Understanding the economic value of nature and the services it provides to humanity has become increasingly important for local, national and global policy and decision making. However, problems arise in that it is difficult to obtain meaningful values for goods and services that ecosystems...

The purpose of this note is to set out the underlying philosophy of the ecosystem services approach as it is applied in UK policy circles. The aim is to clarify some flexible "ground rules" which should guide both the use of this type of decision support tool itself, and the interpretation of...