IAN Seminar Series

This lesson is intended as a primer for understanding environmental economics, focusing particularly on the valuation of ecosystem services. The first section of the presentation focuses on an economist’s typical perspective on how ecosystem services are to be analyzed – and in particular on the kinds of ecological analysis and outcomes needed for economic evaluation.  Boyd stresses the importance of being able to describe the effect of specific management actions on changed ecological outcomes via ecological “production functions.” He also stresses the importance of measured or modeled ecological outcomes that can be understood by lay audiences. Ecological analysis that causally relates specific management actions to changes in socially understandable biophysical outcomes allows for those outcomes to be valued in monetary terms.The second section of the presentation focuses more heavily on how to economically quantify the importance of ecosystem services.  In order to fix a monetary value on an environmental