Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1760:
On the Environmental Effectiveness of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive
Katrin Rehdanz Christine Bertram
Abstract: Marine and coastal ecosystems – and thus the benefits they
create for humans – are subject to increasing pressures and competing
usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine
Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime
policy in the EU and aims at achieving or maintaining a good environmental
status (GES) of the European seas by 2020. To this end, the MSFD requires
the development of improvement measures, which have to be assessed inter
alia by examining their cost-effectiveness and by carrying out cost-benefit
analysis (CBA) before their implementation. In this paper, we investigate
the applicability of environmental CBA in the marine context and identify
and discuss problems that may hamper the environmental effectiveness of the
MSFD. For example, marine ecosystem services are much less tangible than
terrestrial ecosystem services. This implies greater challenges for the
quantification of societal benefits in a marine context. One finding is
that the limitations of environmental valuation methods regarding their
ability to capture the whole total economic value of improvement measures
are a potential source of problems, as the MSFD allows countries to
disregard measures with disproportionately high costs. The trans-boundary
nature of the main European seas adds to the complexity of the valuation
task, e.g. due to the danger that benefits that occur outside of national
territories are neglected. Moreover, the current state of knowledge on the
functioning of complex marine ecosystems and the links to socio-economic
impacts and human well-being seems insufficient to meet the MSFD
requirements
Keywords: Cost-benefit analysis, ecosystem services, environmental valuation, EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Europe; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: Q51,; Q53,; Q57,; Q58; (follow links to similar papers)
40 pages, March 2012
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