ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on refining and improving the methods for quantifying the values received from natural services to increase their reliability and to demonstrate their importance, taking care to identify the specific contributions to human welfare. It explores the design of private, public, and public–private partnership arrangements as well as incentive mechanisms that can help protect the important components of nature from degradation. Coral reefs are an integral part of an extensive and vital landscape of coastal ecosystems. Ecosystem valuation can also help to raise awareness of extremely valuable, but probably underappreciated, ecosystem services, especially when the continuation of those services is threatened. Valuation is only one of the contributions economic analysis can make to the maintenance and protection of important ecosystem services. The chapter highlights some of the ways that economic analysis can place values on the ecosystem goods and services to assist policymakers in decision making.
