South Sudan and Ethiopia, despite possessing many wetlands – some even having international importance, there has been limited attempts to value the ecosystem and biodiversity services of the wetlands. However, such valuation exercises are vital to promote knowledge-based decision making and the proper management of the wetlands. The Lower Baro wetlands systems is one of the wetlands in the Nile Basin located in both countries and among the wetlands with limited availability of literature; let alone valuation studies. This study is, hence, aimed at filling this gap and applied the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD) to estimate the values of the ecosystem services since it was difficult to access the study area. The land use land cover map of the area was extracted using Remote Sensing and GIS tools. Considering 2020 as a base year, the annual economic value of the wetlands’ ecosystem services was estimated at above $660 million. More than half of these benefits emanate from the provisioning services while regulating and cultural services contribute about 22.5 percent each. The biodiversity services stood the least with less than half a percentage contribution. The findings reveal that the ESVD database is a good source of information for valuing wetlands in data scarce regions. Since the regulating and biodiversity services have a public good character, which may not be the immediate reasons for the conservation of the wetlands, actors from local to international levels should play their part in designing mechanisms for duly compensating local communities for these services.
