The world’s first comprehensive collection of online tools and resources for planners, watershed managers, natural resource agencies, scholars and businesses to research and communicate the value of nature’s capital assets is available online — the Ecosystem Valuation Toolkit.Nature provides a wide array of market and non-market benefits to society, ranging from recreational and scenic qualities, to clean water, arable land and other extractive uses. Indeed, our economy is integrally dependent on natural resources for everything we produce, consume — even very air we breathe. To value these ecosystem services economically is not easy and provide difficulties, to put it mildly, when problems as diverse as climate change, salmon restoration and human exposure to toxic chemicals need to be solved. This requires a translation of the physical benefits and risks associated with the environmental problems into the economic language to allow policymakers handle the issues properly. Weighting pros and cons and directing resources to both create solutions and halt actions that threaten the health of future economies. Which means, creating a sustainable future by conserving nature’s services.
To provide the tools for understanding the complex interactions at stake and translating the values of ecosystem services in economic terms, the Ecosystem Valuation Toolkit has been developed. It is an online tool for managers and decision-makers that facilitates understanding the consequences of changes in economic markets for ecosystems, in fact for the society at large.
The Ecosystem Service Valuation Toolkit (EVT) will preview at the ACES Conference in Dec 2012, and can be found here.
The above news item is reprinted from materials available at Earth Economics EVT. Original text may be edited for content and length.
(Source: Ecosystem Valuation Toolkit)
