Scaling Up Ecosystem Services Values: Methodology, Applicability and a Case Study

Abstract

The approach of using existing data on economic values of local ecosystem services for an assessment of these values at a larger geographical scale can be called “scaling up”. In a scaling-up exercise, economic values from a particular study site are transferred to another geographical setting, for instance to the regional, national or global scale. This paper proposes a methodology for scaling up ecosystem service values to a European level, assesses the availability of data for conducting this method, and illustrates the procedure with a case study on wetland values. The proposed methodology makes use of meta-analysis to produce a value function that is subsequently applied to individual European wetland sites. Site-specific, study-specific and context-specific variables are used to define a price vector that captures differences between sites and over time. The proposed method is shown to be practicable and to produce reasonably reliable aggregate value estimates.

Keywords: Ecosystem Services, Value Transfer, Meta-Analysis, Wetland Values

JEL Classification: C81, Q24, Q57