Natural ecosystems benefit human lives via providing fundamental life-support services and goods upon which human civilization depends. However, as nature provides those for free, many people believe that they are of little or no value and they exploit the land greedily and unreasonably, which makes serious ecological degradation. Concerning this issue, we present the ecological services valuation model (ESVM) to measure the cost of environmental degradation of land use cost, which is an evaluation model of environmental degradation cost. Environmental degradation cost refer to the cost of deterioration or compromise of natural environment through natural processes or human activities, which consists of opportunity cost and environmental damage cost. Land area is an important variable in the ESVM. Based on Osmotic system, we put forward the effective land area, which combines the scale factor and the impact of external environment. What is more, the Cobb-Douglas production function is modified to establish the model. Finally, we propose the calculation formula of the economic cost of land use projects. Analysis of effectiveness and sensitivity prove that ESVM was a relatively stable model.
Keywords: Cobb–Douglas production function; differential equation; environmental degradation; land use; true economic cost.