Cultural ecosystem services provided by the Baltic Sea marine environment.

This paper applies the concept of cultural ecosystem services (CES) to reveal the diverse benefits the Baltic Sea provides to human well-being. The study identifies and defines relevant CES for marine and coastal environments and applies them in a survey with 4800 respondents from Germany, Finland and Latvia. The relative importance of various CES was determined by asking respondents to allocate 100 points between CES related to recreation, landscape, inspiration, learning and education, spiritual experiences and belonging, historically and culturally important places and the existence of habitats.

A probabilistic approach for a cost-benefit analysis of oil spill management under uncertainty: A Bayesian network model for the Gulf of Finland.

Large-scale oil accidents can inflict substantial costs to the society, as they typically result in expensive oil combating and waste treatment operations and have negative impacts on recreational and environmental values. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) offers a way to assess the economic efficiency of management measures capable of mitigating the adverse effects. However, the irregular occurrence of spills combined with uncertainties related to the possible effects makes the analysis a challenging task.

Valuing the commons: An international study on the recreational benefits of the Baltic Sea.

The Baltic Sea provides benefits to all of the nine nations along its coastline, with some 85 million people living within the catchment area. Achieving improvements in water quality requires international cooperation. The likelihood of effective cooperation is known to depend on the distribution across countries of the benefits and costs of actions needed to improve water quality.

Citizens' preferences for the conservation of agricultural genetic resources.

Evaluation of conservation policies for agricultural genetic resources (AgGR) requires information on the use and non-use values of plant varieties and animal breeds, as well as on the preferences for in situ and ex situ conservation. We conducted a choice experiment to estimate citizens' willingness to pay (WTP) for AgGR conservation programmes in Finland, and used a latent class model to identify heterogeneity in preferences among respondent groups. The findings indicate that citizens have a high interest in the conservation of native breeds and varieties, but also reveal the presence of preference heterogeneity.

Baltic Sea nutrient reductions--what should we aim for?

Nutrient load reductions are needed to improve the state of the Baltic Sea, but it is still under debate how they should be implemented. In this paper, we use data from an environmental valuation study conducted in all nine Baltic Sea states to investigate public preferences of relevance to three of the involved decision-dimensions: First, the roles of nitrogen versus phosphorus reductions causing different eutrophication effects; second, the role of time - the lag between actions to reduce nutrient loads and perceived improvements; and third; the spatial dimension and the roles of actions targeting the coastal and open sea environment and different sub-basins. Our findings indicate that respondents view and value the Baltic Sea environment as a whole, and are not focussed only on their local sea area, or a particular aspect of water quality.

Subjective vs. objective measures in the valuation of water quality.

Environmental valuation studies rely on accurate descriptions of the current environmental state and its change. Valuation scenario can be based on objective quality measures described to respondents, on individual subjective perceptions or their combination. If subjective perceptions differ systematically from objective measures, valuation results may be biased.