Ecological benefits assessment: A policy‐oriented alternative to regional ecological risk assessment

Abstract

As the focus of many environmental and resource management decisions shifts to larger ecological units such as watersheds and ecoregions, the respective roles of ecological risk and ecological benefits must be reassessed. At larger ecological scales, risk becomes much more difficult to characterize because of the focus on the system rather than individual species. However, quantifying the monetary value of many ecological benefits is also difficult because no direct measures of their value exist, and the indirect techniques used by economists are not fully accepted in some policy‐making settings. This dilemma may be resolved by considering ecological resource/service flows, which are ecological benefits in physical rather than monetary units. By assessing the whole range of resource/service flows and the changes to each that would result from different management/control alternatives, scientists would be able to provide policy‐makers a much better basis for their decisions, and the resulting assessment would characterize changes in ecological features that are more familiar to both policy‐makers and the public.

Key Words:

• ecological risk assessment
• ecological benefits
• cost‐benefit analysis
• expert judgement