The Future of Ecosystem Services in Asia and the Pacific

Ida Kubiszewski, Sharolyn J. Anderson, Robert Costanza and Paul C. Sutton

Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: We estimated the current value of ecosystem services for terrestrial ecosystems in 47 countries in the Asia and the Pacific region. Currently, these provide $US14 trillion/yr. in benefits, most of which are non-marketed and do not show up in GDP. We also estimated the changes in terrestrial ecosystem services value for scenarios to the year 2050, built around the four Great Transition Initiative archetypes: (1) Market Forces (MF); (2) Fortress World (FW); (3) Policy Reform (PR); and (4) Great Transition (GT). Results show that under the MF and FW scenarios the ecosystem services value in the region continues to decline from $14 trillion/yr in 2011 to $11 and $9 trillion/yr in 2050, respectively. In the PR scenario, the value is maintained around $14 Trillion/yr in 2050 and in the GT scenario it is significantly restored to $17 Trillion/yr. We also show more detailed maps and results for 8 selected countries in the region (Bhutan, China, India, Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) and compare our results with a previous national study of Bhutan. Our results indicate that adopting a set of policies like those assumed in the GT scenario would greatly enhance human wellbeing and sustainability in the region.

Keywords: ecosystems services; scenario planning; sustainable development; well-being; ecosystem service mapping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2016-10-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, September 2016, pages 389-404

Downloads: (external link)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.147/full (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.147/full [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.147/full)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:appswp:201629

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sung Lee ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).