Cost to restore and conserve urban forest fragment

Abstract

Human well-being relies on natural flow of goods and services provided by nature and the ecosystem structure and diversity are important components to maintain the whole system functioning. Expenses for replacing natural capital can be assumed as an indirect measure of costs to restore human welfare and represent the economic lost in ecosystem services that were previously provided by the fragment. This study used the economic expenses for restoration and maintenance of the complex of Atlantic Forest and dunes fragment to estimate the conservation value of the area. We uphold an assumption that expenses for restoring will vanish through time and be replaced by decreasing costs in maintenance. The Present Value (PV) estimated indicated that this was true for the first two years of restoration, but will fluctuate depending on the enhancement or worsening of the economic scenario. We then emphasize the importance of maintenance actions because the pace of anthropogenic pressure upon urban natural areas is higher than the time required for natural ecological restoration and species colonization due to increasing anthropogenic pressure, degradation of urban natural areas is occurring faster than the rate of natural ecological restoration and species colonization.