The increasing benefits from ecosystems

Ecosystems provide important services and are becoming increasingly scarce relative to market goods. Substantial policy shifts are currently underway in the US and elsewhere to integrate the value of ecosystem services in investment appraisal and regulatory analysis. Yet, policy guidelines need to be improved by providing direction on how to account for the fact that benefits from ecosystem services increase over time as incomes grow and ecosystem services become scarcer. Building on economic theory and best available evidence, we propose a simple relative price change rule to adjust the benefits from future ecosystem services. Applying this rule will better enable governments to reflect the importance of scarce ecosystems for current and future generations in public decision-making. This is critical as conservation efforts have so far fallen short of their stated goals.