Biodiversity Economics: The Value of Pollination Services to Egypt
نویسندگان
چکیده
Pollinator populations are under severe pressure worldwide because of man-made intensification in land use, including the use of pesticides and fertilizers. The majority of wild and crop plants are fully or partially dependent on pollinators for their reproduction. Loss of pollinators has already caused measurable declines in the populations of many wild plants in Europe. Many Egyptian crops are fully or partially dependent on pollinators for their yields, and data exist on the market values of Egyptian crops. We therefore use these to estimate the 2004 costs to the Egyptian economy of a catastrophic loss of pollinators. The annual cost to the Egyptian economy of losing its pollinators would be approximately LE 13.5 billion ($2.4 billion), 3.3% of the 2003 GDP.
منابع مشابه
Valuing Insect Pollination Services with Cost of Replacement
Value estimates of ecosystem goods and services are useful to justify the allocation of resources towards conservation, but inconclusive estimates risk unsustainable resource allocations. Here we present replacement costs as a more accurate value estimate of insect pollination as an ecosystem service, although this method could also be applied to other services. The importance of insect pollina...
متن کاملEconomic value of tropical forest to coffee production.
Can economic forces be harnessed for biodiversity conservation? The answer hinges on characterizing the value of nature, a tricky business from biophysical, socioeconomic, and ethical perspectives. Although the societal benefits of native ecosystems are clearly immense, they remain largely unquantified for all but a few services. Here, we estimate the value of tropical forest in supplying polli...
متن کاملEconomic Evaluation of Pollination Services Comparing Coffee Landscapes in Ecuador and Indonesia
Biodiversity conservation through land-use systems on private land is becoming a pressing environmental policy issue. Agroforestry, such as shade-coffee production, contributes to biodiversity conservation. However, falling coffee prices force many coffee growers to convert their sites into economically more attractive land uses. We performed an economic evaluation of coffee pollination by bees...
متن کاملConservation Planning for Ecosystem Services
Despite increasing attention to the human dimension of conservation projects, a rigorous, systematic methodology for planning for ecosystem services has not been developed. This is in part because flows of ecosystem services remain poorly characterized at local-to-regional scales, and their protection has not generally been made a priority. We used a spatially explicit conservation planning fra...
متن کاملEcosystem Services and the Economics of Biodiversity Conservation
The concept of ecosystems services provides a robust and complementary rationale for biodiversity conservation to the traditional arguments based on intrinsic value. In principle, it also provides a mechanism for optimizing investments in biodiversity conservation and directing them to where they are most useful. This requires the valuation of ecosystem services, and in particular, the contribu...
متن کامل