REVALUING ECOSYSTEMS: PATHWAYS FOR SCALING UP THE INCLUSION OF ECOSYSTEM VALUE IN DECISION MAKING

The document argues that ecosystems are often managed for short-term gain because their non-marketed services—such as climate and water regulation—are treated as having no value. To address this, it outlines six pathways: mainstreaming ecosystem values in national economic accounts, improving local decision-making through an 'ecosystem service corps', scaling up natural infrastructure for water and coastal defense, increasing corporate investments in the food and beverage sector, using 'restoration bonds' for agricultural landscapes, and utilizing strategic communication following natural disasters to highlight community resilience.

• A global assessment indicates that approximately 60 percent (15 of 24) of assessed ecosystem services have been degraded, posing a significant threat to human development goals.
• Traditional economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fail to reflect a country's reliance on natural assets and do not show if economic growth occurs at the expense of these processes.
• The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 2012, provides an international framework to account for natural resources, ecosystem inputs, and environmental protection expenditures.
• Natural infrastructure, such as wetlands and coral reefs, can be more cost-effective and resilient to extreme events and climate change than traditional built infrastructure.
• The food and beverage sector is highly dependent on ecosystem services for raw materials; for example, Amazon deforestation and climate change contributed to a 2014 drought in Brazil that caused global coffee prices to spike by 50 percent.
• Restoration bonds are proposed as a financing mechanism to help smallholder farmers transition from degrading practices to sustainable production by providing risk-adjusted financial returns for investors and technical support for farmers.
• Strategic communication following natural disasters can be used to reframe the challenge of disaster recovery into an action-oriented path for investing in ecosystems to build community resilience.
• In Belize, the 'Coastal Capital' project demonstrated that tourism dependent on coral reefs and mangroves contributed an amount equivalent to 15 percent of the country's GDP in 2007.
• In Botswana, water accounts revealed that the agriculture sector is the largest water user at 43 percent, but provides very low value added per unit of water use ($0.03 pula/m3) compared to the services sector ($31 pula/m3).

APA

BURKE, L., RANGANATHAN, J., & WINTERBOTTOM, R. (n.d.). REVALUING ECOSYSTEMS: PATHWAYS FOR SCALING UP THE INCLUSION OF ECOSYSTEM VALUE IN DECISION MAKING. World Resources Institute. https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Revaluing_Ecosystems_April_2015_2.pdf

Chicago

BURKE, LAURETTA, JANET RANGANATHAN, and ROBERT WINTERBOTTOM. REVALUING ECOSYSTEMS: PATHWAYS FOR SCALING UP THE INCLUSION OF ECOSYSTEM VALUE IN DECISION MAKING. World Resources Institute, n.d. https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Revaluing_Ecosystems_April_2015_2.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=BURKE |first1=LAURETTA |last2=RANGANATHAN |first2=JANET |last3=WINTERBOTTOM |first3=ROBERT |title=REVALUING ECOSYSTEMS: PATHWAYS FOR SCALING UP THE INCLUSION OF ECOSYSTEM VALUE IN DECISION MAKING |publisher=World Resources Institute |url=https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Revaluing_Ecosystems_April_2015_2.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{burkendrevaluing, author = {BURKE, LAURETTA and RANGANATHAN, JANET and WINTERBOTTOM, ROBERT}, title = {{REVALUING ECOSYSTEMS: PATHWAYS FOR SCALING UP THE INCLUSION OF ECOSYSTEM VALUE IN DECISION MAKING}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, url = {https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Revaluing_Ecosystems_April_2015_2.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }