January 5, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Marine ecosystems provide myriad benefits to humans—from supplying food to tempering our climate to regulating the air we breathe. To use our oceans wisely, we need to understand the economic value of these “ecosystem services.”
A new nationwide NOAA study is the first to assess the validity of published studies that assigned economic values to U.S. marine ecosystem services based on public opinion surveys.
Economists use stated preference methods to derive economic values from how people respond to carefully worded questions in interviews or surveys. These methods are frequently used to estimate the value of ecosystem services that are not bought or sold in markets. The goal of the study was to evaluate the reliability of these estimates in the existing literature for use in fisheries and ecosystem assessments.
“For effective ecosystem-based fisheries management, we need to better understand the role of human activities and their associated economic values. We need to know that these values are valid to weigh the tradeoffs involved in different uses of the ocean. Our research contributes to this understanding,” said study leader Dan Lew, economist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “But our findings have far broader applications. Many decisions by natural resource managers and policy-makers must be made quickly based on economic valuation data in the existing literature. They need to know if that literature is reliable.”