Approaches and Challenges for Valuing Coastal Ocean Ecosystem Services

Coastal and ocean environments provide a number of important benefits to humans.  However, a growing variety and intensity of human activities (e.g., energy production, fishing, coastal development, transportation), coupled with the impacts of climate change, threaten the sustained delivery of these ecosystem services.  Moreover, the processes and ecosystems that humans rely on for these services are poorly understood, scarcely monitored, and often only appreciated after they are lost.  Marine spatial planning and other approaches to ecosystem scale management require knowledge about tradeoffs between various services and about the true costs and benefits of policy decisions for humans and ecosystems.  The Natural Capital Project, a partnership among Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, is in the midst of a 2-year project to develop a suite of spatially-explicit ecosystem service models called Marine InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs). Marine InVEST 1) maps and values the services that flow from coastal and ocean environments under current and future management and climate change scenarios 2) is highly flexible for use with diverse habitats, policy issues, stakeholders, data limitations, and spatial and temporal scales 3) includes modules for a variety of services (models currently available include: food from fisheries and aquaculture, recreation, coastal protection from erosion and inundation, and energy generation; future models will quantify and value nursery habitat, transformation and sequestration of wastes, and cultural services) 4) includes process-based models that consist of a  biophysical step, where supply of the service is quantified, a use step where demand for the service is quantified, and an economic step for valuation in monetary terms.  The models run in ArcGIS based on user-defined input layers that describe climate conditions and human use patterns in the form of alternative scenarios.  The initial application of Marine InVEST is underway along the West Coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada where we are collaborating closely with a public-private group overseeing marine spatial planning and ecosystem-scale management of the area.  We will show preliminary outputs for: coastal protection from erosion, food from aquaculture and fisheries, energy generation, and recreation for wildlife viewing.   We will discuss challenges and opportunities in developing and applying this approach in Vancouver Island and temperate and tropical areas around the world.