Valuing Ecosystem Services in the Lower Mekong Basin: Country Report for Thailand

This report begins with a description of what ecosystem services are and how they can be categorized. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is the most ubiquitous and comprehensive categorization of ecosystem services, which fall into four broad categories: provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural (MEA 2005). However, more recently, the European Environmental Agency (EEA) has been sponsoring development of the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) to help negotiate the different perspectives that have evolved around the ecosystem service concept since that time and assist in the exchange of information about them (Haines-Young and Potschin 2012). The CICES classification system groups ecosystem services into three categories: provisioning, regulation and maintenance, and cultural. These are the categories adopted for this report.