Offshore Oil and Gas Activity Impacts on Ecosystem Services in the Gulf of Mexico

Ecosystem services are the material and energy outputs drawn from the natural environment and used by humans for their benefit. They include food supply, pollination, recreation, water treatment, soil formation, storm mitigation, and any other materials or processes supplied by natural or managed ecosystems. Though ecosystem services are, by definition, valuable to humans, they are not always valued by modern economies. This can lead to market failures. For example, crop pollination is often provided by insects but there is no market mechanism to ensure that this valuable but not valued ecosystem service is maintained. As a result, a large number of studies have emerged over the past four decades that have sought to put a monetary value on ecosystem services (e.g., farmers benefit by $X per year from insect pollinators). The purpose of this report is to critically review such studies with respect to three Gulf of Mexico (GOM) ecosystem services: recreation, fishing, and storm mitigation. We also perform an analysis to predict how one ecosystem service (fish provisioning) might be impacted by changes in oil and gas platform numbers. We find a number of limitations associated with the methods used to perform ecosystem service valuations and argue that this severely limits their usefulness for policymaking. We note that ecosystem service valuation is, at present, best understood as an academic exercise that could be useful for encouraging public engagement and increasing general understanding that natural systems have value, rather than a means for making policy. Specifically, we conclude that market-based valuations of some ecosystem services are available and likely reliable, but that valuation of non-market ecosystem services is difficult, subject to variance, and potentially un-replicable. In addition, our ecosystem model of the GOM suggests that platform removal will have little impact on the population of red snapper, one of the most important fishery species in the GOM; we also note several important caveats of that finding.

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2017-09-21 → 2020-02-28