The Role of Economics in Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy Debates: Opportunities and Challenges

Economists in the field of environmental and natural resource economics or agricultural economics who want to be policy-relevant face both unique opportunities and unique challenges relative to economists in many other fields. The concept of ecosystem services emerged in response to the growing appreciation of the important role that ecosystems play in providing goods and services that contribute to human well-being, as well as a growing awareness of the scale of the impact of human actions on ecosystems and the flow of these services. A key to evaluating tradeoffs is, of course, comparing tradeoffs that would have to be made to the tradeoffs that people are willing to make, which depend on their preferences, particularly the extent to which they view different goods and services as substitutable.