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Operationalizing Ecosystem Services Indicators for Policy and Decision-Making
Citation:
Hall, K. Operationalizing Ecosystem Services Indicators for Policy and Decision-Making. Western Forest Economists Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, May 03 - 04, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
ORD’s Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program and client offices have embraced Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) as a way to identify biophysical features that best link ecosystem change to human well-being. A result of this embrace is the need to identify metrics and indicators for these features. These indicators necessarily translate scientific information used by experts into indicators that describe the state of FEGS to non-experts and beneficiaries in a way that is salient and meaningful. Because these indicators are salient and meaningful to beneficiaries, they are considered to be the most effective units to use in social analysis including economic analysis. Definition of these indicators will require the integration of expertise of natural science researchers familiar with particular ecosystems with social science expertise in the ways in which beneficiaries benefit from these ecosystems. This research starts to describe a methodology that guides the identification of these FEGS indicators. This product is a deliverable of SHC 2.61.2
Description:
The ecosystem services concept has gained popularity as a means of linking ecosystem goods and services to human well-being. Despite its popularity as a concept, there is much progress needed in operationalizing ecosystem services indicators before they are useful for policy and decision makers. Doing so requires interdisciplinary work between economists and natural scientists to develop indicators that effectively link ecosystem components to human well-being and policy outcomes. In this work we propose an ecosystem services framework that makes progress in this realm by proposing a process that explicitly outlines the link between ecosystem services and human well-being using a production function framework. The resulting indicators can inform policy, decision-making, monitoring programs and facilitate communication between natural scientists, policy makers, resource managers and the public.