Gabriela Ele­na BACIU¹,  Ioana TOMA², Cristi­na GÂRLEA³

STEFAN CEL MARE UNIVERSITY, FACULTY OF FORESTRY¹; UNIVERSITY OF AGRONOMIC SCIENCES AND VETERINARY MEDICINE²;FACULTY OF BIOTECHNOLOGY, ROMANIAN ACADEMY, AGROSILVIC BIODIVERSITY STUDIES AND RESEARCH CENTER³

Cor­re­spond­ing author email: gabrielaelena.baciu@gmail.com

Abstract: Ecosys­tems pro­vide a range of goods and ser­vices vital to the well-being of humans and oth­er liv­ing things, as well as to the devel­op­ment of soci­ety. Along with nat­ur­al resources, tan­gi­ble and trad­able in the mar­ket, they pro­vide a series of intan­gi­ble, non-mar­ketable ser­vices that trans­late into health, cul­tur­al, social and sci­en­tif­ic ben­e­fits. Human activ­i­ties, espe­cial­ly after indus­tri­al­iza­tion, have cre­at­ed unprece­dent­ed pres­sures on nat­ur­al ecosys­tems and led to their con­stant degra­da­tion, resource deple­tion, glob­al warm­ing and loss of bio­di­ver­si­ty. This is also because non-mar­ketable ser­vices are under­es­ti­mat­ed by the major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion, being per­ceived as inex­haustible and free. The health of ecosys­tems has a direct impact on the qual­i­ty of life of peo­ple and oth­er liv­ing things, a fact that has led to the devel­op­ment of a series of meth­ods and tech­niques for eval­u­at­ing all ser­vices, includ­ing non-mar­ketable ones, so that their val­ue can be tak­en into account at all rel­e­vant lev­els of the deci­sion-mak­ing process. In this paper, a state-of-the-art of meth­ods and tech­niques for eval­u­at­ing non-mar­ketable ser­vices pro­vid­ed by ecosys­tems is pre­sent­ed, the results of stud­ies to cal­cu­late the Total Eco­nom­ic Val­ue of ecosys­tem ser­vices are pre­sent­ed, as well as their impor­tance in the process of pub­lic pol­i­cy devel­op­ment.
Key­words: ecosys­tem ser­vices, glob­al warm­ing, bio­di­ver­si­ty, eval­u­a­tion meth­ods, pub­lic poli­cies.
JEL clas­si­fi­ca­tion: Q51.

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