‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Ensure the transfer of rights involves low transaction costs
If there is not a brokerage agency, firms can 
spend too much time finding sellers and 
making transactions:
• 
There has to be enough money to 
support the costs of the private or
public operating agency 
• 
Selling or trading emissions, seques-
tration or biodiversity involves complex 
arrangements 
Developers can acquire points for permit 
approvals by installing ecological space in 
buildings owned by others: 
• 
The planning agency needs only to
certify that the space is ‘planted’
(normal building inspection)
• 
The DES could be maintained by
others (as in urban gardens) without
new legal arrangements
Ensure future government decisions will not adversely affect investment
In the case of conventional mitigative trading, 
new scientific evidence may require changes 
in policies and programmes:
• 
New knowledge could vitiate 
programmes (eg levels of sequestration 
in varied ecosystems) 
• 
Investors could lose money
Urban amenity and biodiversity is positive 
and would be unaffected by new science: 
• 
Ecological space could be easily 
modified if new science made 
discoveries about urban biodiversity – 
as ecological space is not based on
specific biota itself
• 
An investment in amenity value is
seldom lost 

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329
Boxes
Box 42 Economic Valuation of Eco-services
Cost–benefit framework
: A common view is that government decisions should be based 
on the same calculus that private business uses, ie cost–benefit analysis (CBA). In fact, many 
accept CBA (or risk analysis etc) as a universal framework of analysis. CBA is often used by 
governments to determine the overall benefit to society of an action, policy or programme, 
or which option has the greatest net benefit in relation to costs. For example, in the US, 
the proposed economic benefits of environmental regulations must be shown to exceed the 
economic costs of compliance. When applied to development proposals, CBA, in effect, can 
translate into tradeoffs. In other words, development is deemed appropriate if the figures 
indicate that social and economic benefits ‘outweigh’ the environmental costs.
Assigning monetary values to ecological and health impacts is highly technical yet, simultane
-
ously, necessarily subjective and relative. It assumes costs and benefits can be aggregated and 
tradeoffs can be made in a context where the overriding issue is still money or efficiency, not 
ecology. The CBA framework means that inherently risky or harmful activities (eg nuclear) can 
be justified if compared to something arguably worse (eg coal-fired power stations), or if there 
is adequate offsetting. Further, CBA does not consider unjust enrichment, where investors or 
developers profit unreasonably at the expense of the public.