POLLINATORS POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION

THE ASSESSMENT REPORT ON POLLINATORS, POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION
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4. ECONOMIC VALUATION OF POLLINATOR GAINS
AND LOSSES
services) (Nelson et al., 2010), each of which comprises a
number of assets. Capital assets represent measurable,
quantifiable stocks that can produce various flows of goods
and services. Pollinators are generally considered natural
(wild pollinators) or manufactured (managed pollinators)
capital asset that produce pollination services, a flow.
Changes in capital assets fundamentally affect what flows
of goods and services are available to an economy and
therefore the economic activities available. This subsection
reviews the links between pollinators and various capital
assets that produce and sustain the economic benefits of
pollination services.
2.6.2 Measuring capital
In neoclassical economics, capital assets are often
components of accounting frameworks, such as Gross
Domestic Product. In recent years, other frameworks have
been developed to integrate natural capital assets into these
frameworks using “Green GDP” measures (See Chapter 6).
The main international standard for Green GDP is the UN’s
System of National Accounts and its associated System
of Environmental Economic Accounts (SEEA) (UN, 2012).
These are expressed as the monetary price of all flows
arising from each stock of capital assets, including future
flows via discounting (see Section 3), using market prices
where available but otherwise estimating value through
non-market measures (e.g., replacement costs – Edens and
Hein, 2013). Typically, neoclassical economics assumes
a high degree of substitution between capital assets and
aims to preserve and increase the net balance of all capital
collectively (van den Bergh, 2001).
Within the SEEA there are a number of challenges affecting
the asset valuation of pollination services – foremost, it is
important to disambiguate the benefits of pollination relative
to other ecosystem service flows produced from the same
assets to avoid double counting (Boyd and Banzhaf, 2007).
This is particularly important when considering honeybees,
which can be used as both a source of honey production
and pollination within the same year but will often not
because of the low nectar yields of many crops (Rucker et
al., 2012). Secondly, the SEEA framework assumes that
assets are controlled by an institute and are marketable.
Although managed pollinators are an owned asset and
patches of habitat can be owned, pollination services are
almost always a public asset as access to the animals
cannot be restricted (aside from enclosed crops) and their
foraging habits are very difficult to control (e.g., Stern et
al., 2001). Finally, the SEEA framework also assumes that
assets are marketable, which is not true for wild pollination
services. These issues can be partially overcome by
considering ecosystems not directly controlled by private
actors as a separate productive sector within the market
that produces its own outputs (Edens and Hein, 2013),
although care should still be taken to avoid double counting.
Monetary valuation of assets can be complimented with
non-monetary quantifications of the biophysical stocks that
underpin ecosystem services to provide a more holistic
assessment of the impacts of capital management and
support planning for sustainable, long-term management
(Dickie et al., 2014). This approach is particularly
advantageous because it is not tied, directly or indirectly
to market prices and can be used to monitor the status
and trends of those assets that are economically valuable
to production. Stocks of a multiple assets of a particular
capital can also be measured as an index; assessing stocks
of assets in a single period relative to the same assets in a
reference period (with a default value of one) (Dong et al.,
2012; Nelson et al., 2010). To date, no study has expressly
included pollinators as an asset in these indexes.
2.6.3 Pollinator assets
A variable number of capital assets are often required
to produce pollination services and hive products. For
wild pollinators, this can be as simple as having sufficient
suitable habitat to support viable populations and available
land, inputs and labour to produce pollinator-dependent
crops. For managed pollinators, there are additional
requirements in terms of human capital to breed and
manage the pollinators, manufactured capital to house
and transport the pollinators, social capital to maintain the
knowledge necessary to breed and use them effectively and
natural capital in terms of wild pollinators that form the basis
of breeding stock and genetic diversity.
Quantities of available managed pollinator assets are simply
the number of available managed pollinators available
to a region (e.g., Breeze et al., 2014). Estimating wild
pollinator assets can be more complex as their numbers
are almost impossible to measure without dedicated,
systematic monitoring data (e.g., Lebuhn et al., 2013).
Such monitoring is presently only undertaken in an ad
hoc manner in a few countries and remains focused on
species presence-absence (Carvalheiro et al., 2013). Larger
scale analyses models such as InVEST (Lonsdorf et al.,
2009) can be used to estimate pollinator populations and
pollination service potential based on habitat suitability
and proximity to pollinated crops (e.g., Polce et al., 2013;
Schulp et al., 2014). Although rigorous, InVEST is only
capable of estimating habitat suitability, not populations of
pollinators, and assumes that there is a linear relationship
between habitat quality and pollinator abundance in fields.
A more expansive production function approach (see 2.2.3)
linking quantitative metrics of habitat quality from primary
ecological research with observed abundances of different
pollinators could substantially improve estimates.
Because these assets will only supply services to relatively
small areas, methods to assess economic value (Section
2.4) are not generally appropriate, as the impacts on