What Are Ecosystem Services?

James Boyd and Spencer Banzhaf

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: This paper advocates consistently defined units of account to measure the contributions of nature to human welfare. We argue that such units have to date not been defined by environmental accounting advocates and that the term “ecosystem services” is too ad hoc to be of practical use in welfare accounting. We propose a definition, rooted in economic principles, of ecosystem service units. A goal of these units is comparability with the definition of conventional goods and services found in GDP and the other national accounts. We illustrate our definition of ecological units of account with concrete examples. We also argue that these same units of account provide an architecture for environmental performance measurement by governments, conservancies, and environmental markets.

Keywords: Environmental accounting; ecosystem services; index theory; nonmarket valuation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 Q51 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-02-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

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