Valuing ecosystem services
The contributions that ecosystems make to human well-being are becoming increasingly valuable to policymakers and the general public. Collectively known as ESs, these contributions include carbon storage, food production and recreational benefits. To help inform decision makers, many ESs are being assigned economic values. In this regard, the EU-funded TREUEVALUE (Trans-national European ecosystem values of grasslands) project aimed to determine what value European citizens place on ESs like biodiversity and recreational use. Although maintaining biodiversity is a potentially important ES, some services such as food or timber production come at a biodiversity cost. Achieving an appropriate balance between such conflicting aims will depend partly on which services are deemed most important by the public. TREUEVALUE developed a questionnaire as part of a choice experiment to gauge participants' willingness to pay for different facets of ES provision. To account for cultural differences, researchers delivered the survey to citizens in both western and eastern Europe (Denmark, and Poland and Estonia, respectively). Researchers chose semi-natural grasslands in each country as a study system. Despite providing services like carbon capture, biodiversity and habitat conservation, grasslands are rarely considered in economic valuations and are being rapidly lost. TREUEVALUE's results showed that respondents in each country (about 800 people per country) were willing to pay for grassland management. All three countries' citizens were more willing to pay for biodiversity and habitat conservation than for landscape preservation or carbon capture for climate change mitigation. In general, respondents wanted grasslands to be managed in their own country, although they were willing to pay less for similar efforts in other countries. Since respondents consistently placed a higher value on biodiversity than any other ES, preserving biodiversity should be a priority for environmental management policies going forward.
