MarES
MarES wishes to look upon this with a focus on Norway where, for example, global increase in demand for (rare) minerals have renewed commercial interests in coastal deposits in the northernmost part of the country, and the rise in sea temperature makes aquaculture in northern sea areas more attractive. Likewise, MarES wishes to provide data and knowledge to aid decision makers in optimal allocation of scarce fish resources among competing user groups.
Background
Marine ecosystem services are under increasing pressure from competing human uses, such as aquaculture, shipping, energy production, conservation, fishing, tourism and recreation. Climate change causing sea level rise and warming put additional pressures on these systems, but also cause spatial redistribution and thus change in commercial and other human activities. With these changes there is a need for new knowledge and new management approaches. Traditionally, national, regional and local agencies have managed marine resources sector-by-sector, with little focus on connections between and within human and ecological systems. Trade-offs arising from management choices in each of these sectors change the distribution of ecosystem services and cause conflicts among users. For example, a fish species like the Norwegian coastal cod, is crucial for commercial coastal fisheries, marine fishing tourism and domestic recreational fisheries. Currently, commercial fisheries are managed separately, whereas tourism and recreational fishing are little monitored and insufficiently regulated.
In a changing world, where non-market ecosystem services become increasingly important for our welfare, we need management systems taking into consideration ecological interactions between the ecosystem services that are of crucial importance for social welfare, including non-market ecosystem services .
Recognizing the need for more effective management of marine resources, efforts to implement ecosystem-based management (EBM) is on the rise. A core component of EBM is its strong emphasis on the marine ES, the myriad of benefits that people and industries obtain from marine resources. They include various provisioning services such as food (e.g. wild and farmed fish), supporting and regulating services (e.g. primary production and nutrient circulation) and a range of cultural services (e.g. recreation, tourism, education and spiritual well-being). The oceans and coastal areas also provide abiotic services such as minerals and energy. Implementation of EBM requires an understanding of the production of marine ES; how human activities rely on and affect these services; and how to assess their value.
The latter is necessary for making trade-offs among various human uses, including both conservation and economic development, in specific areas. The ES concept provides a tool for understanding the connection between the natural environment, including natural resources, and human welfare, and it enables the development of more adaptive management models. Many decisions regarding natural resource utilization hinge on the question of how people value resources and how such values can inform trade-offs for decision makers. Amending the decision-support tool cost-benefit analysis (CBA) by including monetized and non-monetized effects on ES will make it a more useful tool for decision-making. Similarly, including non-use (conservation) values in bio-economic models enables a wider set of preferences to count in the allocation of fish stocks. Both applications enables more science-based and transparent decision-making, and provides a measure for finding efficient and fair solutions.
Types of valuation
Monetary ES valuation, is seen within some marine ecosystem services that are traded in markets and can be valued in monetary terms based on market prices (e.g. farmed fish and tourism). Other ecosystem services have no market prices, and can only be valued by use of non-market valuation methods. Such methods include revealed preference (RP), stated preference (SP), and deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) methods, and benefit transfer (BT). Revealed preference methods use observational data on decisions people make in markets and as such only capture use-values. Stated preference methods use data generated from surveys eliciting people’s contingent preferences in constructed (hypothetical) market scenarios. Some stated preference methods have been extended to include information provision and time to think and discuss in the felicitation of peoples’ contingent preferences. These are often denoted deliberative monetary valuation, and are developed to meet objections to the standard stated preference methods that people do not necessarily have fixed preferences for goods and services, especially not for ecosystem services with which they are unfamiliar. Rather, they need to inform such preferences over time and through information provision and deliberation. A third group of (secondary) valuation methods is benefit transfer. Benefit transfer uses value information from existing studies or meta-data extracted from the literature to transfer to a relevant policy context in need of such information. While the valuation methods have been tried and tested for many years, there is a lack of ecosystem service valuation studies that are specifically designed for decision support, cost-benefit analysis and bio-economic modelling. Moving research into resolving both methodological and practical challenges in ecosystem service valuation is seen as an important frontier of ecosystem service research.
Non-monetary ecosystem services valuation, methods do not rely on monetary metrics or market logics, but examine the fundamental needs and importance people attach to ecosystem services. The term socio-cultural values defined as: “the importance people, as individuals or as a group, assign to (bundles of) ecosystem services”, is emerging as a unifying term in this field of research. Socio-cultural values are conceptually different from cultural ecosystem services by acknowledging that people do not separate between non-material and material benefits when valuing nature. This distinction is crucial for analyzing the intangible local and indigenous values in the Arctic, where consuming and harvesting wild food or “contact with nature” are fundamentally important for residents’ personal and cultural well-being beyond their provisional benefits. Thinking in terms of co-benefits assigned to species or ecosystem features (i.e. bundles) relax the need to separate between the nutritional, recreational or the broader meaning that people ascribe to harvest activities. Spatial explicit participatory mapping of ecosystem services could fill in knowledge gaps of socio-cultural values by: i) instrumental approaches for 3 spatial value transfer and quantitative analysis of spatial priorities, or by consultative or non-monetary deliberative approaches.
The use of ecosystem services values in cost-benefit analysis and bio-economic modelling can be a crucial tool for sustainable management of marine environments. Cost-benefit analysis measure societal costs and benefits of alternative scenarios of ecosystem services utilization in relation to baselines that are quantified in physical terms, and to the extent possible, valued in monetary terms. Diverse cost and benefit categories can then be compared. Bio-economic models are used to determine the optimal harvest of one, or two interacting (fish) species, and the output is the long-term sustainable harvest of the species given economic measures as price and harvest costs.
Current cost-benefit analysis’s and bio-economic models only exceptionally include monetary ecosystem services values and non-monetized ecosystem services that convey welfare relevant information. Integrating monetary and non-monetary values associated with ecosystem services into a hybrid cost-benefit analysis framework and extended bio-economic models is both a management and politics need, as well as a research challenge.
Critics further add that for cost-benefit analysis and bio-economic models to be more relevant to actual decision-making, a more explicit focus on distributional issues and stakeholder involvement is needed to better understand who wins and who loses in decision-making and the underlying conflicts that influence peoples’ choices. Increased emphasis on equity issues has been recommended in the revised guidelines of the Norwegian Expert Committee on cost-benefit analysis, while equity issues are largely ignored in bio-economic modelling. If the cost-benefit analysis framework and bio-economic models can be amended in these ways, it can be useful in structuring, reviewing and analysing welfare implications of various ecosystem services uses, and serve as a basis to analyse trade-offs between different ecosystem services uses over time and across geography and stakeholder groups.
That is why MarES wishes to investigate how global changes and human activities affect the use and importance of ecosystem services (ES) spatially and across groups of people, as well as deliver improved tools for decision-making on trade-offs between different uses of marine ecosystem services spatially and across stakeholders.