Economic valuation of seagrass in palk bay region
Student name: Mr Sarthak Ashri
Guide: Dr Sukanya Das
Year of completion: 2018
Host Organisation: TERI School of Advanced Studies
Abstract: Seagrass are marine flowering plants that are mainly found in near shore underwater environments in all continents except Antarctica. They provide various important ecosystem services such as supporting high levels of biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water quality improvement, providing habitat to fish and feeding ground for various important endangered species such as Dugongs, Green Turtles and Seahorses, for whom there is a direct connection between the availability of seagrass and their ability to survive. Apart from this, there is a huge livelihood-dependence of local traditional communities on seagrass ecosystem in terms of income and food source through fisheries. Thus, along with ecological, there can be economic and social impacts of seagrass loss as well. Despite of having such an important role, seagrass cover has been disappearing in India due to many reasons such as climate change, degrading water quality and exploitative fishing methods. They are left out of managerial and conservation decisions, leading to its degradation and decline. Thus, this study tries to identify all the major ecosystem services of seagrass in the Palk Bay region and tries to find the economic value of one of its ecosystem services i.e. the provisioning service in terms of food through fisheries in the southern part of Palk Bay region for the post-monsoon season. For this purpose, majority of data has been collected through primary surveys in the Palk Bay region.
Keywords: seagrass ecosystem, fisheries, ecosystem service, provisioning service
