Monetary Valuation of Ecosystem Services: A Review of Methods

Review Scope

The literature review was conducted from May to July 2025.

The focus of the literature review aimed to answer the following question:
“What valuation concepts, approaches, and methods are used for the monetary valuation of ecosystem services internationally?”

The review concentrated primarily on grey literature found by initially reviewing the websites of National Statistical Institutes (NSIs). Publications, reports and supporting documentation focused on ecosystem accounts and containing monetary valuation of ecosystem services were targeted. The primary criterion for inclusion in the review was whether a publication specified valuation methods for at least one ecosystem service. Additionally, as this area of ecosystem accounting is still evolving and there may be multiple iterations to value the same service(s) by a particular agency, only the most recent publications were considered.

Services related to mineral and energy resources (e.g. sand provisioning, oil and gas provisioning) are abiotic flows that fall outside of the scope of ecosystem system services as defined in chapter 6 of the SEEA-EA framework and were therefore excluded from the review.

Only literature available in English were included apart from the study by the Central Bank of Costa Rica (Aguilar-Madrigal et al., 2025). The CSO had direct correspondence with the relevant contact at the Central Bank of Costa Rica who provided information regarding their work on the monetary valuation of three ecosystem services.

Identifying Organisations

Firstly, a list of NSIs and their corresponding websites was obtained from the UN Statistics Division register of National Statistical Offices.

Any national institute which was not a statistical institution, but had previously reported SEEA data was also included for review. To identify these, the list of reporting institutions provided in the UN Global Assessment Reports for SEEA were checked. Any institutions not already included in the UN Statistics Division's register were included.

In total, the websites of 216 national institutes across 199 countries and regions were included in the search to identify relevant literature.

Identifying Literature

To identify literature relevant to the monetary valuation of ecosystem services, a Boolean string search was used. Specifically, the Boolean string below was input into the Google search bar of a web browser for each institution’s website domain:

site:[website domain]

(“natural capital account*” OR
“ecosystem service* account*” OR
“ecosystem account” OR
“environmental-economic account*” OR
“SEEA EA” OR
“SEEA-EA” OR
“SEEA Ecosystem Accounting” OR
“natural capital” OR
“ecosystem service”)

AND

(“monetary valuation” OR
“economic valuation” OR
“asset value” OR
“present value” OR
“discount value” OR
“exchange price” OR
“shadow price” OR
“value” OR
“monetary” OR
“valuation”)

The above search resulted in a total of 650 hits across the 216 websites.

Relevant literature was identified by reviewing the results page of each institution. Non-targeted or irrelevant (524), duplicate (31) and outdated literature (26) were excluded, leaving 69 publications which were further reviewed in greater detail. Additional publications were identified based on references mentioned in the 69 publications, along with further searches to ensure that the most recent versions of publications were included. Studies from the Natural Capital Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (NCAVES) project were also included.

In total, 20 publications were found relevant to the scope of the literature review. These consisted of studies carried out by NSIs, Other National Authorities (ONAs) or collaborations linked to these organisations including those carried out by consultants. Some publications were noted as pilot accounts or were based on the SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting framework. These were included if they were the most recent study found. See Background Notes for a complete list of publications included in the literature review.