Abstract
The main objective of this study is to assess the economic value of the Brazilian Amazon’s ecosystem services accruing to Brazilians based on a meta-analysis of the Brazilian valuation literature. Insight in these local values provides an important benchmark to demonstrate the importance of preserving the Brazilian Amazon forest. The review covers almost 30 years of Brazilian valuation research on the Amazon, published predominantly in Portuguese, highlighting a high degree of study and data heterogeneity. The estimated mean value of the provision of habitat for species, carbon sequestration, water regulation, recreation and ecotourism to local populations is about 410 USD/ha/year. The standard deviation is however high, reflecting a wide dispersion in the distribution of values. Between 50 and 70 percent of the variation in these values can be explained with the help of the estimated meta-regression models, resulting in considerable prediction errors when applying a within-sample resampling procedure. These findings demonstrate the need for a more robust, common ecosystem services accounting and valuation framework before these values can be scaled up and aggregated across the entire Brazilian Amazon.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0268425 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-20 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Early online date | 19 May 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:World Bank Group (0000), Roy Brouwer and Stale Navrud received funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2022 Brouwer et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding
World Bank Group (0000), Roy Brouwer and Stale Navrud received funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
