Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to develop a PES scheme and as such might be incentivized to cherry-pick studies from ex-
tant literature that increase the likelihood of the PES price being acceptable to the service
buyer, i.e. studies with lower value estimates. The legitimacy of such commoditization can
therein be questioned .
This is particularly the case as the level of risk and uncertainty in future projections
of the value of non-provisioning ecosystem services is likely to be far higher than that of
provisioning services and conventional marketed goods (such as the electricity generated
by a large-scale hydro project). Although the social welfare changes that might potentially
arise from an inaccurate assessment of electricity generating capacity might be important,
the disbenefits associated with such projections being found to be inaccurate
ex post
are of
a different nature and scale to, say, irreversible habitat or species loss, or equally the de-
not apply as readily to marine systems as opposed to terrestrial systems is that, for many
services values are based on societal perceptions: given that we as humans are land-based
creatures, this tends to limit the extent to which the attributes of marine habitats remain
member of the general public can see, hear, touch, and experience nature in terrestrial sys-
tems more readily than, say, the deep oceans. Might this imply that there is a tendency to
undervalue marine ecosystems? It is difficult to provide evidence to either support or refute
this, as there is no 'right' price per se for a non-marketed commodity.
Further, as previously discussed, the pricing of nature comes in many forms, one of
which is the use of benefits transfer (BT). Given the paucity of studies on open oceans, it is
quite possible that reliance ona secondary study orstudies to transfer values to a policy site
entails BT being applied in a vastly different socio-cultural context. A fundamental tenet
of BT is that it should not be applied in such scenarios, but there is evidence that it is non-
Returning explicitly to the question of promoting valuation versus heeding caution, as
ever in such discussions there is no right or wrong answer. As a minimum, economic ap-
