Stephen Polasky, Regents Prof Fesler-Lampert Prof of Ecological/Environmental Economics
University of Minnesota
Nature contributes to human well-being in a wide variety of ways, from regulating environmental conditions, to providing both material goods and non-material services. Current political and economic systems typically do not account for these values, nor provide adequate incentives for conserving the natural capital necessary for their continued provision. Correcting this problem requires integrating natural sciences and social sciences to assess the value nature’s contributions and to incorporate these values into policy and market mechanisms. I discuss examples of quantifying and valuing nature’s contributions to people and the potential for providing incentives for provision of these benefits from local scales (watershed analysis), to national scale (US and China), to global scale analysis.