Accounting for Ecosystems

How does one put a price on an ecosystem? That’s the challenge facing environmentalists, according to a new report from the National Academies’ Water Science and Technology Board. Unless the economic value of “ecosystem goods and services” is accounted for in environmental decision-making, the report says, they’ll be assigned no value in cost-benefit analyses — and thus policy choices will be inherently biased against conservation. To read a copy of the report, titled “Valuing Ecosystem Services: Toward Better Environmental Decision-Making,” click here.