D3.2 Advancements in the economic assessment of coastal wetland change and biodiversity: Methods and test simulations

This deliverable reports on preliminary results of Task 3.2 “Coastal/marine biodiversity impacts.” It presents the state-of-the-art literature on the economic assessment of coastal wetland change and biodiversity, develops a simulation method for assessing direct economic impacts of wetland change, and delivers a first preliminarily application of this method and associated test simulations. The full application of this method will then produce simulations that will then feed into the final Task of WP3, which assesses the economy-wide implications. For assessing the direct economic impacts of multiple drivers (climate change, land use change, etc.) on coastal biodiversity and key ecosystem services we couple a global model of coastal wetland change (Schuerch et al. 2018), the global DIVA coastal flooding model (Hinkel et al. 2014) and a meta-analysis of coastal wetland values. The economy-wide impacts of this will then be assessed in Task 3.4. Together with Task 3.1 and Task 3.3, the innovative contribution of this task is the assessment of economy-wide implications of the linkages between coastal ecosystems, climate change, human development and land use change.