Forest Ecosystems Goods and Services: Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation

Ecosystem services refer to the contributions of ecosystems to the benefits that are used in economic and other human activities. The valuation of forest ecosystem services is implemented for Karnataka State, India, as per the validated protocol—System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA EA; SEEA.un.org ), which constitutes the statistical framework for natural capital accounting. According to this protocol, ecosystem services are defined as the contributions of ecosystems to the benefits that are used in economic and other human activities. Services of the ecosystem were quantified considering only the contribution of the ecosystem to the benefit, through the residual value method by taking the gross value of the final marketed good to which the ecosystem service provides input and then deducting the cost of all other inputs, including labor, produced assets, and intermediate inputs. The current endeavor focuses on ecosystem services in forest ecosystems for 2005 and 2019, which highlights that there has been a considerable decline in ecosystem services in Karnataka—a 51.65% reduction in provisioning services in forest ecosystems, a 27.1% reduction in regulatory services, and a 1.9% reduction in cultural services during 2005 to 2019. Ecosystem services were aggregated to compute the Total Ecosystem Supply Value (TESV), which was 2841 billion INR and declined by 35% from 2005 to 2019. The decrease in value is reflected in the decline of net present value (NPV) from 73,099 billion INR (2005) to 47,214 billion INR (2019). The economic valuation of ecosystem services would aid in ascertaining trade-offs among conflicting environmental, social, and economic goals in the development and implementation of policies. The key role of science is to provide insights into the social, economic, and environmental benefits of various levels of biodiversity, achieved through innovative ecosystem management options and communicating the research results effectively to decision-makers and other stakeholders.