Valuing ecosystem resilience

Abstract

The concept of ecosystem resilience is being increasingly discussed as a driver of values people attach to biodiversity. It implies that marginal deteriorations in ecosystem conditions can abruptly result in non-marginal and irreversible changes in ecosystem functioning and the economic values that the ecosystem generates. This challenges the traditional approach to the valuation of biodiversity, which has focused on quantifying values attached to individual species or other elements of ecosystems. As yet, little is known about the value society attaches to changes in ecosystem resilience. This paper investigates this value. A discrete choice experiment is conducted to estimate implicit prices for attributes utilized to describe ecosystem resilience using the Border Ranges rainforests in Australia as an example. We find evidence that implicit prices for the attributes used to infer the values people hold for ecosystem resilience are positive and statistically significantly different from zero.