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What Is Value?
There are many different types of value. There is intrinsic value, social value, cultural value, ecological value, economic value, and many more.
Prior to continuing this overview, consider the following. Can the importance of an ecosystem be fully grasped by assigning it a monetary value? How much money would you pay for something that has no substitute? How do you put a dollar value on ecosystem functions that are not perceived by individuals or the market? These are the kinds of questions that an economic valuation of an ecosystem must contend with.
Why Assign Value?
Oftentimes in order to leverage the value of the river with political and business institutions, the services provided by the river must be quantified and turned into monetary amounts. While no valuation is perfect, it is nonetheless a helpful tool to communicate the importance of ecosystems and the services they provide us.
What Are Ecosystem Services?
Ecosystem Services (ES) are “the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems, and the species that make them up, fulfill human life” (Daily, Gretchen 1997). This includes the goods essential to our economy and the services vital for sustaining all life on Earth. ES are typically split into four categories: provisioning services, regulating benefits, cultural services, and supporting services.
Provisioning services are products which the ecosystem provides to humans, regulating benefits are the benefits obtained from the ecosystem process, cultural services are non-material benefits obtained from ecosystems, and supporting services are needed for the production of all other ES. Supporting services are different from the rest in that they impact humans either indirectly, or their impact is seen over the long-term, unfortunately this means that they can oftentimes go unobserved or unappreciated.
Since it is evident that there are different ways in which ES affect humans, this means that there are different ways we can value them. One of the most common ways to categorize these values is through use and non-use values.
Direct-use values (e.g., timber, medicinal plants), indirect-use values (e.g., crop pollination, carbon sequestration), option-use values (potential value of future use), and non-use values including legacy value (bequest), and existence value. Non-use values, constituting a significant portion of ecosystem value, must be accounted for in policy formulation to avoid underestimation of total value.
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