Cultural ecosystem services: Just warm fuzzies or critical for decision-making?

Background/Question/Methods

Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, efforts to value and protect ecosystem services have been seen by many as the best hope for making conservation attractive and commonplace worldwide.  If people and institutions recognize the diverse values of Nature, then we can greatly enhance investments in conservation and foster human well-being at the same time.  Scientific and policy communities have been working to develop the scientific basis and the policy and finance mechanisms necessary for integrating natural capital into resource and land-use decisions on a large scale.  These approaches have generally focused on modeling, mapping, and valuing critical provisioning, supporting, and regulating ecosystem services.  Cultural ecosystem services—diverse non-material benefits that people obtain through their interactions with ecosystems, including spiritual inspiration, cultural identity, social capital, and recreation—have received less attention. 

Results/Conclusions

In this talk we will: 1) Briefly demonstrate how modeling and mapping of ecosystem services have been successfully used to improve decision-making, 2) highlight some emerging themes from and gaps in the wide-ranging literature that connects nature to human well-being in intangible ways, 3) use examples from case-studies (e.g. Canada, US, Israel) to argue that the explicit inclusion of cultural ecosystem services, alongside their easier-to-model-and-map counterparts, is critical, 4) describe five key challenges that have hampered the explicit inclusion of a wide range of cultural services in decision-making, and 5) suggest solutions to some challenges, rebuttals to others, and offer a proposed path forward to improved decision-making that includes the full range of benefits that people receive from natural systems.