Sutton, P.C.; Duncan, S.L.; Anderson, S.J. Valuing Our National Parks: An Ecological Economics Perspective. Preprints2018, 2018100661. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0661.v1
APA Style
Sutton, P.C., Duncan, S.L., & Anderson, S.J. (2018). Valuing Our National Parks: An Ecological Economics Perspective. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0661.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Sutton, P.C., Sophia L. Duncan and Sharolyn J. Anderson. 2018 "Valuing Our National Parks: An Ecological Economics Perspective" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0661.v1
Abstract
The annual budget for the United States National Park Service was roughly three billion dollars in 2016. This is distributed amongst 405 National Parks, 23 national scenic and historic trails, and 60 wild and scenic rivers. Entrance fees and concessions generate millions of dollars in income for the National Park Service; however, this metric fails to account for the total value of the National Parks. In failing to consider the value of the ecosystem services provided by the National Parks we fail to quantify and appreciate the contributions our parks make to society. This oversight allows us to continue to underfund a valuable part of our natural capital and consequently damage our supporting environment, national heritage, monetary economy, and many of our diverse cultures. We explore a simple benefits transfer valuation of the United States national parks using National Land Cover Data from 2011 and ecosystem service values determined by Costanza (et al). This produces an estimate suggesting the parks provide $84 billion / year in ecosystem service value. If the natural infrastructure 'asset' that is our national park system had a budget comparable to a piece of commercial real estate of this value, the annual budget of the National Park Service would be roughly an order of magnitude larger at something closer to $30 billion rather than $3 billion.
Keywords
national parks; ecosystem service value; natural infrastructure; natural capital
Subject
Social Sciences, Geography, Planning and Development
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
