Ecosystem services: The economics debate
By J. Farley. 2012
258 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The goal of this paper is to illuminate the debate concerning the economics of ecosystem services. The sustainability debate focuses on whether or not ecosystem services are essential for human welfare and the existence of ecological thresholds. If ecosystem services are essential, then marginal analysis and monetary valuation are inappropriate tools in the vicinity of thresholds. The justice debate focuses on who is entitled to ecosystem services and the ecosystem structure that generates them. Answers to these questions have profound implications for the choice of suitable economic institutions. The efficiency debate concerns both the goals of economic activity and the mechanisms best suited to achieve those goals. Conventional economists pursue Pareto efficiency and the maximization of monetary value, achieved by integrating ecosystem services into the market framework. Ecological economists and many others pursue the less rigorously defined goal of achieving the highest possible quality of life compatible with the conservation of resilient, healthy ecosystems, achieved by adapting economic institutions to the physical characteristics of ecosystem services. The concept of ecosystem services is a valuable tool for economic analysis, and should not be discarded because of disagreements with particular economists' assumptions regarding sustainability, justice and efficiency.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e67a688df0e7c6f0595fd910ad14f64e4ceba5ef
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Sarah Parks
- L. Braat
- John Gibson
- Xiangzheng Deng
- J. Gowdy
- R.W.J. de Groot
- Pier Paolo Franzese
- Tiina Häyhä
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- The ecosystem services agenda:bridging the worlds of natural science and economics, conservation and development, and public and private policy (2012, background): “Before society can decide how to answer this question, however, it must prioritise the desirable ends, and must also have a firm understanding of the nature of the scarce resources’’ (Farley, 2012).”
- Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and Cost-Benefit Analysis: Comparing alternative frameworks for integrated valuation of ecosystem services (2016, unknown): “…that monetary valuation can reduce citizen values, including normative beliefs, principles and collective meanings into consumer preferences (Sagoff 1998; Spash 2007; Vatn 2009), and ignore ecological thresholds and distributional impacts (Wegner and Pascual 2011; Farley 2012; Kallis et al. 2013).”
- Ecosystem services assessment: A review under an ecological-economic and systems perspective (2014, background): “The limitations f monetary valuation are especially important when ecosystems re in the vicinity of critical thresholds and ecosystem change is rreversible or reversible only at a high cost (Farley, 2012).”
- A review on trade-off analysis of ecosystem services for sustainable land-use management (2016, background): “When a system crosses a threshold due to persistent or strong environmental or socioeconomic drivers, it will trigger great costs to society due to the irreversible loss in critical natural capital (Farley, 2012).”
- What have economists learned about valuing nature? A review essay (2013, background): “While monetary valuation can be valuable to decision makers and is important for internalizing externalities in policies that affect ecosystems, it should be supplemented with the consideration of other types of value, such as ecological, social and cultural (Kumar, 2010; de Groot et al., 2006; Farl”