Origin and evolution of ecosystem services

Background/Question/Methods

Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans or other organisms receive from the natural environment. They are often classified as public goods and include both ecological and human use functions. The term, “ecosystem services” has become a term of art over the past 10 years, especially since the 2005 United Nations Millennium Assessment (MA) was published.  The reference to an ecosystem (or natural resource) service evolved much earlier than its reference in the MA. The term gained prominence through the natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) arena due to the difficulties in trying to place dollar values on environmental injury. Within the NRDA area of practice, compensation for injuries to natural resources has evolved from monetary compensation to restoration-based compensation. In this approach, natural resource services that are injured are compensated for through the provision of an equivalent amount of natural resource services through restoration (creation, enhancement, acquisition, preservation, etc.) activities. The transition from discussing the environment from monetary terms to discussing the environment in service terms has resulted in a significant change as to how environmental actions such as remediation, restoration, permitting, environmental, can be evaluated and conducted.

Results/Conclusions

The evolution of “ecosystem services” has necessitated the development of environmental economics based approaches to quantifying both negative and positive impacts associated with actions that affect the environment. These approaches include the quantification of ecological habitat service values using habitat equivalency analysis methodology, resource specific service values through a resource equivalency analysis methodology and human use service values through a variety of established economics based approaches. These approaches are technical, scientifically based, and litigation tested and integrate non-monetary metrics into decision-making. Aside from the NRDA area, these ecosystem service valuation methods have now evolved into use in applications such as permitting, remedial, impact assessment, restoration, and land development.