Methods for monetary valuation of ecosystem services: A scoping review

Adequate assessment of ecosystem services is important for the development of policies and management plans related to forestry activities and the environment. Carefully identified ecosystem values can determine which options policy makers should prioritize to provide the greatest benefit. There are numerous methods used by researchers to evaluate ecosystem services. The most widely applied methods are monetary valuation methods, they are often deemed to be the most pragmatic language when it comes to communication with political and business institutions. The main goal of this review is to analyse available literature using the methodology particular to the scoping review approach in order to identify and describe valuation methods that can be applied for monetary assessment of ecosystem services. As a result of the scoping review, over 20 monetary valuation techniques (including several less common methods such as willingness to sell and Delphi method) were derived from 16 literature sources. In the process of compiling the range of different methods, a few flaws and gaps in the communication of methods were observed such as lack of consistency in the names of different methods and mixing up concepts. In addition, a few areas for future research are suggested.

INTEGRAL VALUATION OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES RELATED TO WATER: HISTORICAL REVIEW APPROACH

The article describes a new idea based on the theoretical and methodological trends of the critical evaluation of ecosystem services, focused on the analysis of different global studies with the application of different methodologies, using 5 search equations and some questions were asked to answer them, which allowed the design of the background search. Its process and information analysis were made with the R and VOS viewer software. Finally, we illustrate as results 194 documents were analyzed from 2010 to 2020, showing that the most important thematic areas come from the environmental sciences and that integral valuation marks an important trend in recent years, incorporating new elements that traditional monetary valuation of ecosystem services did not consider, including spatial, sociological scenarios among others and new models of critical analysis, some methods emerge as is the case of cellular automata from which new investigations may appear for the plural or integral evaluation. The state of the art of integral valuation of the ecosystem services related to Water was built based on bibliometric analysis, using the search for scientific documents in the Scopus.

Emergy as a Tool to Evaluate Ecosystem Services: A Systematic Review of the Literature

The objective of this paper is to present a review of current research on the valuation of ecosystem services, using emergy evaluation methodology (EME). A bibliometric analysis and a systematic review were carried out between 2000 and 2020, using all of Web of Science database subfields that collected 187 papers, selected through the keywords “emergy” and “ecosystem services”. In the second part of the research, we carried out a new search on Web of Science of the 187 initial articles produced, with the words “valuation” and “economic”, in order to analyze those directly related to the evaluation of ecosystem services. The results showed that the EME method is an effective tool to evaluate ecosystem services, since it relates economic and ecological aspects in the evaluations. The research also indicated that the use of isolated methods does not appear to be the most appropriate solution, and that emergy used in combination with other methodologies can be used to obtain more accurate and comprehensive results to evaluate natural resources.