Protocolo para la valoración económica de los servicios ecosistémicos en los Andes colombianos, a través del método de transferencia de beneficios: Reflexiones sobre el Capital Natural de Colombia No. 1

Colombia Natural Capital Strategy has been developed by Conservation International (CI-Colombia), el Fondo Para la Acción Ambiental y la Niñez (FPAA), la Presidencia de la República de Colombia and la Contraloría General de la República, seeks the understanding and learning of the social, economic and environmental importance of ecosystems, in order to generate mechanisms that enable decision makers to integrate the value of Colombia’s Natural Capital in various planning actions related with the country’s development and welfare of its inhabitants. The aim of this contribution is to design an economic valuation protocol based on Benefit Transfer method, using previous ecosystem services valuation studies for the Andes region, in order to define a formal and cost-effective approach to the economic valuation of Colombian Andes Natural Capital. This document is organized in three sections: 1. A review of the state of the art of Benefit Transfer: its theory methods and limitations. 2. A protocol formulation for implementing Benefit Transfer method for the economic valuation of Colombian Andes Natural Capital. 3. A general description of the review developed by CI about the economic valuation studies of goods and ecosystem services carried out in the Colombian Andes. This protocol wills aloud an "initial" approximation to Colombian Andes Natural Capital, identifying lacks of information and further research needs. Besides it is important to clarify this is a partial approach to the topic due to the following reasons: i) there are not studies for the valuation of many ecosystem services in the region, ii) some of the ecosystem services evaluated in the reviewed studies do not correspond to an ecosystem service in the strict sense (e.g. biodiversity conservation, watershed recovery, species’ habitat, support for other ecosystems) for what they have been reinterpreted for this review and iii) it is possible that a direct extrapolation of estimated values based of land cover may not be precise enough for places were no information is available.