Ecosystem is a non-tradable goods (de Groot et al., 2012) but its value only understands when it expressed in monetary unit. Monetary value ensures both policy makers and beneficiary from ecosystem services to raise awareness on degradation of ecosystem and provide effective measures to protect our ecosystem. Science-stakeholder partnership helps to reduce short term economic benefits for long term sustainability (Daily, 1997; Reyers et al., 2009).
What are the main disadvantages of assigning a value to ecosystem services?
Ans.: Although giving a ‘price tag’ helps to understand ecosystem services value for policy maker but sometimes it diverts the original intension of valuing ecosystem services. This trade off value minimise its true intension which is sustainability of our ecosystem (Hanley & Shogren, 2002; Randall, 2002). As a result, policy makers focus on its practical approach rather than its accuracy (Bao et al., 2007). Which means it transform from qualitative approach to quantitative (Martínez-Harms et al., 2012). Monetary value sometimes reflects human preferences rather than ecosystem itself (Brown, 1984), leading to poor decision making. Components in ecosystem acts independently, so valuation might be incomplete or overestimated for a single ecosystem. It is very hard to estimate all the values of ecosystem services.
What are the practical difficulties in establishing values of ecosystem services?
Ans.: Transformation of natural capital into monetary term is a complex process. Sometimes it is very hard to assign accurate value of ecosystem services due to lack of academic limitations. Traditional value is not comparable to those services. For instance, air quality or role of mangrove forest cannot transform into economic term (Costanza et al., 1997). In some cases, cultural value and/or aesthetic value of ES is yet to standardize and challenging to measure (Hernández-Morcill et al., 2013). That’s why ES sometimes limited to tourism.
In addition, by creating ‘market’ for ES sometimes leading to degradation of environment of that ecosystem (Vatn, 2010). For example, reserve forest or sanctuary are ‘crowded’ by people rather than preservation. Moreover, current financing method is dubious. There are uncertainties how to link valuation with outcome, at what condition financing should be applied and for how long it should continue (De Groot et al., 2010). Economic driver needs to be synchronized into institutional scale. So that, ecological and economic drivers can integrate.
Finally, transdisciplinary knowledge gap often creates difficulties to share knowledge. Especially some technical term defines each discipline separately, which create a communication gap among experts.
References
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