Wednesday, 13 January 2010 - 11.00am - 12.30pm
Speaker: Andrew Balmford
Abstract
There is now widespread appreciation of the overall importance of ecosystem services (ESs) for human wellbeing. Moving to the next step, of integrating ESs into real-world decision-making, depends on recognising that ES production and value vary spatially, that not all ESs can be maximized simultaneously (so trade-offs are necessary), and that decision-makers need to know not about the gross values of ESs, but how these may change depending on the choices they make. I will present two pieces of work designed to help meet these needs: an operational framework outlining the steps needed to establish the net economic consequences of a given land-use decision; and a model which resolves trade-offs between food production and biodiversity conservation, but which can be generalized to other competing ecosystem services.