Valuing Marine Ecosystem Services Loss from Oil Spills for Use in Cost-Benefit Analysis of Preventive Measures

The coastal zones globally are under increasing pressure from often competing human uses, such as aquaculture, sea transport, energy production, conservation, fishing, and recreation (Turner and Schaafsma 2015). Climate change causing sea level rise, warming and acidification, put additional pressures on coastal zones and management (Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). Traditionally; state, regional and local agencies have managed marine and especially coastal resources relatively statically and sector-by-sector, with little consideration for connections between and within human and ecological systems (Holland et al. 2010, Liu et al. 2015). Further, the un-priced, non-market values of coastal resources have often remained implicit or even ignored (Kumar 2010). Overall, this approach has been unsuccessful in managing the coastal zone sustainably, leading to outcomes with lower net benefits to society than would otherwise have been possible (Holland et al. 2010).