Valuing our National Marine Sanctuaries

Abstract

Ocean resources have long been an important component of the identity and culture of our country and few would dispute that they have great value. Where there is debate, however, lies in how these resources should be utilized and who should receive the benefits. The designation of a National Marine Sanctuary carries with it a connotation that the area being designated and the resources therein are particularly unique. Valuation of these resources must take into consideration a range of sanctuary-specific issues. Currently, the United States has 13 National Marine sanctuaries; 11 of these are for the conservation of natural resources and two are dedicated to the protection of cultural resources. The stewardship of these sanctuaries is of national importance, yet involves a broad range of local concerns that affect the valuation process. Additionally, sanctuary management is inherently a complicated process, often involving multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. Management of sanctuary resources is necessarily collaborative in nature, involving all governmental entities with responsibility for sanctuary resources as well as representatives of all groups who have a stake in the process. These may include those who make their living from the resources found in sanctuaries or those in citizen groups whose goal is to protect those resources. The ways in which these various stakeholders value the resources are as disparate as their reasons for participating in their management. However, the most difficult stakeholder group's value to take into consideration is the U.S. population as a whole. As a national resource, every citizen holds a claim to ownership of sanctuary resources. However, most of the attention is often paid to local stakeholders who use the resource directly. The organization of this paper is as follows. A brief description of sanctuary resources is provided followed by a discussion of the role of socioeconomic analysis in the management of these resources. The next section is a short primer in valuation, in which the various types of values are explained, followed by a discussion of the link between values and the health of environmental resources. A brief introduction to valuation methodology follows in which some of the more popular valuation techniques are described and the concept of opportunity cost is discussed. Case studies are provided in the next section, in which various applications of resource valuation in the National Marine Sanctuary program are illustrated. The final section describes how sanctuary values must be used to incorporate the preferences of both users and the population as a whole, and the need for a comprehensive set of values to achieve the goal of holistic sanctuary management.