Ecosystem Service Markets

To improve our water quality, increase our wildlife habitat, and reduce flood damages, we need to increase the pace of wetland restoration throughout the Midwest. Meaningful improvement will depend on more than merely one restoration project here and another one over there. To reverse a century of destruction, we will need a new economic driver that pushes the scale and pace of restoring wetlands.

That’s why one of the key goals of the Wetlands Initiative is to create and promote innovative strategies that can shift the economic paradigm of wetland restoration.

One opportunity is to establish new markets that recognize the economic value of the ecosystem services that wetlands provide—services like naturally removing nutrient pollution from our rivers and streams, reducing soil erosion from our farms, holding floodwater on the land to reduce the cost and misery of flood damage, sequestering carbon for a cooler planet, and providing recreational opportunities.

We know these benefits have real value to both humans and wildlife. The challenge is to quantify the value of these services and establish a marketplace value for these benefits. Such “ecosystem services markets” could, in turn, motivate and compensate landowners to voluntarily restore more wetlands.

The Wetlands Initiative is working to develop, advocate, test, and implement new ecosystem services markets that could be the financial engine for large-scale wetland restoration. One such strategy the Initiative is pursuing is water quality trading.

For further reading:

Finding value in wetlands (PDF, 1 page). Fact Sheet by The Wetlands Initiative on the profitability of restored wetlands on landowner properties versus traditional row crop farming.

Eco Markets Intro: Conservation Backgrounder. Basic overview of international and domestic ecosystem service markets, reported by Ecosystem Marketplace, the leading online source of news, data, and analytics on markets and payments for ecosystem services (such as water quality, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity).

Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. A comprehensive scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world's ecosystems and the services they provide, as commissioned by the United Nations.