Glossary
Commons
(or equivalently a common property resource or public good); a resource that provides services that must be shared by some community of individuals or the public.
Discount rate
used to allow comparisons of benefits and costs experienced at different points in time. It allows conversion of future values into their present-day equivalent.
Ecology:
the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings
Economics:
the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth
Externality
occurs when the actions of one individual impose costs or benefits on another individual, who has not agreed to receive those costs or benefits.
Extractive services
services that are provided by extracting some amount of the resource in question.
Market failure
when the market alone does not result in an efficient provision of some good or service. The provision of a service is said to be efficient when it is impossible to make any individual better off without making someone else worse off. Market failures are typically caused by the presence of externalities.
Natural capital
(as opposed to human or manufactured capital) is the stock of society’s environmental assets.
Nonextractive services
services that do not involve removing biomass from the ecosystem providing the service, for example, water purification services.
Normative economics
provides recommendations to policy-makers concerning what should happen in some situation and how best to intervene to ensure that it does. By comparison, positive or descriptive economics is the more objective study of what does happen.
Valuation
the process of estimating the willingness of individuals to sacrifice or pay to achieve some goal or outcome.
