ABSTRACT
Scientific literature and countless reports show that over the past decades biodiversity has been lost at an unprecedented rate (e.g. Foley et al., 2005; MEA, 2005; Worm et al., 2006). Biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecosystems are attributable to multiple causes, most of which are related to human activity, such as population growth and economic development in many regions of the world (NEAA, 2008). Perhaps one of the most important “riders of the biodiversity apocalypse” is land use change, through habitat degradation and destruction. As a result, the impact of spatialeconomic development on ecological systems is attracting more and more attention within the fast expanding field of policy evaluation (Ison et al., 2002; Polasky et al., 2008). The inclusion of ecological aspects within the evaluation framework has, without any doubt, consequences for the use and methodological development of the two standard analytical techniques in ex ante evaluation, multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) (Hanley and Spash, 1993; Farrow and Toman, 1999; Janssen, 2001; Belton and Stewart, 2002; Bateman et al., 2003; Pope et al., 2004; Sheate et al., 2005; Sijtsma, 2006; Sukhdev, 2008). The goal of this chapter is to elaborate on these consequences and develop
a method that enables evaluation analysts (“evaluators”) and (other) researchers to include biodiversity impacts explicitly in the evaluation framework. To this end, we introduce a so-called “nature value indicator” that is based on widely available ecological data. Because of this integration of ecological insights in economic decision procedures, this chapter analyses the evaluation of spatial-economic development and planning from a much more interdisciplinary ecological-economic perspective than is usually the case. This, in fact, is the main contribution of the chapter.
