisions are based on more than the sum of individual preferences 6. EEV undermines other motivations to act (f.i. intrinsic motivation) 7. EEV mistakenly assumes that value commensurability exists, and is needed for rational decision making . 8. EEV fails to strike a balance between the acceptance of markets norms and resistance to that expansion.

Alternative rational decision methods which do not require value commensurability  Procedural accounts  Expressive accounts  Deliberative accounts Informally we use them permanently all over in our lives, in communities, in politics. Why tread nature differently?