HL.b.10—Ecosystem services valuation

Ecological economics gives ecosystem services greater weight, but translating them into payments can redistribute power as well as money.

A resource-depleted country may pay a resource-rich country to preserve forests, biodiversity or carbon storage; this can finance conservation while raising sovereignty, local-rights and fair-distribution tensions.

If payments reach a national government but restrict Indigenous or local land use without consent or benefit sharing, a global service gain can reproduce environmental injustice.

Check ecological additionality, permanence, who controls the resource, who is paid, whose use is restricted and whether intrinsic or cultural values are crowded out.

A monetary estimate is a decision aid, not the service's full worth or automatic consent to outside control.