Reports and Peer-Reviewed Publications about Valuing Nature

Although metrics such as water use efficiency ratios are commonly employed within businesses to measurably demonstrate progress, assessing the benefits of water projects beyond a company’s four walls is much more difficult. To fill the gap, some companies are developing “replenish” methodologies to capture how quantitative or qualitative water benefits can be calculated for a given water-related community activity or conservation project. This brief introduces WWF’s perspectives on replenish and how it can fit into broader water stewardship strategies.

WWF works with partners and local communities in Iowa’s Cedar River Valley to pilot and develop new scientific approaches to inform decisions for sourcing corn more sustainably. Learn how these tools will enable public and private supply chain actors to evaluate the potential range of environmental benefits and costs of achieving sustainability goals.

Research about ecosystem services often aims to generate knowledge that influences policies and institutions for conservation and human development. However, we have limited understanding of how decision-makers use this knowledge or what factors facilitate use. Here we address this gap and report on, to our knowledge, the first quantitative analysis of the factors and conditions that explain the policy impact of ecosystem services knowledge.

The growing base of information about ecosystem services generated by ecologists, economists, and other scientists could improve the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of commodity-sourcing standards being adopted by corporations to mitigate risk in their supply chains and achieve sustainability goals. This review examines various ways that information about ecosystem services could facilitate compliance with and auditing of commodity-sourcing standards. We also identify gaps in the current state of knowledge on the ecological effectiveness of sustainability standards and demonstrate how ecosystem-service information could complement existing monitoring efforts to build credible evidence.

Ecosystem services have clear promise to help identify and protect priority areas for biodiversity. To leverage them effectively, practitioners must conduct timely analyses at appropriate scales, often with limited data. Here we use simple spatial analyses on readily available datasets to compare the distribution of five ecosystem services with tiger habitat in central Sumatra.

The limited understanding of how ecosystem service knowledge (ESK) is used in decision making constrains our ability to learn from, replicate, and convey success stories. We explore use of ESK in decision making in three international cases: national coastal planning in Belize; regional marine spatial planning on Vancouver Island, Canada; and regional land-use planning on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Ecosystem Service Assessments (ESAs) have become a popular tool for science-based policy. Yet, there are few guidelines for developing an ESA to inform a decision-making process. Drawing on the lessons of conducting ESAs around the world, we propose a set of enabling conditions and a framework for carrying out ESAs that foster high-quality results and drive action.

Recent studies that incorporate the spatial distributions of biological benefits and economic costs in conservation planning have shown that limited budgets can achieve substantially larger biological gains than when planning ignores costs. Despite concern from donors about the effectiveness of conservation interventions, these increases in efficiency from incorporating costs into planning have not yet been widely recognized. Here, we focus on what these costs are, why they are important to consider, how they can be quantified and the benefits of their inclusion in priority setting.