Abstract

With the trend toward greater integration of production and conservation in forestry, traditional economic approaches to assessing forest value have come to be regarded as inadequate in the determination of forest policy and the setting of forest management objectives. In the last few decades, other types of economic as well non-economic methods to assess forest value have gained foothold. To arrive at a sound account of forest value, we need to clarify how value is understood from an economic and ecological perspective. Two things are at stake. One is the attempt to capture values beyond the more well-defined utility values. The second is the effort to try to make these values measurable. Such clarification, and the critical discussion it requires, will help to provide a better foundation for policy and concrete management decisions and make the underlying basis of prioritization more transparent.