What Are the Main Options for Applying the Multiple-Use Water Services Paradigm? - Rethinking Infrastructure Design for Multi-Use Water Services - page 55

The Challenge
Ascribing values to ecosystem services is not an end in itself, but rather one
small step in the much larger and dynamic arena of political decision-making.
Our challenge today is to build on this foundation and integrate ecosystem
services into everyday decisions. This requires a new focus on services
beyond provisioning services; an understanding of the interlinked production
of services; a grasp of the decision-making processes of individual stake-
holders; integration of research into institutional design and policy imple-
mentation; and the introduction of experimentally-based policy interventions
designed for performance evaluation and improvement over time (Daily et al.
2009 ).

10.3 Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services

Economic valuation is broadly accepted as an approach that can effectively link
ecology and economics to evaluate bene ts of management options. It can capture a

broad array of environmental values, attributing not only a commercial value (e.g.
the monetary value of timber) to an ecosystem service (NRC 2004 ), but also
including many components that have no commercial or market basis (e.g. the
aesthetic value of a natural landscape).
Given that, most ecosystem services are not sold in market, economic valuation
techniques can be used to attach an appropriate value to their resulting bene

ts.
Thus, economic valuation provides a systematic way in which environmental
values can be factored into choices for better environmental decision-making. Other
frameworks to valuate ESS are based on ecological or socio-cultural approaches.
By , we mean an attribute of a service or good, while valuation is the

process of quantifying this attribute. The term

' values '

' economic value ' describes the

change in human wellbeing — welfare generated by a product.

10.4 How to Value Ecosystem Services?

To increase their total well-being people express preferences stemming from both
use and non-use values. The sum total of use and non-use values related to a
resource or an aspect of the environment is called Total Economic Value (TEV) and
offers a useful framework to value ecosystem services. The metric for quantifying
economic values is usually money (Fig. 9 ).
Use values encompass direct use values; consumptive (e.g. value of timber, sh

etc.) or non-consumptive (e.g. recreation, aesthetics) and indirect use values that