The promise and pitfalls of ecosystem service valuation

Background/Question/Methods

Ecosystems are connected to human well-being in a number of complex ways at multiple time and space scales.  The challenge of ecosystem services science (ESS) is understanding and modelling these connections, with the express purpose of providing information to decision-makers to allow them to better manage our natural capital assets. In order for ecosystem services  (the benefits provided to humans by ecosystems) to occur, natural capital (natural ecosystems and their products that do not require human activity to build or maintain) must be combined with other forms of capital that do require human intervention to build and maintain. These include: built or manufactured capital, human capital (e.g., human labor and knowledge); and social capital (e.g., communities and cultures).  Thus ESS is inherently an integrated, transdisciplinary science that is concerned about the way these four forms of capital contribute to human well-being and the synergies and trade-offs among them.

Results/Conclusions

The process of valuation of ecosystem services is about quantifying and modelling these synergies and trade-offs.   It requires a deeper understanding of the interconnections among human psychology and decision processes, ecosystem processes and functions, and economic production and consumption processes at multiple time and space scales. Several integrated modleing approaches and the global Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP) are begining to address these issues. The challenges of ESS are huge and will require a significantly more transdiscipinary approach than our current academic institutions are comfortable with. But the payoffs are also huge. Our future depends on making rapid progress in this area.