Valuation of Ecosystem Services Based on EU Carbon Allowances-Optimal Recovery for a Coal Mining Area.

This paper presents a new way of valuing ecosystem services based on the price of EU carbon dioxide emission allowances. Its main advantage is that it facilitates the monetisation of non-provisioning ecosystem services, which is the Achilles heel of current frameworks. The research approach is built on the notion that land rehabilitation and ecological restoration involve trade-offs between ecosystem services.

Restoring Coal Mining-Affected Areas: The Missing Ecosystem Services.

Multi-criteria decision analysis and cost-benefit analysis, either individually or in combination, have been used as the preferred tools to develop ecosystem services valuation, presenting significant discrepancies and variations between the calculated values. To counteract this problem, a new framework was developed based on a hierarchical weighting of the non-provisioning ecosystem services, using biodiversity as the reference ecosystem service since it is the easiest to apprehend. Their monetisation was made using the average price of EU carbon dioxide emission allowances during 2019 and 2020, obtaining reasonable and comparable results in line with what was expected for the study region.