Roots of happiness: Global connections between ecosystems and human well-being

Background/Question/Methods

Happiness is complex.  The notion of happiness as an ultimate good, and the question of what makes people happy have occupied much thought throughout our intellectual history.  Recently the academic literature on subjective well-being has blossomed, with many robust links being identified between various forms of financial economy (e.g. income, relative wealth), human capital (e.g. identity, purpose), and social relationships (e.g. family and friendships). Rarely, however, are ecological goods and services included in these analyses.  Here we explore the ways in which ecosystem services generally, and cultural ecosystem services specifically, contribute to subjective human well-being on a global scale.  We introduce a general theoretical model that explores both the material (e.g. food, shelter) and non-material (e.g. freedom, inspiration) elements of happiness.  Then, by using various statistical tools (e.g. variance partitioning), we deconstruct this relationship on a global scale.

Results/Conclusions

We demonstrate the ways in which ecosystems and forms of natural capital are important to our well-being after accounting for the importance of other forms of capital such as built capital, social capital, human capital, and financial capital.  Likewise, we provide estimates of the degree to which factors that have historically been strongly tied to subjective well-being in the literature (e.g. income) are in fact ultimately moderated or driven by the state of the ecological system.  We provide estimates of the relative power of financial, built, social, human, and natural capital in explaining variation in global well-being.  In sum, the attempts of the international community to simplify the concept of human well-being have led us to overly stress 'easily counted' proxies (e.g. GDP) while under-appreciating the significant--and complicated--role of ecosystems and social capital.