Valuation Approaches for Soil Carbon - Soil Carbon: Science, Management and Policy for Multiple Benefits - page 218

and cost for individual technologies or pol-
icy measures (ibid). The MACC approach
only considers the mitigation potential and
direct costs of a particular technological or
policy option. Potential actions may be ex-
cluded from a MACC analysis if they in-
volve serious externalities or run counter to
other normative goals (such as poverty alle-
viation). MACC models are also endogen-
ous to the assumed abatement targets. Here,
the rationale is that as abatement targets be-
come increasingly difficult to achieve, the
costs of reaching those targets for a given so-
ciety, industrial sector or individual are as-
sumed to increase.
The potential advantage of the MACC
in the context of soil carbon is that the mar-
ginal abatement cost curves can be based on
a particular economic sector (i.e. agriculture
or forestry) where the abatement occurs and
do not require knowledge of global emis-
sions trajectories. Moreover, the advantage
of the MACC approach over SCC is that the
abatement costs are based on existing activ-
ities and technologies, and can therefore be
relatively easily estimated empirically (at
least in the present time). It has been sug-
gested that the uncertainty in the empirical
estimates of MACC are of two orders of mag-
nitude less than for SCC estimates (Dietz,
2007). Nevertheless, as MACC is projected
into the future, it becomes increasingly un-
certain as new carbon-reducing activities
are required to meet emission targets and
new technologies alter the abatement costs.

for these non-market services. In situations
where the benefits of increased soil carbon
do not accrue to the producer (for example,
as in the case of the regulation of water qual-
ity, as mentioned above), then a production
function approach should also take into ac-
count the cost or benefits incurred by the
production of this ecosystem service. This is
particularly relevant when the management
of soil carbon jointly produces both private
goods (such as agricultural commodities)
and common pool resources (such as clean
water) or public goods and services (such as
regulation of floods, climate regulation).
It has recently been suggested that the
interdependent, or bundled, nature of the
ecosystem services produced in a given loca-
tion means that they should not be con-
sidered in isolation from each other. Rather,
different possible bundles of interdependent
ecosystem services should be quantified and
valued, in order to allow consideration of the
trade-offs between the potential provision of
different sets of goods and services from a
given ecosystem (e.g. Raudsepp-Hearne et al .,
2010; Martín-López et al ., 2012). Methodolo-
gies for identifying ecosystem services bun-
dles are relatively new, with the focus on the
spatial mapping of individual services and
the trade-offs between those services (e.g.
Raudsepp-Hearne et al ., 2010; Plieninger
et al ., 2013). Explicit valuation tools directly
related to ecosystem service bundles are rare.
One promising approach is the use of stated
preference methods to elicit values of, and
the societal preferences for, the different bun-
dles of ecosystem services delivered by vari-
ous types of ecosystems (e.g. Martín-López
et al ., 2012). In this context, different levels of
soil carbon (and the associated land manage-
ment practices that lead to those soil carbon
levels) could be used as factors of production
in different bundles of ecosystems services.

Joint Production and Ecosystem
Service Bundles

Where soil carbon provides an intermediate
service to final goods and services for which
there is no clearly defined market good or
service - e.g. regulation of water quality or
flood control - then the production function
approach can be used to evaluate the rela-
tions between soil carbon and the physical
provision of the final service. Subsequently,
replacement cost methods, averted behav-
iour methods or stated preference methods
can be used to elicit individuals' preferences

Including Economic Values in
Decision-making Processes

The methods described above are under-
pinned by the idea of capturing the inten-
sity of people's preferences as individuals
for changes in soil carbon. These economic