Digital Commons Network^™

A Novel Deliberative Multicriteria Evaluation Approach To Ecosystem Service Valuation, Georgia Mayrommati, Mark E. Borsuk, Richard B. Howarth

New Hampshire EPSCoR

Although efforts to address ecosystem services in decision making have advanced considerably in recent years, there remain challenges related to valuation. In particular, conventional economic approaches have been criticized for their inability to capture the collective nature of ecosystem services, for their emphasis on monetary metrics, and the difficulty of assessing the value of ecosystem services to future generations. We present a deliberative multicriteria evaluation (DMCE) method that combines the advantages of multicriteria decision analysis with a deliberation process that allows citizens and scientists to exchange knowledge and evaluate ecosystem services in a social context. Compared with previous applications we …