Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment

Ecosystem Service Valuation

There has been increasing emphasis on the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to ensure government policy decisions are evidence-based and represent value for money. However, the use of CBA to evaluate environmental policies requires a comprehensive and robust set of monetary values for ecosystem services. New Zealand’s Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) has previously investigated how environmental considerations have been integrated in the budgetary process. One of the key barriers to evaluating budgetary initiatives is the lack of monetary values for many environmental benefits.

Currently, the CBAx database maintained by the Treasury provides the most comprehensive and accessible range of New Zealand specific monetary values for natural capital and ecosystem service valuation. However, the database is limited in terms of the scope and coverage of environmental values. Recent changes to New Zealand’s environmental policy settings demonstrate the need for robust environmental valuation in project assessment.

The last comprehensive assessment of the value of New Zealand’s ecosystem services undertaken by Patterson and Cole was released in 2013. This study applied benefit transfer techniques to derive a standard set of values. Monetary values were presented for a range of New Zealand ecosystems and associated ecosystem services and are still used in environmental valuation assessments. The standardised nature of these values facilitates a range of applications including assessment of trade-offs between different dimensions of the environment and between environmental and economic objectives. However, there is a need for an updated set of ecosystem service values to account for methodological improvements in valuation techniques and more recent valuation studies.

Accordingly, this Request for Proposal seeks consultancy work to provide a standardised set of monetary values for New Zealand’s ecosystem services.