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Ecosystems have immeasurable intrinsic value that can never be priced. Ecosystems also exist as ecological infrastructure that delivers valuable ecosystem services for human wellbeing including supporting, regulating, provisioning, and cultural services. The conceptual framework underlying the analysis in this report focuses on the way that ecosystem services cross over from the biophysical to the social and economic world. This enables the pricing of the human labour and technology cost of protecting and enhancing ecosystems (ecological infrastructure) that provide these services that benefit human wellbeing. We routinely price this cost of protecting ecosystems in organisational budgets for core and grant funding. We can also price these same costs in a manner that does not rely on government core or grant funding, but instead on a sustainable financing framework.

The current study continues the PEBACC project in Vanuatu. It builds on an earlier PEBACC study that undertook a baseline ecosystem and socio-economic resilience analysis and mapping appraisal of the Port Vila Metropolitan area. The methodology approach adopted provided for mainly desk-top review work, supplemented by four key workshops (including one in Port Vila), interviews with Port Vila stakeholders, and brief field inspection in Port Vila.

Melanesia is characterised by complex interactions among land and natural resource uses, legal and political institutions, and interest groups. These interactions play out at the national level, where institutions have been profoundly shaped by an interplay of 'local' and 'global' orders and by the political and economic systems which affect natural resource exploitation.

PACC reports