Monetary assessment of the impacts of forestry on water-based benefits in Finland

This paper identifies the major impacts of forestry on watercourses, introduces methods and calculation approaches for valuing these impacts in monetary terms and presents some preliminary estimates of the economic value (order of magnitude) of damages to different water-based values. Using a variety of calculation approaches, the range of aggregated damages was estimated to be 17–93 million FIM per year if even the more uncertain (guess-estimate type) figures of general recreation, biodiversity and crayfish fisheries were included. The main components in this estimate were the impacts on flood protection and water-based recreation. The range of aggregated damage estimates corresponds to 0.2–1.0% of the GDP of forestry in Finland in 1992. However, due to data and methodological problems in some specific impact estimations, and those related to individual valuation and summation procedure in general, even the total range remains tentative.