The role of ecosystem services in USA natural resource liability litigation

For injuries to ecological services, we found trustees have relied almost exclusively on habitat equivalency analysis (HEA), a service-to-service approach, adapting its use to applications where restoration projects make resource and/or ecosystem services substitutions. We explore how the trustees address the challenge of characterizing the equivalency between injury and restoration resources and ecosystem services through the choice of restoration projects and the choice of the ecosystem service metrics. Widely used in the U.S. and EU, the restoration-based measure of damages and the associated HEA methodology may be useful for other countries.