Abstract
Economic assessment provides one strand of an overall integrated (sustainability) analysis. The core aim of the economic assessment process is to determine how changes in ecosystem services provision are translated into changes in human welfare. The chapter discusses available valuation methods and key issues for appropriate economic valuation of ecosystem services. Since sustainable policies often require choosing between options that differ in temporal patterns of costs and benefits, or that differ in their duration, discounting can be used to compare costs and benefit that occur at different points in time. Different discount rates have different implications for trade-off analysis, including the consideration of intergeneration equity. However, it may not be possible to value all impacts through economic approaches, because of practical or ethical considerations. Contested issues which are commonplace in coastal management, also require the consideration of equity impacts, for which economics/social sciences provide different approaches to inform trade-offs and decision-making.
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