This weekly news brief will focus on ecosystem services and the potential benefits or drawbacks that can derive from putting a financial value on natural ecosystems.
“An ecosystem is a community of animals and plants interacting with one another and with their physical environment. Ecosystems include physical and chemical components, such as soils, water, and nutrients that support the organisms living within them. These organisms may range from large animals and plants to microscopic bacteria. Ecosystems include the interactions among all organisms in a given habitat. People are part of ecosystems. The health and wellbeing of human populations depends upon the services provided by ecosystems and their components - organisms, soil, water, and nutrients.” (ESA, 2000:1). We then benefit for “free” and without necessarily knowing it from the services that natural ecosystems create such as seeds dispersion, drought and floods mitigation, pollination, climate stability etc.
These natural services are difficult to duplicate but are essential for our well being. This however did not stop human populations from disrupting or impairing ecosystems through for example: runoff of pesticides, fertilizers, and animal wastes, pollution of land, water, and air resources, introduction of non-native species, erosion of soils, deforestation, urban sprawl etc.(ESA, 2000)
The question was then raised on how to understand and therefore prevent ecosystems degradation. With respect to the evaluation of ecosystems services monetary pricing evaluation is the most common method used as the examples below illustrate:
- Much of the Mississippi River Valley’s natural flood protection services were destroyed when adjacent wetlands were drained and channels altered. As a result, the 1993 floods resulted in property damages estimated at twelve billion dollars partially from the inability of the Valley to lessen the impacts of the high volumes of water. (ESA, 2000:2)
- Over 100,000 different animal species - including bats, bees, flies, moths, beetles, birds, and butterflies - provide free pollination services. One third of human food comes from plants pollinated by wild pollinators. The value of pollination services from wild pollinators in the U.S. alone is estimated at four to six billion dollars per year. (ESA, 2000:2)
The UK National Ecosystem Assessment is one of the most advanced interdisciplinary assessment of ecosystems and services in the world and it states that ecosystem services are typically "ignored" and given a "value of zero" in political decision-making (UKNEA,2011). To compensate this lack of political interest, ecosystem studies like the UK national assessment try to give a financial value to the services that ecosystems provide in order to make in a practical way decision makers aware of the importance of preserving ecosystem services.
The problem with this approach raised by many scholars is that by doing this we risk to put a dollar value on ecosystem services, by reducing them down to an economic rationalist framework.
Although ecosystems services assessment like the UK one try to put into the equation well being values (ex: health and shared social value) rather than just economic ones, the assessment recognized that the paucity of information on social values and the difficulty to quantify them constrained their understanding of how to account for them in decision-making (UKNEA,2011).
The debate is therefore still open. With which argument do you agree with?
Giving a financial value to ecosystems services provide that governments, businesses and consumers can understand the gravity of the problem (Anderson, 2010)?
Or that Nature conservation must be framed as a moral issue and argued as such to policy-makers, who are just as accustomed to making decisions based on morality as on finances. Therefore it is not the best way to meaningfully engage policy-makers driven by translating the worth of nature into the language of economics (McCauley, 2006)?
By: Giorgia Donin
References:
Anderson R., 2010, Nature’s gift: the economic benefits of preserving the natural world. BBC News. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11606228
ESA (Ecological Society of America), 2000, Ecosystem service. Available from: http://www.esa.org/education_diversity/pdfDocs/ecosystemservices.pdf
MacCauley D.J, 2006, Selling out on Nature. Nature, 443(7), 27-28.
UKNEA, 2011, UK national ecosystem Assessment Synthesis and key findings. Available from: http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/