September 2014: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has released a summary report that makes the case for the economic valuation of biodiversity and provides a strategy for implementing biodiversity valuation across the domains of policy-making, public administration and business. The report, titled ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) Challenges and Responses,’ recounts the conceptual and historical origins of the TEEB, as well as well the challenges and opportunities it faces in mainstreaming biodiversity valuation at local, national and international scales.

Economic valuation, according to the report, is a powerful tool to make nature visible in policies and decisions that currently fail to take it into account. It stresses that while TEEB treats valuation as an important human institution, it does not propose it as a “one-size-fit-all, cost-benefit-based stewardship model for the whole Earth.” Instead, the initiative views economic valuation as a holistic, context-dependent tool involving three different levels of action: a method to recognize a wide-range of cultural and biophysical benefits; a tool to demonstrate the trade-offs between land-use options; and a resource to capture value through economic mechanisms that include not only markets but other forms of decision-making, such as legislation, liability rules or eco-labels.

The report also addresses four “widespread and legitimate concerns about economic valuation of nature’s services” and describes how TEEB has taken these concerns into account in designing its approach to valuation. These four concerns are related to: subjectivity (e.g. values unique to certain people, places, and times); incommensurability (e.g. between economic values and human rights or the intrinsic value of other species); uncertainty (e.g. between current and future well-being); and financialization (e.g. the risk that economic valuation will lead to the commodification and privatization of nature).

As TEEB moves forward with its implementation phase, the report emphasizes the importance of quality, transparency and inclusion for building a common vision and strategy among the ‘TEEB community,’ which consists of several hundred economists, ecologists, social scientists, policy-makers, administrators and business professionals. As a model for collaboration, the report offers the ‘TEEB for Business Coalition,’ which was established to standardize methods for natural capital accounting. [Publication: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) Challenges and Responses]