Coastal Capital –

Economic Valuation of Coral Reefs in Tobago and St. Lucia

by Lauretta Burke, Suzie Greenhalgh, Daniel Prager and Emily Cooper 

The World Resources Institute has recently released a pilot study of the economic value of coral reefs in two Caribbean islands: Tobago and St. Lucia. These results reflect our preliminary methodology, which we are currently revising and adapting to apply in Belize, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and elsewhere. We welcome your comments on the preliminary methods, and hope to continue to improve them going forward. Please contact Emily Cooper ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or Lauretta Burke ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) with your input.

The full report can be found in the Caribbean Technical Reports section of the Documents Library on this site, and is also available on the WRI website at: www.wri.org/project/valuation-caribbean-reefs, along with shorter, island-specific summaries of results and an Excel-based Valuation Tool for implementing the methodology.

A brief introduction to the paper: 

Coral reefs provide many benefits, sometimes called ecosystem goods and services, which are of high value and critical importance to local and national economies in the Caribbean. These values are frequently overlooked or underappreciated in coastal investment, development and policy decisions, resulting in short-sighted decisions that do not maximize the long-term economic potential of coastal areas. This project focuses on development of a valuation methodology that will be broadly applicable in countries across the Caribbean, supporting wise, long-term coastal policy and management. This report provides a comprehensive summary of the valuation methodology as well as valuation results from implementation in two pilot sites in the Eastern Caribbean (St. Lucia and Tobago).

A priority for this project has been the development of a simple, broadly applicable methodology to value coral reef goods and services, based predominantly on commonly available data. Use of a consistent approach should lead to more comparable estimates of value for different places and time periods. An easily replicable methodology can also be applied while varying key assumptions in order to assess the impacts of different development and management options. This methodology does not assess Total Economic Value (TEV), but rather focuses on three key goods and services: coral reef-associated tourism, fisheries, and shoreline protection services. These goods and services were chosen because of their importance to local economies and because data are available to support estimation of these values. The method was developed based on literature review, feedback from local partners and examination of coral reef use and data availability in two pilot locations (St. Lucia and Tobago).

The results from the economic valuation of coral reefs in St. Lucia and Tobago—sites with very different coastal management and data richness situations—are presented in the full technical report. Even assessing only a subset of goods and services demonstrates that the benefits provided by coral reefs are economically significant, particularly with respect to island GDP. These estimates should be viewed as lower bound (partial) estimates of the economic contribution of coral reefs to the economy of these two islands.