Page 179 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS195 Albert B.
in the case of provisioning services such as crops, fish or water, i.e. products
which are consumed by people. Non-consumptive ES-services, like the
spiritual or cultural importance of a landscape, are rarely valued in monetary
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terms (TEEB, 2010, p.7) . So, in the case of ecosystem services researchers
need to be innovative to develop a satisfactory valuation. As can be seen from
a recent conference paper, 11 different valuation methods are presented
including an assessment on their suitability (Obst, C., 2018). However,
researchers still have different opinions concerning the fitness of certain
ecosystem services valuation methods. This concerns for instance the use of
shadow pricing methods, of preference-based methods and of restoration
costs (Droste, N. et al 2017). This does not imply that these methods do not
provide useful information in certain (regional) circumstances, but it raises
questions with regard to the comparability of such valuations over space,
nations and time. This leads to the question whether an extension of natural
resources assets to cover ecosystem assets is realistic. The main issue is that
most economic assets are not actively traded during an accounting period,
like dwellings, factories or large customer-tailored software. This holds also in
the case of ESassets, so that alternative valuation approaches are needed. One
possibility is to compile the net present value (NPV) of future flows of income
for each type of ES-asset, which requires mainly - the choice of discount
rate - the expected asset life.
If it can be assumed that ecosystem assets tend to exist almost eternally,
a realistic estimation of the expected asset life is extremely difficult. In addition,
the application of any discount rate for such a long period will heavily
influence and probably even dominate the results.
Insofar the following conclusion drawn would seem understandable: “Note
that expressing values in monetary units can be a time and resource intensive
exercise and often quantitative insights expressed in bio-physical units are
sufficient to communicate benefits (e.g. number of people benefitting from
clean water provision). Valuation should therefore only be done where it is
needed.” (De Groote et al. 2012, last page).

4. Disseminating and combining ecosystem data
4.1 Separate ES-figures
As soon as reliable data on ecosystem services (and assets as well) become
available, either in quantity or in value terms, the question of how to publish
them has to be addressed. The immediate possibly is to disseminate them as

An exception to this is a recent study to estimate the value of nature-based (short-distance)
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recreation in Europe for 2012, based on the potential visits of the population for recreational
purposes by type and in a regional breakdown. Monetary values are obtained by applying the
so-called zonal travel cost method (TCM), based on travel expenses by car (Vallecillo, S. et al.,
2019).
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