Description
The continued loss of ecosystems and biodiversity is endangering the prosperity of current and future generations (Dasgupta, 2021). To make better informed decisions about the trade-offs involved in ecosystem management, land-use change, or any activity affecting ecosystems and biodiversity, we need better information about the full importance of ecosystems to our wellbeing.
The Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD) has been developed with the long-term goal of providing robust and easily accessible information on the economic benefits of ecosystems and biodiversity, and the costs of their loss, to support decision making regarding nature conservation, ecosystem restoration and sustainable land management.
The focus of the ESVD is to gather information on economic welfare values related to ecosystem services measured in monetary units. By communicating such values in monetary units, the tool provides recognisable information that can be used to internalise the importance of Nature in decision making. See the ESVD page on the ES-Partnership website for more background information on history and example applications.
The ESVD currently contains over 5,400 value records from over 800 studies distributed across all biomes, ecosystem services and geographic regions. Their repository of valuation studies contains over 5000 studies and the number is growing continuously so the number of value records in the ESVD will increase over time.
Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay.
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