Human well-being relies critically on ecosystem services provided by nature. Examples include water and air quality regulation, nutrient cycling and decomposition, plant pollination and flood control, all of which are dependent on biodiversity. They are predominantly public goods with limited or no markets and do not command any price in the conventional economic system, so their loss is often not detected and continues unaddressed and unabated. This in turn not only impacts human well-being, but also seriously undermines the sustainability of the economic system.It is against this background that TEEB: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project was set up in 2007 and led by the United Nations Environment Programme to provide a comprehensive global assessment of economic aspects of these issues. This book, written by a team of international experts, represents the scientific state of the art, providing a comprehensive assessment of the fundamental ecological and economic principles of measuring and valuing ecosystem services and biodiversity, and showing how these can be mainstreamed into public policies.This volume and subsequent TEEB outputs will provide the authoritative knowledge and guidance to drive forward the biodiversity conservation agenda for the next decade.
The TEEB study is underpinned by an assessment of state-of-the-art science and economics. The goal is to provide the conceptual foundation to link economics and ecology and to posit a paradigm of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services. This aspect of the study tackles the challenges of valuing ecosystem services, as well as issues related to economic discounting. It aims to quantify the costs of inaction and examine the macroeconomic dimension of ecosystem services loss. This information will focus on improving our understanding of the economic costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. This survey is the most comprehensive overview of existing thinking in this area to date, and the process is bringing scientists and economists together to provide the analysis and tools required in order for us to be able to create a robust methodological framework enabling the decision-makers at different levels to do economic analysis of ecosystem services and biodiversity.
the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity: ecological and economic foundations ||
TEEB is a global initiative focused on drawing attention to the economic benefits of biodiversity, highlighting the growing cost of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and drawing together expertise from the fields of ecosystem science, economics and development policy to support the mainstreaming of biodiversity and ecosystem considerations in policy making at the local, national and international level as well as in business decision-making whilst ensuring scientific credibility.
Stakeholder involvement is a key success factor of the TEEB study. It is a multi-donor project with several hundred contributors from international organisations, public administration, private sector, research institutes and NGOs. It is also a multidisciplinary project including expertise from science, economics, development studies and policy. This approach is also referred to as "open architecture".
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. First, we review the ecological and economic foundations of insurance value, deriving key insights relevant to urban areas. Next, we substantiate these insights by examining two cases where cities have invested in green infrastructure, augmenting the insurance value offered by urban ecosystems. With this foundation, we examine the potential for building resilience in cities through investment in the insurance value of green infrastructure. We end with concluding remarks and policy recommendations to promote insurance value in urban areas.
Third, insurance value was not monetized to support decisions in either of the case studies and doing so would not necessarily have been helpful. Although insurance value can be a powerful metaphor to guide green infrastructure strategies, there are drawbacks to interpreting the concept narrowly in the logic of monetary costs and benefits. Some authors note that investments in green infrastructure to enhance insurance value are likely to bring more economic benefits than costs, at least in the long term (Costanza and others 2006). In the short term, however, high market values of real estate in urban areas will frequently outcompete the economic value that can be attributed to insurance value, tilting the math against resilience investments on sites where development is permissible. Furthermore, those harnessing the metaphor of insurance value risk inadvertently advancing the notion that we could substitute ecological resilience with financial insurance, i.e. that investments in resilience and purchasing financial insurance are largely equivalent, and ecosystem users can select the cheapest option. Despite its direct relation with economic value, insurance value may be seen as being weakly comparable or even incommensurable in monetary terms (Kronenberg 2015a), and hence we advise against its financialization.
Although we call for a broader recognition of the long-term social and economic importance of insurance value, we also advise against its monetization in support of decision making, not only because data and analytical demands are high, but primarily because insurance value affects non-marginal changes that remove traditional welfare analysis from the domain where it is theoretically consistent (Gowdy 2005) and because monetization risks advancing the notion that losses in insurance value from ecosystem degradation can be compensated for through financial capital. Instead, we make a case for an ecological economic analysis and management oriented to avert regime shifts so as to secure the sustained delivery of ecosystem services underpinning long-term conditions for well-being.
TEEB, 2010aTEEB (2010).The economics of ecosystems and biodiversity ecological and economic foundations, Earthscan, Londen and Washington.Link to PBL-website: -for-Mainstreaming-Ecosystem-Goods-and-Services-in-International-Policies.
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