“Where ecological services need to be monetized, they likely will be. Where monetization is unlikely or virtually impossible, they probably don’t need to be brought into the cost benefit calculations of decision makers in the normal course of events. And attempting to do so might be viewed with suspicion and undermine support for the very environmental benefit one is attempting to foster.”
Defining ecosystems in general or a specific ecosystem in particular is a difficult endeavor.
As daunting a task as this is, it is no less difficult to establish a sound economic baseline for the entirety of the benefits that nature provides to mankind. Where ecological services need to be monetized, they likely will be. Where monetization is unlikely or virtually impossible, they probably don’t need to be brought into the cost benefit calculations of decision makers in the normal course of events.…
“Due to a lack of knowledge and/or limited possibility of commodification due the impossibility of accurate pricing and the inability to enclose the commons for some environmental goods, it is an open question as to whether it is even possible to value ecosystem services as a whole – as opposed to a select few benefits that flow from particular sets of relations within an area.”
Many economists find valuing global (and most times even local) “ecosystem services” difficult. Nonmarket pricing, indeed, is inherently impossible to solve or thus requires very questionable methodologies.
Critics of environmental commodification argue that the ongoing public funds for such efforts are neither now, nor are they likely to be in the future, justified. Alleged market failure, in other words, is swamped by other failures in the “solution.”…
“Payment schemes also risk creating perverse incentives…. If the system pays landowners to bank carbon, they may plant non-native species, or genetically ‘improved’ trees to bank carbon faster. Or they may discourage natural phenomena that happen to be good for biodiversity but bad for people, including such ecosystem disservices as fire, drought, disease, or flood.”
Just as there are supporters of this relatively new way of looking at environmental decision-making–commodification–there are also critics. I include myself among them.
Some environmentalists argue that ecosystems or their constituent parts with intrinsic value does not mean they should be priced and treated as economic goods. By stressing the market value of ecosystem services, should those values be exceedingly difficult to calculate, or come in at a lower-than-expected value, it will be easier for those pushing more intensive human intervention in the ecosystem to win the day in the policy field.…