How much is that grizzly bear in the window worth?

Managing wildlife species of concern can be complex. On the one hand, some species can cause costs to humans through conflicts such as property damage, livestock depredation, and injury. On the other hand, the same species can create tremendous value for society: people enjoy viewing wildlife and benefit from the contributions of wildlife to ecosystem health. To evaluate wildlife management policies, managers would ideally be able to compare costs and benefits on an apples-to-apples basis. If a policy is expected to change wildlife populations, will society be better off or worse off? In other words, do changes in benefits mask changes in costs? Economic costs can be relatively simple to quantify. For example, data may indicate that a species kills a certain number of livestock each year, and livestock are priced in the market. The total cost can therefore be estimated by multiplying the number of livestock lost by the market price of livestock. Benefits, however, can be more difficult to quantify, in part because there are no market prices for many important types of benefits. Managers of parks and protected areas around the world are often tasked with communicating the economic value generated by these areas, even when there are no associated prices. For example, there are no market prices that directly show how much people are willing to pay to view wildlife—but just because such prices do not exist, it does not mean that viewing wildlife has no value!

That’s where economists come in. They use a method called “nonmarket valuation” to help managers estimate and communicate the value of goods and services that are not traded in traditional economic markets.

To fill this gap, economists from the National Park Service (NPS) and the U.S. Geological Survey collaborated to develop a method to quantify the multiple benefits of wildlife viewing: the value of a wildlife viewing trip, the value of a single animal viewing, the total value of all animal viewings in a year, and the contribution of a single animal to the total viewing value. The latter measure is key: Individual animals generate a continuous stream of viewing benefits, and if one animal disappears, the entire viewing benefit stream disappears. The economists applied their method to grizzly and black bear viewing in Yellowstone National Park, where bear viewing is a major attraction for visitors, creating a measure of bear benefits that can be weighed against existing estimates of the costs incurred by bears.

“What we have done is attempt to quantify only a small portion of the total economic value of bears, by estimating the “use” value of bear sightings. The overall value of bears would be much higher, especially if “non-use” values, such as existence value, were taken into account. As more types of value are added over time, we will continue to gain a better understanding of how much society benefits from bears.” (Aaron Enriquez, Research Economist, U.S. Geological Survey)