Valuating Natural Resources and Ecosystem Services: Systematic Review of Methods in Use

Abstract

The relevance of an ecosystem approach, which involves addressing ecosystems as an object of research, economically evaluating ecosystem services, and including the existing variety of evaluation methods and their classifications for the estimation of nature’s value, was the focus of this study. So, the aim of the current research is to develop an evaluation theory by refining approaches and methods for the economic evaluation of natural resources and ecosystem services. The research object was the evaluation practice of the former USSR, Russia, and countries outside Russia. Employing research methods of systematization and content analysis with evolutionary and ecosystem approaches, about three hundred scientific papers have been the subject of this review. The study (1) reveals the evolutionary changes in economic evaluation approaches and methods of natural resources and ecosystem services; (2) discloses the features of the existing classifications of economic evaluation methods; and (3) offers the author’s classification, which is based on the five classification criteria: evaluation type, evaluation approaches, evaluation character (nature), evaluation methods, and market discourse. We believe that understanding the development of scientific thought about evaluation methods and their classifications will make it possible to increase the reliability of the estimation results in natural resource and environmental economics.