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Using Habitat Equivalency Analysis to Assess the Cost Effectiveness of Restoration Outcomes in Four Institutional Contexts

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Abstract

At the national level, with a fixed amount of resources available for public investment in the restoration of biodiversity, it is difficult to prioritize alternative restoration projects. One way to do this is to assess the level of ecosystem services delivered by these projects and to compare them with their costs. The challenge is to derive a common unit of measurement for ecosystem services in order to compare projects which are carried out in different institutional contexts having different goals (application of environmental laws, management of natural reserves, etc.). This paper assesses the use of habitat equivalency analysis (HEA) as a tool to evaluate ecosystem services provided by restoration projects developed in different institutional contexts. This tool was initially developed to quantify the level of ecosystem services required to compensate for non-market impacts coming from accidental pollution in the US. In this paper, HEA is used to assess the cost effectiveness of several restoration projects in relation to different environmental policies, using case studies based in France. Four case studies were used: the creation of a market for wetlands, public acceptance of a port development project, the rehabilitation of marshes to mitigate nitrate loading to the sea, and the restoration of streams in a protected area. Our main conclusion is that HEA can provide a simple tool to clarify the objectives of restoration projects, to compare the cost and effectiveness of these projects, and to carry out trade-offs, without requiring significant amounts of human or technical resources.

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Notes

  1. Trustees are representatives of the public as a whole in defending the environmental interests of the population. They can be an environmental administration, a tribal party, a county, etc.

  2. Today, the criteria for ranking are well defined, but this was not the case at the end of the 80 s. Up to now, restoration projects are approved for consideration if they have the potential to achieve a quantifiable increase in one or more of the injured resources, and if there is sufficient information about the project to (a) evaluate it and (b) enable its implementation within the next 12 months. Next they are ranked according to 6 “qualitative” criteria: cost, amount of ecological improvement in DSAYs, probability of success, potential collateral losses, number of targeted ecosystem services, and effects on public health and safety.

  3. Especially during the Exxon Valdez legal procedure, which lasted 20 years and wasted a lot of public time and effort as well as a great deal of money (1.3 milliards US$ 1991) without any resulting action.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the French National Agency for Water and Aquatic Ecosystems (partnership Onema - Ifremer 2011) for their support in organizing this work. Thanks are also addressed to all the people interviewed for this work, and to Antoine Roudier for his assistance with the English version.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IFREMER - UMR AMURE, Marine Economics Unit, ZI Pointe du Diable, BP70, 29280, Plouzané, France

    Pierre Scemama & Harold Levrel

  2. AgroParisTech - UMR CIRED, Campus du Jardin Tropical, 45 bis, avenue de la Belle Gabrielle, 94736, Nogent-sur-Marne Cedex, France

    Harold Levrel

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  1. Pierre Scemama
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  2. Harold Levrel
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Correspondence to Pierre Scemama.

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Scemama, P., Levrel, H. Using Habitat Equivalency Analysis to Assess the Cost Effectiveness of Restoration Outcomes in Four Institutional Contexts. Environmental Management 57, 109–122 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-015-0598-6

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