Valuating ecosystem services to support environmental management in Ugam-Chatkal State National Park, Uzbekistan
Over the last decades, assessing ecosystem services has gained increased attention because ecosystems are stressed and this restrains their current and future services supply. This questions how the supply and demand of ecosystem services can be better balanced to enhance their sustainable use. Ecosystem services can be managed through market mechanisms. This offer opportunities to calculate their values and maybe establish a proper price. However, capturing these opportunities requires to clarify how valuable or beneficial ecosystems and their services are. This is addressed in this study, which explicitly aims to assess the ecosystem services’ values and benefits in the Ugam-Chatkal State National Park of Uzbekistan. The assessment’s methodology includes ecosystem accounting and a welfare-based approach with choice experiments for possible non-use values, and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). The study contributes to better manage the Park’s ecosystems and finally reviews possibilities to integrate such ecosystem-accounting systems into Uzbek’s environmental policy by appraising examples from other countries, such as The Netherlands.