This section is an excerpt from the paper “Best Practices for Integrating Ecosystem Services into Federal Decision Making.”

Benefit-relevant indicators (BRIs) represent the minimum requirement for measurement that links policy options to ecosystem services analysis. BRIs can be used in intuitive decision making and tradeoff evaluation and as inputs to benefits assessment (monetary and nonmonetary approaches). BRIs, when used with nonmonetary methods like multicriteria analysis, can reveal options that produce the highest ecosystem services benefits for a given amount of spending, even when benefits cannot be monetized.¹

BRIs in Intuitive Decision Making

Can BRIs stand alone as an input to decision making? Absolutely. By design, BRIs are more informative and intuitive inputs to ecosystem services analysis and stakeholder deliberations than purely biophysical measures or biophysical measures that are less directly relevant to social welfare. When decision makers prefer to form their own judgments, resolve their own tradeoffs, and set their own priorities (or if they lack the time or money to engage in preference evaluation methods), BRIs represent a more precise and transparent alternative to purely narrative claims of ecosystem services production. When a decision is being taken using BRIs, a basic, helpful step can be to construct an “alternatives matrix” that depicts each policy option’s associated (measured or modeled) BRI outcomes (Table 1).

Table 1. Alternatives matrix for considering ecosystem services in intuitive decision making

Source: National Ecosystem Services Partnership. 2016. Federal Resource Management and Ecosystem Services Guidebook. 2nd ed. Durham: National Ecosystem Services Partnership, Duke University, https://nespguidebook.com.

Evaluating Tradeoffs with BRIs

BRIs alone do not depict the importance, weight, or value attached to ecosystem services outcomes. Nevertheless, they can sometimes be useful in evaluating tradeoffs among options. However, the insight that BRIs alone can provide into tradeoffs is limited. Consider policies that incentivize different types of land use among agriculture, timber, housing, and conservation areas that affect the value of marketed commodities—agricultural crops, timber harvests, and housing values (measured in monetary value). These policies may also affect the persistence of terrestrial vertebrate species (measured in number of species expected to persist in the basin), and so tradeoffs in ecosystem services are inherent (Figure 1). It is assumed that species have existence value to the extent that people perceive benefits from the survival of a species, though putting that value in monetary or even nonmonetary terms is difficult.

Figure 1. Schematic plot (“efficiency frontier”) showing how marketed commodities and number of species can be used to assess tradeoffs between land use policies and species persistence

Source: S. Polasky, et al. “Where to Put Things? Spatial Land Management to Sustain Biodiversity and Economic Returns.” Biological Conservation 141 (2008): 1516.

Tradeoffs can be considered using this approach even when some services are reflected in value terms and others in BRIs, as in Figure 1. Clearly, points B, C, D, E, and F are superior to point I, which represents the current land use pattern, because they generate both higher conservation benefits in terms of more species and higher value of marketed commodities. But whether C is preferred to D or vice versa (or to any other two points on the efficiency frontier) depends on a value judgment about the relative importance of species conservation versus value of marketed goods. Is greater conservation or greater value of commodities preferred? In this case, BRIs help assessors consider the options in intuitive and socially relevant terms, but they do not identify a single best option without further analysis.

An action with positive effects on a greater number of BRIs will not necessarily have greater social value than an action that affects fewer BRIs. In general, the assessor cannot simply count (positively) affected BRIs provided by a system as a proxy for social value. Effects on social welfare depend not only on how many BRIs are affected but also on the degree of change in each BRI and the relative value of each BRI to all beneficiary groups. Most decision contexts and policy options (environmental or not) involve tradeoffs that, if they are to be evaluated formally rather than intuitively, require application of benefits assessment methods.

Using BRIs in Assessments of Benefits

An evaluation of preferences is needed if (1) service provision varies substantially across different stakeholder populations, i.e., there are differences of opinion about the outcomes, or (2) changes in services in response to management or policy vary in direction (or magnitude) across services. In either case, tradeoffs will have to be made, and that means valuation of some kind. BRIs are important and desirable inputs to benefits assessment, a broad term incorporating both economic (monetary) and nonmonetary valuation methods.²

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