Valuation Approaches for Soil Carbon - Soil Carbon: Science, Management and Policy for Multiple Benefits - page 220

and social views (Munda, 2008). The use of
participatory and SMCE processes in envir-
onmental policy and natural resource man-
agement is gaining momentum. The advan-
tage of SMCE is the possibility of taking into
account the diversity of economic and
non-economic values that may exist for soil
carbon without reducing such diversity of
values to a single, all-encompassing unit of
measurement such as money. The recogni-
tion of the existence of diverse types of val-
ues, including economic ones, can be in-
corporated by means of qualitative and
quantitative information, which in turn can
be represented through cardinal numbers,
ordinal rankings or fuzzy and crisp ap-
proaches (Munda, 2008). SMCE is based on:
(i) identification of relevant social actors
with regard to their confronted interests in
soil carbon conservation by means of insti-
tutional analysis; (ii) defining the problem
of the search for sustainable soil carbon; (iii)
development of alternative soil carbon man-
agement options and the definition of spe-
cific evaluation criteria translated into a
multi-criteria impact matrix; (iv) assess-
ment of social actors' preferences and val-
ues through in-depth interviews or focus
groups; (v) construction of a ranking of the
available management alternatives by aggre-
gating criteria scores by means of a mathem-
atical algorithm; and (vi) analysis of the ro-
bustness of the analysis by means of a
public debate and validation.
CEA considers alternative management
options in which both the relative costs and
outcomes are taken into account in a sys-
tematic way. It is a decision-oriented tool,
designed to ascertain which means of at-
taining a particular normative goal are most
efficient (Levin, 1995). With CEA, the costs
of different options are expressed in monet-
ary terms, whereas the outcomes are ex-
pressed in more 'natural' units (for example,
level of conservation goals realized). Differ-
ent policy options are then compared via
the relative ratios of costs of implementa-
tion to the outcomes achieved. The CEA ap-
proach differs from the more ubiquitous
CBA where both the costs and benefits (out-
comes) of a given option are expressed in
monetary terms. The application of CEA to

valuation of soil carbon may be most appro-
priate when soil carbon contributes to eco-
system services or normative goals that are
not expressed easily in monetary terms. For
example, the contributions of soil carbon to
the maintenance of cultural landscapes,
cultural ecosystem services or conservation
of biodiversity areas are where CEA might
usefully be applied. The advantages of CEA
over CBA approaches are that the resulting
CEA evaluations of different potential inter-
ventions are often understood more intui-
tively and are less prone to rejection and
critiques of the commodification of nature.
However, CEA is limited in its application,
as (unlike CBA) it can only be used to com-
pare interventions or polices that have com-
monly defined goals.

Conclusions

Valuing changes in soil carbon through its
contribution to maintaining and producing
other ecosystem services is becoming in-
creasingly relevant for policy discussions.
This is due partially to the realization that
the natural carbon cycle and human ma-
nipulations of the flow of carbon through
both the economic and natural systems is
important for understanding the value of
multiple interdependent ecosystem services.
Some progress has been made, but there
are still considerable gaps in the valuation
methodologies as well as in the empirical
data to support economic assessment of al-
ternative soil carbon conservation/invest-
ment paths. We highlight three key areas for
further research development. First, the
synthesis of the literature suggests that
there are considerable advantages in devel-
oping further the production function ap-
proaches to value the role of carbon through
its indirect contribution to a range of eco-
system services, i.e. agricultural food pro-
duction, climate regulation, to name a few.
For this research to be amenable to eco-
nomic analysis, it is essential that it is taken
into account that changing soil carbon levels
is only one component in ecosystem service
provision. Accounting for other input factors,
human control variables, as well as abiotic