OVERVIEW OF THE MAIN TRENDS IN THE ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

The concept of ecosystem services, first proposed in the report “On the assessment of Ecosystems at the turn of the Millennium” in 1999, plays an important role in the idea of a Green Economy that is developing today. The main purpose of the ecosystem services concept is to draw decision makers' attention to the problem of ecosystem degradation and the need for rational use of the benefits and benefits received by society from them. As a result, it is the cost and economic assessment of ecosystem services that plays an important role as the closest and most understandable way for decision makers to show the benefits of ecosystems and the risks of their degradation. In this article, an overview of current trends in the economic assessment of ecosystem services was conducted, a classification of ES and economic methods was provided, and an analysis of the most relevant economic methods for assessing ES was carried out on the example of climate and water management services. The current methods of cost estimation of ES today are the methods of prevented costs, replacement cost, conditional assessment, cost of travel, direct payment for ecosystem services, transfer of benefits and factor income. The choice of method depends on the service or services being evaluated, as well as the quantity and quality of input data. The variety of modern methods of economic assessment of ecosystem services is determined both by the presence of a formed market for the service under study and the structure of this market, and by the actual ability to evaluate the service using economic methods.