Supporting site planning through monetary values for biomass and nature conservation services from ecosystem accounts

Abstract

Ecosystem services can be measured physically, but also valued in monetary terms. In public planning and decision-making in Germany, multi-criteria analysis is usually used to inform decision-makers about different impacts of projects, for example, for housing and the siting of industrial or infrastructure projects. Typically, these evaluations are based on various environmental, social and economic impacts using their own specific methods and then juxtapose the different results, without providing further support for weighing various concerns. Economic evaluations attempt to assess preferences of individuals and society in relation to the outcomes that are relevant for a decision, thereby providing further support to decision-makers. Although so-called welfare values are usually used for this purpose in cost-benefit analysis, it can be shown that, in certain cases, exchange values from environmental economic accounting also fulfil that objective. This is demonstrated for the case of site planning, using maps of economic values of biomass provisioning services and ecosystem services for nature conservation. The ecosystem service values used for this purpose were determined spatially explicitly nationwide for Germany. Services for nature conservation were calculated as average costs to develop one ´biotope value point´. This unit is used in German planning law to determine ecological compensation measures for impacts on nature. Cost data were calculated from nature conservation measures to fulfil the requirements of the EU Habitats Directive. As a proxy for the biomass provisioning service, hypothetical agricultural land-lease rates with different yield potential were estimated throughout Germany. Due to a lack of other spatially specific data, timber services were valued with the average net profit of forestry businesses. A comparison shows that, on average, services for nature conservation have higher values than biomass provisioning services. This is the case even for arable land.