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known as 'discounting', tends to privilege decision-making towards immediate benefits
and delayed costs, which in turn impacts on sustainability and on inter-generational equity.
Accounting formarine ecosystem services such as those provided bymarine protected
areas can contribute to enhancing the socio-political enabling framework for such protec-
tion measures of the marine environment and provide a level playing field for the capacity
of various stakeholders to affect decisions.
Valuation of various marine ecosystem services, including from the standpoint of
monetized versus qualitative benefits, is therefore necessary. This is, however, rendered
challenging, not only by considerations related to the need to develop tailored and some-
times novel methodologies specific to the marine environment, but also by bias in prefer-
ence methods and limitations inherent in the application of stated preference techniques in
the terrestrial domain to the marine domain. In fact, values derived in primary studies are
context-specific in ecological and socio-cultural terms, and there is a clear paucity of data
for open ocean environments.
Main human uses and impacts of ocean areas are described in Chapter 2 , while the
contribution of economic assessments to informing societal choices in relation to the mar-
ine environment is treated in Chapter 7 of the topic.
While economic valuation does not provide all of the answers to informing decision-
and policy-making, it can support the conservation outcome of the particular set of man-
agement actions envisaged. And, because the risks involved in commoditization of nature
are real and there is a requirement to take into account not only 'credence attributes' of
marine habitats (related to perceptions) but 'sensory' or 'experience' attributes as well (this
is particularly true for the open and deep ocean environments), there is a need for econom-
ic valuation in the future to focus on both valuable as well as under-researched ecosystem
services from the oceans (cf. Chapter 7 ).
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