ABSTRACT
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), more than 60 percent of the world’s ecosystems are being degraded or used unsustainably (MEA 2005). And Asia fares no better than other parts of the world. Following on from MEA, economists and other professions have worked to document and value the loss of ecosystem services, for example through initiatives such as the Economics of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (TEEB) (Kumar 2010). The aim is to “recognize and demonstrate” for policymakers, bureaucrats, businesses and the general public the magnitude of the welfare loss in order to “capture” such un-internalized ecosystem service values in decisions. An important part of this effort has been to utilize the existing and relatively large non-market valuation literature in environmental economics in order to estimate values of ecosystem services in new local policy contexts or scaled up (e.g., for regional or national level uses) (see e.g., de Groot et al. 2012 for a recent example of the latter). This practice is termed “benefit or value transfer,” as economic values of (an) ecosystem service(s) derived from a study or compiled based on the literature are transferred, often in adjusted form, to a new policy site or context.
