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135 Environmental Justice Challenges for Ecosystem Service Valuation MATTHEW A. WEBER In pursuing improved ecosystem services management, there is also an opportunity to work toward environmental justice. The practice of environmental valuation can assist with both goals, but as typically employed obscures distributional analysis. Furthermore , valuation techniques may provide misleading or flawed information for weighing outcomes across groups. Pitfalls, solutions, and research needs are summarized at the nexus of valuation and environmental justice. INTRODUCTION Improving environmental management for the benefit of humanity requires a better understanding of the value of nature. The discipline of ecosystem services seeks this understanding and has become a popular research paradigm. Daily (1997) provides one of the earliest ecosystem services references, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) provides the first global view. There are now thousands of publications on ecosystem services (Cox and Searle, 2009).1 A traditional focus of the literature is to use information on nature’s value to consider ways of increasing the aggregate net benefits of ecosystem services and thus utilize those resources more efficiently. Given the attraction of efficiency and the difficulties in its achievement, it can be easy to forget further social goals. Yet while revising ecosystem services management, there is also an important opportunity to work toward environmental justice. This raises new research issues since distributional impacts must be assessed.2 A process must also be undergone to decide what does and does not constitute a just outcome. A specific procedure for environmental justice analysis is not outlined here—instead this chapter takes the related goal of examining how well the tools of ecosystem service valuation support such an analysis in general. If ecosystem service benefits are misrepresented, both efficiency and distributional analyses will be flawed. While many of the issues discussed here are not new, the tools of valuation are specialized, and their limitations may not be well known. Furthermore, some problems are particularly troublesome when cast in the light of the intentions of environmental justice. For our purposes, the term “valuation” refers to a subset of ecosystem service research that attempts to estimate ecosystem service benefits in dollar terms, so results are compatible with 136| Matthew A. Weber a formal benefit-cost analysis (hereafter BCA). Valuation is a challenge since ecosystem service benefits are often unpriced in markets and require specialized research to monetize their value. A variety of nonmarket valuation techniques have been developed for this purpose (for background see Freeman, 2003). Governmental responsibilities lend motivation, for example, all new U.S. federal regulations with an expected impact of $100 million per year on the national economy require use of BCA by Executive Order 12866.3 Without valuation there is no direct way to account for nonmarket environmental benefits in the balance, and we risk assigning them an effectual value of zero. The promise of improved accounting has spurred the spread of ecosystem service thinking into government, marking a new level of maturity for the field. Notable examples in the United States include the 2008 Farm Bill naming of a new Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets housed within the U.S. Forest Service (U.S. Forest Service, 2010); the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ecology research program being reorganized as the Ecosystem Services Research Program (U.S. EPA, 2010a), including a multiyear plan (U.S. EPA, 2008a); and the National Ecosystem Services Partnership, encompassing federal and nonfederal members (Duke University, 2009). Governmental involvement is significant since agencies manage a significant share of natural resources. In the United States, roughly 30 percent of the land is federally managed; 50 percent in the West (Natural Resources Council of Maine, 2000).4 In addition, the U.S. EPA regulates navigable water resources through the Clean Water Act and air through the Clean Air Act. Governmental involvement also underscores the further challenge to environmental management of incorporating environmental justice. Environmental justice is a broadly recognized social goal (e.g., background in Cole and Foster, 2001) and is a mandated consideration for U.S. federal agencies by Executive Order 12898. However there is a complication in that there is no single approach to addressing environmental justice. The U.S. EPA offers a general definition (U.S. EPA, 2010b): Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across this Nation. It will be achieved...

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