Economic value

We live in a world where money remains today the main measure of equivalence and comparison. As the loss of biodiversity is still ongoing, the emerging field of Environmental economics assumes that by giving a monetary value to nature, it would allow to better take into account its importance in development choices. For example within the framework of development projects where decision-makers have to make choices between various options, more or less at the cost of environment, biodiversity components are not economically valued and are thus considered as non-existent.
 
For this economic valuation approach to be useful for nature conservation, it is necessary to assess the Total Economic Value (TEV), including market-value services (for example when people use food, fresh water or wood that is at their disposal) and non-market values services such as aesthetic, cultural, etc.
 
There are several methods used to assess the costs in Environmental economics. Among them, the costs of opportunity (or of option) and the accounting costs :
 

• The costs of option measures the loss of goods and services which we give up by allocating the resources available for a given use. In the case of the world study led recently by Pavan Sukhdev on the cost of the loss of the biodiversity, it is for example assessed as the cost of not having protected biodiversity since 2000.
• On the other hand, the accounting costs are the estimation of what the society has to pay to restore, compensate or maintain biodiversity which, once degraded, produces fewer ecological services compared to a situation with a good biodiversity state.

 
Today it is still not possible, with this approach, to have a shared view and indicators to assess and to compare ecosystems between regions and countries. However, it is possible, for certain ecosystems defined in a rather wide way - for example the "temperate forests" or the "permanent meadows" - to propose more or less precise estimations of the economic value of a certain number of ecological services which are associated with them. With the current methods and indicators, lessons learned show that total economic valuation can be relatively precise at site level but remains more difficult to adapt to similar ecosystems in other regions due to historical, ecological, social and economical specificities.