Naturally functioning ecological systems such as estuaries, rivers, wetlands and beaches provide many different goods and services to human society. An ecosystem service supports the conditions and processes through which naturally functioning ecosystems sustain life and fulfill human well-being. Ecosystem goods, on the other hand, represent the material products that are obtained from natural systems for human use. Ecosystem goods and services occur at multiple scales, from climate regulation and carbon sequestration at the global scale, to flood protection, water supply, soil formation, nutrient cycling, waste treatment and pollination at the local and regional scales.

They also span a range of degree of direct connection to human welfare, with those listed above being less directly connected, while food, raw materials, genetic resources, recreational opportunities, and aesthetic and cultural values are more directly connected. For this reason, ecologists, social scientists and environmental managers are increasingly interested in assessing the economic values associated with ecosystem goods and services associated with natural systems.



Figure 1 represents an integrated framework members of the EcoValue Project team have developed for the assessment of ecosystem goods and services within the coastal zone, including consideration of ecological structures and processes, land use decisions, human welfare and the feedbacks between them. As the schematic shows, ecosystem goods and services form a pivotal conceptual link between human and ecological systems. Ecosystem structures and processes are influenced by long-term, large-scale biophysical drivers (i.e., tectonic pressures, global weather patterns) which in turn create the necessary conditions for providing the ecosystem goods and services people value.

The concept of ecosystem goods and services used in the EcoValue project is inherently anthropocentric: it is the presence of human beings as welfare-maximizing agents that enables the translation of basic ecological structures and processes into value-laden entities. Through laws and rules, land use management and policy decisions, individuals and social groups make tradeoffs between these values. In turn, these land use decisions directly modify the structures and processes of the coastal zone by engineering and construction and/or indirectly by modifying the physical, biological and chemical processes of the natural system (see Boumans et al. 2002)

The concept of ecosystem goods and services is useful for coastal zone science and management for three fundamental reasons. First, it helps us synthesize essential ecological and economic concepts, allowing researchers and managers to link human and ecological systems in a viable and policy relevant manner. Second, it draws upon the latest available economic methods for economic valuation. Third, scientists and policy makers can use the concept to evaluate social and political tradeoffs between coastal land use development and conservation alternatives.

In the EcoValue Project, we use the concept of goods and services to describe a diversity of human values associated with coastal systems. In particular, we focus on the estimation of economic values and how these values can be used to inform decisions about the future of the coastal zone.