Routledge Handbook of Ecosystem Services

Marion Potschin, Roy Haines-Young, Robert Fish, R. Kerry Turner, Marion Potschin, Roy Haines-Young, Robert Fish, R. Kerry Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317687030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Écosystèmes et Habitats

The idea that nature provides services to people is one of the most powerful concepts to have emerged over the last two decades. It is shaping our understanding of the role that biodiverse ecosystems play in the environment and their benefits for humankind. As a result, there is a growing interest in operational and methodological issues surrounding ecosystem services amongst environmental managers, and many institutions are now developing teaching programmes to equip the next generation with the skills needed to apply the concepts more effectively.

This handbook provides a comprehensive reference text on ecosystem services, integrating natural and social science (including economics). Collectively the chapters, written by the world's leading authorities, demonstrate the importance of biodiversity for people, policy and practice. They also show how the value of ecosystems to society can be expressed in monetary and non-monetary terms, so that the environment can be better taken into account in decision making. The significance of the ecosystem service paradigm is that it helps us redefine and better communicate the relationships between people and nature. It is shown how these are essential to resolving challenges such as sustainable development and poverty reduction, and the creation of a green economy in developing and developed world contexts.

1 Ecosystem Services in the Twenty-First Century

Marion Potschin, Roy Haines-Young, Robert Fish and R. Kerry Turner

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775302-1

Your true modern is separate from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He [sic.] has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored sjpgf. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’

The Land Ethic from ‘A Sand County Almanac’, Aldo Leopold, 1948

Introduction

Around 2008, the human population passed something of a milestone. For the first time there were more people living in cities than in rural areas. Looking forward, it is estimated that by 2050 roughly two-thirds of the nine or so billion people that inhabit the Earth will be urban dwellers (UNFPA, 2007). It is also projected that the absolute numbers of people living in the countryside will decline, compared to the present.

That we are becoming a predominantly urban species, and that all future population growth will be in built-up areas, will have many consequences. The outlook for human well-being is likely to be positive in many important respects, because there are generally better employment prospects in cities, and better access to education and health services. The United Nations Population Fund argues that social mobility in cities is greater and the chances that women can take control of their lives are greater. As a result, they suggest, fertility rates in urban areas are likely to reduce, and this will change trajectory of overall population growth. ¹ But there will be other consequences, too. The fact that societies depend fundamentally on natural systems may be readily masked and obscured by the experience of city living. Many critical traditions have argued in the vein of Leopold that, with urbanity, nature is often remade as a distant ‘other’; as merely background scenery for cultural processes; and as a set of commodities that conceal, or at best stylise, their origins in natural processes. While we may say that this model of spatial organisation makes society less vulnerable to environmental hazards, an appreciation of the ties that bind people and nature together will arguably be more difficult to sustain. Our planet will become no less finite just because most people will be living in cities.

The problem of the changing connection between people with nature is the one we want to address in this chapter. In thinking about this, and in particular what it means for the ecosystem services debate in the 21st century, we were reminded of Leopold’s thoughts about the ‘true modern’. From our current perspective, we can imagine that not only will the future descendants of the ‘true modern’ be less able to see the ‘vital relation’ that he or she has with ecosystem function, but also, since the ‘golf links’ and ‘scenic area’ are now likely to be regarded as ‘valuable cultural ecosystem services’, the prospect of changing his or her mind may be even more remote.

Of course, it is not inevitable that Leopold’s description of the ‘true modern’ will apply in the future. The prospect is very much dependent on the kinds of narratives that people develop to describe their lives and the societies that they inhabit – which is why the idea of ecosystem services and the importance of natural capital may have particular significance for Homo urbanus. In this chapter we will examine the history of the idea of ecosystem services, and argue that while it is an idea shaped by thinking at the end of the last century, it can continue to be relevant – providing we can connect it into wider debates about what people care about.

Histories

In their ‘fragmentary history’ of ecosystem services, Mooney and Ehrlich (1997) attribute the first use of the term ‘ecosystem services’ to Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1981). However, they also recognise the idea that ecosystems can be thought of as providing ‘services’ to people can be found in the literature long before the particular phrase was used. They note, for example, the account of ‘environmental services’ a decade earlier in the Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP, 1970), and ideas of the ‘public-services’ that can be provided by the global environment as described in Ehrlich and Holdren (1974) and other papers published around that time – not to mention the account of ‘nature’s services’ provided by Westman (1977).

In their history of the concept and its link with economic valuation of the environment, Gómez-Baggethun et al. (2010) agree with Mooney and Ehrlich (1997) that while the impact of human actions on the way nature can benefit people was discussed by writers even in ancient civilisations, it was probably the publication of Man and Nature in 1864 by George Perkins Marsh that stimulated interest in modern times. It is from Marsh’s work that we can see some of the central themes of contemporary debates about ecosystem services being rehearsed, namely the finite capacity of the earth, its limitations in providing benefits to people, and its vulnerability to human action.

As Lowenthal (2000, p.3) argues, a noteworthy feature of Man and Nature ‘was Marsh’s stress on the unforeseen and unintended consequences, as well as the heedless greed, of technological enterprise’. Marsh contended that, to sustain global resources, society needed to become aware of how it affected them (Lowenthal, 2000). While the term ‘ecosystem services’ did not enter scienjpgic discourse until 1981, the idea that people directly benefit from nature, and that nature’s capacity to support these benefits is limited, was thus already common currency. Indeed, the idea was shaping not only conservation debates but also institutional responses.

For example, in a ‘Worldwatch’ paper of 1978, we find Eckholm discussing the significance of the loss of species ‘whose ecological functions are especially important to society’. He cautions: ‘At the broadest level, extinctions serve as markers of the general reduction in the capacity of the earth’s biological systems to provide goods and crucial, if subtle, ecological services’ (Eckholm, 1978, p.18, author’s emphasis). In 1980 the IUCN World Conservation Strategy explicitly used the notion of goods and services provided by ecosystems in the section on ‘policy making and the integration of conservation and development’, where it is used in connection with sustainable forest management, and in the section on ‘environmental planning and rational use of resources’, where it is discussed more generally in the context of how to use ecosystem assessments to help allocate resource use (IUCN, 1980). Despite the passage of nearly four decades, the assessment framework that they proposed (Figure 1.1) remains highly applicable and consistent with current thinking.

Figure 1.1 Framework for ecosystem assessment developed in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy (after IUCN, 1980). Original title: ‘The relationship between the allocation of land and water uses and assessment, research and monitoring’.

What is perhaps surprising when we look back is that despite this early interest the idea of ecosystem services was given little attention in the ‘Brundtland Report’ of 1987. Reference is made to the idea only once, when the Report deals with species and ecosystems in the context of resources for development, and where it is noted that ‘species and natural ecosystems make many important contributions to human welfare’ (World Commission for Environment and Development, 1987, p. 125). The report observes that these resources are often not used in ways that will be able to meet the demands for the ‘goods and services that depend upon these natural resources’. Background reports to the Commission did, however, emphasise the importance of natural resources and natural processes which affect human well-being (Turner, 1989). Nevertheless, the point was taken up more fully in Agenda 21. This was a key and influential output from the Earth Summit in 1992 and which set out the United Nation’s action plan for delivering on sustainable development. In the discussion on ‘combatting deforestation’, the document echoes the points made in the World Conservation Strategy on the role of wood and non-wood goods and services as a component of sustainable forest management. Perhaps more importantly, when addressing the conservation of biodiversity, Agenda 21 charges us to ‘take measures to encourage a greater understanding and appreciation of the value of biological diversity, as manifested both in its component parts and in the ecosystem services provided’ (United Nations, 1992, sect. 15.5.m). The development of integrated environmental and economic accounting methods was seen as one necessary step. The aim was to expand national accounting systems so that they better measured the ‘… crucial role of the environment as a source of natural capital …’ (United Nations, 1992, sect. 8.41). Another key action idenjpgied in Agenda 21 was the development of a ‘science for sustainable development’, in which scienjpgic knowledge is applied ‘through scienjpgic assessments of current conditions and future prospects for the Earth system’ (United Nations, 1992, sect. 35.3).

Mooney and Ehrlich (1997) describe how biodiversity assessment approaches were developed in the 1990s, eventually as part of wider related initiatives such as the Global Biodiversity Assessment of UNEP, which integrated economic and ethical issues with biodiversity science (UNEP, 1995; Perrings et al., 1995). However, despite such advances, there was a wider recognition that the new findings emerging from ecology and related fields were poorly reflected in policy discussions. A key part of the debate was the publication of Protecting our Planet, Securing our Future: Linkages among Global Environmental Issues and Human Needs, in 1998. This was the output of an international study sponsored by UNEP, NASA, and the World Bank.

Importantly, Protecting our Planet called for more integrative assessments ‘that can highlight the linkages between questions relevant to climate, biodiversity, deserjpgication, and forest issues’ (Watson et al., 1998, p.56). It provided some of the impetus ² for the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), an examination of the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being, and a key influence on the early mainstreaming of the ecosystem services agenda (Daily et al., 2011, p.3). Significant institutional factors were, however, perhaps more decisive: the work associated with a number of international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Convention to Combat Deserjpgication, the Convention on Migratory Species, and the Ramsar Convention, had shown that the needs for scienjpgic assessments within the conventions were not being met. And so the foundations of the MA were laid. It became one of the key initiatives to help achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and to carry out the Plan of Implementation for the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.

As the result of the stimulus of the MA, national assessments have been made in a number of countries, including New Zealand, France, Spain, Portugal, and Israel. ³ The UK Government has also funded two national ecosystem assessments and set up a formal Natural Capital Committee ⁴ to audit society’s use of ecosystem services (UK, NEA, 2011; UKNEA FO, 2014). Most significantly, the Inter-Governmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has now been established ⁵ to continue to review, assess, and evaluate the growing knowledge base that has developed around the topic, and crucially to improve the capacity for using that knowledge effectively in decision-making. With its formal endorsement by the science and policy communities, the aim is to give as strong and credible a voice to issues surrounding biodiversity and ecosystem services as has bee...