Valuing Green Spaces: Economic Challenges and Policy Implications

Forests, parks, gardens, ecological corridors… Green spaces are widely perceived as beneficial, but whatis their economic worth? In this article, the authors Capucine Chapel, Mohamed Hilal, and Julie Le Gallo, provide a critical review of economic valuation methods applied to green spaces. The paper questions current practices, identifies persistent gaps, and proposes new research directions to better incorporate these public goods into planning and policy decisions.

Why economically value green spaces?

Green spaces provide a wide range of ecosystem services — that is, the benefits humans derive from the proper functioning of natural ecosystems. These include:

• Environmental services: air quality, thermal regulation;
• Health services: well-being, mental health;
• Social services: access to nature, social cohesion;
• Economic benefits: property value enhancement, residential attractiveness.

As part of the ecological transition, these functions are increasingly acknowledged in urban and regional planning. However, their protection and development entail costs, and their value is still often overlooked in public decision-making. This underscores the growing need for robust tools to quantify their benefits and inform land-use and investment choices.

Our article aims to review and assess existing methods for estimating the economic value of green spaces. Through a critical and systematic literature review, we identify major contributions, limitations, and blind spots — to advance their integration into public policy.

What methods, and what limitations?

The literature typically distinguishes two main types of approaches to valuing green spaces (Adamowicz, 2004):

• Revealed preference methods, which infer value from observed behaviors (e.g., housing prices, travel costs);
• Stated preference methods, which rely on surveys about individual willingness to pay.

These methods help make the indirect benefits of green spaces visible and provide useful estimates for decision-makers. However, several limitations remain:

• A strong geographical concentration of studies (mostly in Global North and dense urban areas);
• Heterogeneous definitions of what constitutes a “green space”;
• Difficulties capturing collective, non-market, or long-term effects.

Moreover, statistical robustness is often lacking, and results are hard to compare across studies (Bishop et al., 2020).

Beyond economic value: A matter of spatial justice

Focusing on value creation also raises new questions:

• Who truly benefits from these amenities?
• Are the benefits equitably distributed across territories and populations?
• Could increased valuation lead to unintended consequences such as green gentrification, where improved environments contribute to the exclusion of vulnerable populations (Wolch et al., 2014)?

The literature increasingly addresses these concerns through the lens of spatial and environmental justice. Our article highlights the importance of continuing in this direction — so that economic valuation becomes not just a tool for quantification, but a means for critically examining how environmental amenities are distributed and accessed.

Article reference

Chapel, C., Hilal, M., & Le Gallo, J. (2025). Review and challenges in the economic valuation of green spaces. Economics and Business Letters, 14(1), 63–74.

Bibliographical references

Adamowicz, W. L. (2004) What’s it worth? An examination of historical trends and future directions in environmental valuation, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 48(3), 419–443.

Bishop, K. C., Kuminoff, N. V., Banzhaf, H. S., Boyle, K. J., von Gravenitz, K., Pope, J. C., Smith, V. K. and Timmins, C. D. (2020) Best practices for using hedonic property value models to measure willingness to pay for environmental quality. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 14(2), 260-281. 

Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J. and Newell, J. P. (2014) Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 234–244.

Cover picture © IRD - Martin Bertrand