Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

This project attempts to understand the non-market values of marine species by interviewing many stakeholders including fishermen, tourism operators, local politicians, and NGOs. The first goal was to identify if there was a gap in existing research on valuing a marine species used by competing resource users by conducting a literature review on both terrestrial and marine ecosystem and species valuations. The second goal, if a gap did in fact exist, was to create a framework that would serve the following purposes: 1) Inform local policy makers and stakeholders of the spectrum of values surrounding a species as well as the tradeoffs between different types of values and 2) Provide researchers who wish to conduct economic valuations on marine species with a framework that will identify the gaps in their data. By doing this, I hope to provide policy makers with a framework that will enable them to move beyond the dollar sign attached to the value of a marine species, or to at least make them aware of its non-market values as well as potential.