Integrated Valuation of Rwanda's Forest and Wetland Ecosystems for National Planning and Green GDP

Conventional GDP records flow of marketed goods and services but ignores the depreciationof natural capital, allowing apparent growth to coexist with the erosion of ecological assetsthat underpin production, infrastructure and well-being. Responding to calls from theDasgupta Review and the System of Environmental Economic Accounting – EcosystemAccounting (SEEA EA) for wealth-based metrics, this paper applies a Rwanda IntegratedValuation Framework (RIVF) to estimate the Total Economic Value (TEV) of six forest andfour wetland ecosystems and to operationalise natural-capital indicators for fiscal andplanning use.The RIVF combines spatially explicit biophysical modelling of key regulating services (wateryield and regulation, carbon storage, soil erosion control) using InVEST 3.12.0 with ahousehold survey of 3,976 households adjacent to ten priority sites. Direct use and culturalvalues are aggregated into a Protection Dividend (PD), defined as the annual cash andsubsistence income that households derive from ecosystem services. Forward-lookinglivelihood losses under stylised “absent” and “half-degraded” scenarios are aggregated into aNet Cost of Degradation (NCD), interpreted as an implicit “natural capital debt”. NCD stocksare annualised over a 50‑year horizon at a 10% discount rate to provide budgeting-compatibleflows. Biophysical outputs are monetised using conservative, policy-relevant unit value based on water tariffs and avoided supply costs, international carbon prices, and nutrientreplacement and sediment-damage costs.Results show that forests and wetlands are core national wealth assets whose TEV isdominated by regulating services. In forests, more than 90% of TEV arises from waterregulation, carbon storage and soil erosion control. Nyungwe National Park alone generateswater regulation benefits of about 418.2 billion RWF per year, holds carbon stocks valued atapproximately 6,066.3 billion RWF (151.7 million tCO₂e) and provides soil erosion controlvalued at 0.3 billion RWF per year. Its composite regulating-service value is about 6,484.8billion RWF, while its annualised NCD is 81 billion RWF/year. Among wetlands, sites suchas Rugezi and Bugarama each supply annual regulating benefits on the order of 386–426billion RWF, alongside substantial provisioning incomes in Bugarama. Across all tenecosystems, a simple trade-off index between current provisioning use and long-termregulating value remains below 0.05 on average, indicating that aggregate current use iscompatible with maintaining most regulating benefits under present conditions.By introducing PD and NCD as complementary indicators and embedding them in a cost–benefit and Green GDP framework, this study goes beyond conventional benefit-transferapproaches to provide a tri-dimensional, integrated valuation (biophysical, economic, socioeconomic) that remains rare in the forest and wetland valuation literature. It demonstrates thatconserving Rwanda’s “natural infrastructure” is not a discretionary environmental cost but acentral macroeconomic strategy for protecting national wealth under Vision 2050, andprovides concrete, SEEA-consistent metrics that can be incorporated into national accounts,project appraisal and spatial planning.