Understanding the economic value of nature and the services it provides to humanity has become increasingly important for local, national and global policy and decision making. However, problems arise in that it is difficult to obtain meaningful values for goods and services that ecosystems...

Practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, land management, and biodiversity conservation are increasingly interested in using economic instruments that promise "win-win" solutions for conservation and human livelihoods. However, practitioners often lack guidance for selecting and...

The purpose of this note is to set out the underlying philosophy of the ecosystem services approach as it is applied in UK policy circles. The aim is to clarify some flexible "ground rules" which should guide both the use of this type of decision support tool itself, and the interpretation of...

Mapping of ecosystem services' (ESS) values means valuing ESS in monetary terms across a relatively large geographical area and assessing how values vary across space. Thereby, mapping of ESS values reveals additional information as compared to traditional site-specific ESS valuation, which is...