Integrated framework and research methodology protocol for the economic valuation of ES in BIOservicES project

BIOservicES  will be undertaking valuation of the ecosystem services attributed to soil management across the 8 land uses in 25 experimental sites. This will include application of market and non-market valuation methods and will feed into a valuation toolkit to inform wider valuation by stakeholders beyond the BIOservicES project. The experimental sites represent a large variety of land use and management intensities and time and resources available for valuation studies are necessarily constrained. However, there is commonality across the ecosystem services, both within and across land use, allowing us to adopt a common valuation framework. This report describes our initial development of that framework. Project partners were invited to an online workshop which sought to identify the ecosystem services associated with each land use and the indicators that could be used to measure or value those services. Analysis of soil related ecosystem services suggested by the literature and during the workshop also allowed us to refine the scope of the valuation, for example removing services that are abiotic in nature or not moderated by soil biodiversity. Jointly provided ecosystem services were also identified suggesting common indicators.

Market values are mainly associated with provisioning services, but may also be relevant for some regulating services, e.g. using cost-based approaches or where ecosystem markets exist, and cultural services where their entry fees or visitor expenditure can be identified. Non-market valuation is more flexible but is mainly applicable to services where there are public good or societal value motivations. An important early task in undertaking any valuations will be to develop thorough profiles of the socio-economic and biophysical contexts for each case study site as these will confirm the degree of ecosystem service delivery and potential benefits. Developing a common data pro-forma for these profiles will be the next step for the work package. We will work with regional partners to identify the relevant data sources. Ideally these will be existing published and commonly available data. This is an important element in developing a valuation toolkit that can used widely across different European regions and land uses as it will allow easier identification of relevant data. But primary data collection may be necessary for some land uses or regions where data gaps exist whether in respect to the benefits of the ecosystem services, or the benefitting populations.