Introduction

Secwépemc People & Lakes

As stated in the preface, the Secwépemc People have a strong connection and friendship with nature. This relationship is rooted in their cultural beliefs, practices, and traditional role as stewards of the land (Ignace & Ignace, 2017). Their views on nature are shaped by living in harmony with the environment. The health and well-being of their people are intricately connected to the health of the land. The key principle is to have a harmonious interconnectedness of nature with human activity and to respect the land by using sustainable practices to ensure its health. This respect is evident in their hunting, fishing, and gathering practices, where they only take what they need and express gratitude for what the land provides. They also learn from nature as nature is a teacher, which offers lessons on living, adapting, and thriving. They deeply understand the ecosystem services provided by lakes and place equal importance on their provisioning, regulating habitat, and cultural and recreational services.

Threats to Lakes

Valuation of Lake Ecosystem Services

Lakes provide numerous ecosystem services to humans directly through provisioning (e.g., water supply, fish catch), indirectly through cultural services (e.g. recreation, aesthetic appreciation), and through regulating and maintenance services (e.g., water purification by removing excess nitrogen by microorganisms, maintaining humidity patterns for climate equilibrium, habitats for marine life). Most of the ecosystem services lakes provide cannot be directly traded on the market to estimate their scarcity through the price system, so assessing them poses difficulties (Reynaud & Lanzanova, 2017). As a result, economists have developed valuation methods to value these services to assist policymakers in addressing biodiversity and ecosystem degradation losses as markets fail to value these services and regulate their over-consumption.

Given the importance of measuring the value of natural assets, economists have developed valuation methods to support the conservation of nature, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable land management decisions. Valuing ecosystem services and natural capital is not commodification. Instead, it shows the value of society’s most important asset; without it, we all would be dead. Economists can value ecosystem services through revealed preference from market transactions (e.g., home prices capture environmental amenities such as clean air) and stated methods through surveys such as the contingent valuation methods (e.g., asking people how much they are willing to pay to preserve nature).

However, another method used in this book is to place a value using the benefits transfer method (BTM). This method is the least expensive and utilizes the information from prior studies to predict the welfare estimates on other sites (Johnston & Rosenberger, 2010). The BTM utilizes approaches such as average valuation from various studies or using a statistical functional transfer (Boyle et al., 2010). The sites should be similar in characteristics to transfer value. However, functional transfers are generally preferred as they are based on a meta-analysis of various studies (Boyle et al., 2010). Due to time and money constraints, policymakers unavoidably utilize the BTM for cost-benefit analysis (Johnston & Rosenberger, 2010). Also, this method is utilized to value large-scale ecosystem services, such as the world’s ecosystem services (Costanza et al., 1997; Costanza et al., 2014). The valuation of large-scale ecosystem services of biomes (e.g., lakes and rivers, open sea, wetlands, and grasslands) cannot rely on a few studies or non-market valuation methods, making the BTM applicable.

Two types of errors can arise from the method: measurement errors from the original study site and transfer errors from the mismatch between the evaluation site and reference site (Boutwell & Westra, 2013). A wider confidence interval can account for these errors that practitioners and scholars might face. Due to these potential errors, a conservative assessment is preferred as this assessment removes studies with significant outliers, uses the median, or uses a value from the lower end of the estimate distribution. This research takes a conservative approach by excluding estimates that arise from one or two studies and hence underestimates the value of ecosystem services per year. Although all methods have shortcomings, the BTM offers the opportunity to assess the value of ecosystem services of lakes globally. Valuing the ecosystem services of the world’s lakes involves transferring an estimate of the price per hectare per year, found through assessing the values from numerous studies, and multiplying this price by the area (in hectares) of the lakes.

Ecosystem System Valuation Database

This book utilizes the Ecosystem System Valuation Database (ESVD) to assess the value of ecosystem services per year and the asset value of lakes (Brander et al., 2023). The database provides information on the economic benefits of ecosystems and biodiversity and the costs of their loss. It collects monetary economic welfare values for ecosystem services from over 1,100 studies from all biomes, ecosystem services, and geographic locations, contributing 9,500 value records to the database.

We extracted data for freshwater lakes that focused on lakes in Canada. Additionally, we added lakes studied in the US and the UK to increase the size, as researchers have only assessed a few freshwater lakes in Canada. In total, there were 81 studies assessing the lakes provisioning services, such as food, water, and raw material; habitat services, such as maintenance of genetic diversity and life cycle; and cultural services, such as aesthetic information, opportunities for recreation and tourism, and inspiration for culture, art, and design. There were no values for regulating services such as water purification, decomposition, and cycling of nutrients.

Table I shows the values of the different services on a price per ha per year in 2020 International $. The most significant valuation is for cultural services, particularly opportunities for recreation and tourism. The total value using averages within each category is $78,804 per ha per year. Meanwhile, the value using the median is lower at $57,726 as outliers do not receive weight. Finally, the most conservative valuation is the modified median estimated at $23,543, which excludes values from one or two studies. Although using the latter value will underestimate the valuation of the lake services, it gives a minimum valuation that policymakers can use as a benchmark for decision-making and minimum asset valuation. As this research will show, even the most conservative valuation shows that lakes constitute a large and important part of our total wealth. We will use the prices in Table I to study lakes in the area.

Table I: Value of Ecosystem Services of Lakes in Canada, UK, & US

Skip Table I

Note. Adapted from Ecosystem System Valuation Database by Brander et al. (2023).

In summary, this book is about the importance of lakes as a natural asset contributing to our total wealth. During the Winter 2023 semester, students, alone or in pairs, wrote a chapter about a lake in British Columbia. Students selected a lake for their course project at the beginning of the semester and worked on their research throughout the semester. Each chapter contains the lake’s geophysical attributes, history, name origin, Indigenous value, environmental and ecological issues with the lake, and valuation. These lakes surround Kamloops, and the region has at least 70 lakes (Kamloops Trails, n.d.a).

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