Global | Ecosystem restoration activities, costs and benefits, nature conservation, sustainable land management, cost functions & value transfer | Status: Completed May 2022
Contribution to data collection and analysis of TEER Initiative
The Economics of Ecosystem Restoration (TEER) is a multi-partner initiative aimed at compiling and analysing information on the costs and benefits of many different types of ecosystem restoration activities under different types of management in different biomes. Activities of the initiative have so far focused on the development of a standard framework for recording of the costs and benefits by restoration projects, and a companion template for data collection which facilitates entry of the data in a joint database. Building on this, efforts have now turned to data collection directly from projects active on the ground.
One of the main challenges in collecting data directly from project managers is to find the proper incentive to gather the relevant data, fill out and submit the template. The strategy of the TEER secretariat to overcome this challenge is to ensure that the respondent gains new insight in the process, such as information about the potential benefits from their restoration interventions and how those compare to the projected costs. FAO’s Forest Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) is acting as the secretariat of the TEER initiative, coordinating inputs from different partners and centralizing the data collected.
The Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSD) and Brander Environmental Economics (BEE) has contributed to the TEER data collection and analysis with the following objectives:
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Expand the quantity of data on ecosystem restoration costs in the TEER database.
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Understand how ecosystem restoration costs vary with the type of ecosystem, restoration intervention, level of degradation and other predictors in order to estimate restoration costs a new project sites (intervention units).
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Understand how ecosystem service values vary with the condition of natural capital (e.g., gradient of ecosystem health) and therefore how we can forecast changes in economic value a ecosystems deteriorate, change from one land use to another, or are restored.
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Provide evidence to support economic arguments for investing in ecosystem restoration by enabling the direct comparison of restoration costs and benefits.
Involved user groups and ESVD applications
In this project we aim to show the benefits of using the ecosystem services approach to take the 'full' value of grasslands, agriculture and (inland) wetlands into account. We are specifically targeting the following user groups through the following ESVD applications:
International Governmental Organisations
The ESVD works together with the FAO on an initiative to collect standardized data about the costs and benefits of ecosystem restoration worldwide
COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
The ESVD plays a crucial role in conducting Cost-Benefit Analyses, exemplified by its partnership in The Economics of Ecosystem Restoration (TEER), a multi-partner initiative focused on collecting standardized data regarding the global costs and benefits of ecosystem restoration.
IMPACT ASSESSMENTS
With the ESVD, we are assessing the impact of land cover changes through the monetary valuation of land cover changes. This informs on the changes in welfare as a result of the changes in land cover. This is useful information to be used by the government for sustainably managing the land.