A new marina is an attractive proposition: it brings in high-value houses, increases population and arguably makes a town a more desirable destination. But as an employee of the council, in the back of your mind you’re starting to worry that bulldozing the mangroves to make way for the houses might create a whole host of problems that the council and community will end up paying for. You would like to approach your elected members with a justification as to why mangroves are better than marinas.

Fortunately, a lot of people around the world have faced the problem of valuing ecosystems, and have come up with some pretty innovative solutions. Mangroves provide flood protection, they purify water, are fish nurseries and contain valuable biodiversity. The challenge is to figure out the value of these services, and how that value stacks up against the projected benefit of the marina. Ideally you would like a relatively rapid but robust approach to see if it is even worth mounting the argument.

The Toolkit for Ecosystem Services Site based Assessment (TESSA) has been developed by Birdlife International so non-experts can measure several ecosystem services rapidly and cheaply, but robustly. TESSA guides non-experts through a selection of accessible, low-cost methods, to identify the ecosystem services that are important at a site, and evaluate the benefits that people get now, compared with those expected under alternative land-uses.

Using these sorts of tools, you might just be able to develop a dollar for dollar comparison between mangroves and a marina, and help your elected members understand whether or not your coastline is fine just the way it is.

More info: http://www.birdlife.org/worldwide/science/assessing-ecosystem-services-tessa

What examples of ecosystem services have you used in your council?
How has it worked?