Ecosystem services, economic valuation and why the economisation of nature is not a sell-out

How much is a hectare of grassland worth? The honest answer: far more than its market price. An intact floodplain ecosystem purifies groundwater, buffers floods, sequesters carbon, feeds pollinators and provides space for recreation. None of these services appear on any balance sheet — and that is precisely part of the problem.

The economist Bernd Hansjürgens has clearly summarised the concept of ecosystem services and its implications for business and policy in the journal Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ, January 2026). His conclusion: the economisation of nature is not a neoliberal sell-out. It is the attempt to make nature visible in decisions that have so far ignored it.

"At its core is the opening of new perspectives, so that the interests of nature are given greater weight in private, corporate and governmental decisions."

Ecosystem services fall into four categories: provisioning services (food, water, timber), regulating services (protection against soil erosion, water retention, pest regulation), cultural services (recreation, the aesthetic experience of nature, research) and supporting services (nutrient cycles, photosynthesis, soil formation). Biodiversity is the foundation of all four categories: the greater the diversity of species, the more stable, resilient and productive an ecosystem.

The total economic value of nature — a concept Hansjürgens explains in detail — encompasses far more than direct use values. It includes existence values (the satisfaction that arises simply from knowing that nature is intact), bequest values (the wish to leave intact nature to future generations) and altruistic values. Anyone who calculates only the directly measurable yields of a piece of grassland captures a fraction of its actual value.

Particularly relevant to our work: Hansjürgens explicitly mentions the impact mitigation regulation under Sections 13 ff. of the Federal Nature Conservation Act (BNatSchG) as an instrument that integrates ecological valuation into governmental decisions. Impact-compensation accounting enables a quantitative comparison of losses and compensation measures — making it one of the few legally anchored instruments that translate ecosystem services into concrete price signals.

Since 2024 there is more: large companies in the EU are obliged by the CSRD to produce sustainability reports under the ESRS standards. Standard ESRS E4 explicitly covers biodiversity and ecosystems — companies must set out their targets, strategies and measures for protecting nature, across the entire value chain. This considerably increases the institutional pressure on parties causing environmental impacts and is likely to further raise demand for high-quality compensation measures.

The project in Ramin is a concrete example of what Hansjürgens describes: the translation of ecosystem services into a basis for economic decisions. From 17.3 hectares of degraded arable land, a certified ecological account with around 650,000 eco-points is being created — points that represent a regulatorily recognised compensation value and must be acquired by parties causing impacts. The price of these points is, at its core, the market price of an ecosystem value that was previously invisible.

Hansjürgens emphasises that the economic approach must be applied with good judgement — where it genuinely helps, without ignoring nature's own interests or riding roughshod over other values. We feel bound by the same principle: economic clarity in the service of ecological impact.

Source: Bernd Hansjürgens, "Ökosystemleistungen. Zur Ökonomisierung der Biodiversität", in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ), vol. 76, no. 1–5/2026, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, pp. 29–34.
The article is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and freely available at www.bpb.de/apuz.