Trends in valuation approaches for cultural ecosystem services: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Cultural ecosystem services constitute a field of research characterised by a growing number of publications from various academic disciplines. We carried out a systematic review of the literature that explicitly assessed with the valuation of cultural ecosystem services (CES). We used the review to identify, evaluate and interpret globally available research on the valuation of CES through the Web of Science and Scopus databases from 2005 to 2022. Thus, 349 articles were included in the analysis. The first article on valuation CES was published in 2010. We observed a temporal trend towards an increase in the number of articles between 2010 and 2022. The terrestrial environment and recreational value being the most emphasised among all the analysed articles. The countries in North America and Europe presented the highest numbers of studies on the theme. We observed associations between valuation methods and typologies of CES. The most studies focused on recreational and ecotourism typology with most of them associated with non-monetary methods for valuing cultural services. However, we did not observe an association between the valuation methods and the types of ecosystems investigated in the studies. We also found a temporal trend in the keywords, with clear differentiation in the theme of the studies from 2015 onwards. The most recent themes in the research area are associated with landscape, protected areas, perception, urban green space and social media studies. In conclusion, future research should focus on considering all CES categories for unequivocal descriptions of each category, proposing the development of typologies that may be applicable in various ecosystems.