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Developing an Environmental Currency Relevant to People
Citation:
Russell, M., D. Landers, A. Nahlik, AND C. Rhodes. Developing an Environmental Currency Relevant to People. Gulf of Mexico Alliance All Hands Meeting, Baton Rouge, LA, June 13 - 16, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This is an invited presentation describing EPA's work on Ecosystem Service approaches and related classification systems. We hope to move towards interagency standardization of EGS assessments.
Description:
EPA (and others worldwide) wanted to more fully include environmental attributes in decision making but there was no systematic approach that defined and organized the environment to identify and potentially quantify those environmental attributes that humans required, valued, or utilized. EPA has adopted a final ecosystem services perspective that links environmental attributes to human users (i.e. beneficiaries). Benefit of each distinct ecosystem condition or process, to each human beneficiary, is counted once and only once. Lack of clarity in these relationships can lead to inconsistent, biased and and/or misleading value estimates.