Metro Vancouver's aquatic ecosystems provide $30 to $60 billion in benefits annually - study

Tiffany Crawford, Vancouver Sun 



VANCOUVER - The David Suzuki Foundation has attempted to put a dollar figure on the non-market value of Metro Vancouver's aquatic ecosystems, releasing a study that suggests they provide $30 billion to $60 billion in benefits every year.

The study, to be released Wednesday at 10 a.m., looks at services across nine land classes in the Georgia Strait and the major watersheds that empty into it, most notably the Fraser River.

The authors admit attaching values to services such as the esthetic quality and cultural elements like religious or spiritual worth is tricky.

However, they hope that by doing so, the research will aid further studies to help guide policies that will protect marine ecosystems.

To arrive at a dollar value, the authors classified services for Lower Mainland residents into four groups: Provisions, including drinking water, food, raw material and medicine; Regulations, including gas, water and climate regulations; Habitat, for instance the plants that are essential in the marine food chain; And culture, including tourism, recreation and the esthetic value that attracts people to live and play in the area.

The authors, Michelle Molnar, Maya Kocian and David Batker, say the findings from the study are "compelling."

"Through benefits such as protecting against flooding, assuring water supply, buffering climate instability, supporting fisheries and food production, maintaining critical habit, providing waste treatment, and more, the Lower Mainland's aquatic ecosystems are providing $30 billion to $60 billion in benefits every year," the report says.

The top service values, according to the study, are esthetic and recreation, estimated between $23 billion to $44 billion per year.

Following that, water supply, valued at $2.3 billion to $7 billion a year and disturbance regulation, worth between $2 billion to $5 billion, round out the top three service values.

Examples of disturbance regulation include storm protection, flood control, drought recovery and other habitat responses.

Only 30 per cent of known services were valued for the study, the authors say, and therefore more studies "are critically needed to update valuations and further justify investment in natural capital."

The authors say they used a variety of methods from economists to assign a value to non-market services, for example, looking at travel costs. Recreation areas, the report says, can be valued by what visitors are willing to pay to travel to it, including the imputed value of their time.

"Determining the value of ecosystem goods and values is straightforward when they are traded in the market," the report says. "Depending on the information available, measuring the value of a specific non-market good or service can range from easy, to possible but difficult, to impossible."

The study concludes that by placing a value on these services, people will understand the importance of shifting investment in projects that damage ecosystem services to investments that improve and sustain them.


