Estimates of monetary values of ecosystem service

This annex presents the monetary values found for ecosystem services provided by the main biomes identified in Chapter 1. As has been explained in earlier TEEB D0-chapters (notably Chapter 1 and 5), economic values have many shortcomings and limitations, not only in relation to ecosystem services but also to man-made goods and services. They are by definition instrumental, anthropocentric, individual based, subjective, context dependent, marginal and state dependent (Goulder and Kennedy, 1997; Baumgartner et al., 2006, Barbier et al., 2009, EPA., 2009). However, despite these fundamental issues in economic theory and practice, information about the monetary importance of ecosystem services is a powerful and essential tool to make better, more balanced decisions regarding trade-offs involved in land use options and resource use. In this annex, we present the results of an analysis of 11 main biomes/ecosystem-complexes (i.e. open ocean, coral reefs, coastal systems, coastal wetlands (mangroves & tidal marshes), inland wetlands, rivers & lakes, tropical forests, temperate & boreal forests, woodlands, grasslands and polar & high mountain systems) and collate their monetary values from different socio-economic contexts across the world. For each biome, all 22 ecosystem services identified in Chapter 1 were taken into account in the data collection. With help of the Contributing and Lead authors, hundreds of publications were screened from which approximately 160 were selected for detailed analysis and data-entry into the “TEEB-database” which was especially designed for this study. Thus far, over 1200 original values (data points) are stored and based on a number of criteria slightly over 600 values were used for the analysis presented in this Annex (for details on the data base, the selection procedure and original values will be made available through the TEEB-website (www.teebweb.org) in June 2010. An important purpose of the TEEB database is the possibility to use the values for scenario-analysis at different scale-levels. To allow for these kind of studies, the database presents the data in one value unit (US$) per ha per year and in a contextual explicit way. For each value, the database includes information on, among others, socio-economic variables, biome type, ecosystem type, ecosystem services and sub-services, valuation method, reference details and the location details of the case study. The web-version of the database thus makes it, in principle, possible to analyze the data in relation to the main determining factors of the values, such as influence of income level, population density, and proximity of user to the service.