Ecosystem services (ES) may be defined as the human benefits generated by nature, such as forest, fauna, water, soil, or minerals, the latter being the stock of renewable and non-renewable resources that, using economic terminology, can also be identified as natural capital [1]. ES are drivers of social wellbeing emerging through their interaction with human and social capitals [2]. For instance, the contribution to human wellbeing derived from forestry and agriculture ecosystems requires human labor energy, and capital (machinery) input to convert them in societal benefits (e.g., crops and timber) [1:1].
A recent assessment carried out at the EU scale has defined and mapped a set of ES such as crops, pollination, timber, recreation, carbon sequestration, flood regulation, water purification and soil retention [3]. Limited attention has been given in the economic literature to soil erosion, water supply and regulation following wildfire events [3:1] [4]. Conversely, ecological values such as biodiversity, have been considered in the wildfire economic literature and monetised by eliciting the willingness to pay for its use value (e.g., wildlife watching) or non-use value, such as the existence value [5] [6]. Biodiversity can also be valued by its optional value, referring to the potential benefits generated by the protection of living beings because of their future bioprospecting use, such as for the production of drugs or new materials [7]. Provisioning services of forest ecosystems, such as timber and mushrooms, are usually considered in economic impact valuation or welfare analysis (cost benefit analysis) because they have a market price [8].
In terms of vulnerability, the ES most commonly affected by fire are timber supply, carbon sequestration and storage, pastures, hunting, mushrooms collection and recreation [9]. The value of those services can be either provided in biophysical units or in monetary terms. The latter can be obtained by adopting the total economic value (TEV) framework [10] [11] in combination with a “cascade model” that shows the relationships (for simplicity assumed linear) between the stock of natural capital (e.g., forest), the underpinning processes generating ecosystem services (e.g., woodland biomass, flood protection, carbon sequestration), and the benefits that contribute to human wellbeing (timber, non-timber forest products, health, safety, recreation and other cultural values, etc.) [12]. Regulating services like carbon sequestration can be the object of an ample range of values according to the methods used, fluctuating from the social cost of carbon, the price generated in the carbon market, and the marginal abatement cost of the national technology used to achieve a specific target of carbon reduction [13] [14]. Recreational values are a measure of welfare analysed by preferences for natural areas, parks, and species using travel cost methods [13:1] [15], and integrated with stated preferences, based on contingent valuation methods to assess the expected changes in number of recreationists under different fire scenarios [15:1] [16] [17] [18]. Landscape has also received attention with analysis of monetary values measuring quality [19], resilience to wildfire intensity [20] and loss of multiple values carried out by integrating the analysis of stated preference (contingent valuation method) [19:1] and burn probability [21].
In all these studies the goal has been measuring the net value change or, in other terms, the lost benefits of the pristine environment net of the regeneration caused by forest recovery [20:1] [22] [23]. The goal is estimating the net value change of the asset, that is, the difference between its pre-fire value and the estimated post-fire value (assuming a certain fire severity level) and integrating the current losses incurred throughout the time until the full recovery of that asset is obtained. This has been named as the present marginal loss (PML), which can be computed using either a more traditional geometric discount or a hyperbolic approach that penalizes less the long terms benefits (over 50 years) achieved by the recovery of the natural ecosystem (e.g., forest), as proposed by Roman et al. (2012)[24]:
where ML is the marginal loss (difference of value between pre and post-fire conditions), r is the discount rate (set by Roman et al. to 2%, but suggested to be between 1% and 3% to better reflect the social temporal preferences of society [25] rather than private market conditions — 5 to 10%), and nb is the estimated recovery time of the particular ES being assessed. PML should be added to the actual ML to estimate the total loss.
However, it should also be pointed out that the use of monetary valuation has been controversial for decades [26] [27] [28], and many alternative methods exist to account for the multiplicity of ES components and their trade-offs. A recent review of existing methods for the valuation of nature by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (approved by 139 countries) [29] [30] indicated that in less than 20% of the studies dealing with the quantification of ecosystem services, a common unit was used, and monetary units were used in a subset of these studies.
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¶ References
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