Abstract
Flood protection is considered one of the crucial regulating ecosystem services due to climate change and extreme weather events. As an ecosystem service, it combines the results of hydrological and ecosystem research and their implementation into land management and/or planning processes including several formally separated economic sectors. As managerial and economic interests often diverge, successful decision-making requires a common denominator in form of monetary valuation of competing trade-offs. In this paper, a methodical approach based on the monetary value of the ecosystem service provided by the ecosystem corresponding to its actual share in flood regulating processes and the value of the property protected by this service was developed and demonstrated based on an example of a medium size mountain basin (290 ha). Hydrological modelling methods (SWAT, HEC-RAS) were applied for assessing the extent of floods with different rainfalls and land uses. The rainfall threshold value that would cause flooding with the current land use but that would be safely drained if the basin was covered completely by forest was estimated. The cost of the flood protection ecosystem service was assessed by the method of non-market monetary value for estimating avoided damage costs of endangered infrastructure and calculated both for the current and hypothetical land use. The results identify areas that are crucial for water retention and that deserve greater attention in management. In addition, the monetary valuation of flood protection provided by the current but also by hypothetical land uses enables competent and well-formulated decision-making processes.
Highlights
Ecosystem services (ES), as the benefits people obtain from ecosystems [1], are outcomes of ecosystem properties—biophysical conditions, structures, and processes [2], which constitute ecosystem functions [3,4]
Despite flood protection being considered one of the crucial ecosystem services that builds on an extensive and robust hydrological research, there are still aspects that need further development. These aspects reflect the complex character of hydrological processes both affecting and affected by several economic sectors and a need for the implementation of flood assessment results to land management and planning
This is even more important in land management systems that deal with several formally separated sectoral management policies. These sectors have a legal competency over the same territory; their managerial and economic interests often diverge, successful decision making processes require a common denominator in the form of a monetary valuation of competing trade-off
Summary
Ecosystem services (ES), as the benefits people obtain from ecosystems [1], are outcomes of ecosystem properties—biophysical conditions, structures, and processes [2], which constitute ecosystem functions [3,4]. The importance of spatial relations between the ecosystems providing the services and the areas where those services are utilized is stressed by many authors [6,7,8]. Ecosystem services are usually provided within units that define processes such as watersheds, specific habitats, or other natural units [7,10]. Spatial relations are for certain ES so significant that several authors [11,12] call them landscape services. Two “identical” ecosystems protecting the nearby area from natural hazards such as landslides, erosion, or floods provide an identical supply of ecosystem service, but the value of each ES reflects the actual value of the respective protected infrastructure (human lives, property, city size etc.)
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