value of ecosystem services in us

Natural Capital Accounting – why GDP is not an accurate measure of our wealth? We have a stronger economy, diverse food products, and advancements in medical research as a result of wildlife and natural ecos… They comprise the diverse ways we depend on Nature. One of the major tasks of the new Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to assess how biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) contribute material and energy inputs for human societies. We now hear phrases like ‘nature’s benefits,’ ‘natural capital,’ ‘human dependence on nature,’ as well as terms borrowed from economics like ‘intrinsic value.’ Though the idea of environmental services was introduced in the 1970s, it really didn’t get wides… In 1997, the global value of ecosystem services was estimated to average $33 trillion/yr in 1995 $US ($46 trillion/yr in 2007 $US). The institutional failures and agriculture and population drivers that put pressure on nature should ultimately be addressed by policymakers. Cutting down a forest can initially increase the local GDP. Using the same methods as in the 1997 paper but with updated data, the estimate for the total global ecosystem services in 2011 is $125 trillion/yr (assuming updated unit values and changes to biome areas) and $145 trillion/yr (assuming only unit values changed), both in 2007 $US. Environmental awareness, however, is on the rise. Therein lies the challenge, and IPBES is taking into serious consideration the issue of assessment capacity. This may be because the negative feedbacks of a bio-capacity deficit are dampened by technology and innovation that essentially buys us time before the deficit catches up. “By framing biodiversity in terms of ecosystem services, the benefits to society become apparent and it [biodiversity] resonates more directly with the public and policymakers,” Mooney explains. Global estimates expressed in monetary accounting units, such as this, are useful to highlight the magnitude of eco-services, but have no specific decision-making context. For the two of us, notions of ‘just and effective decision-making’ collided as we got to know one another—a biophysically- and philosophically-trained ecosystem-services insider (Kai) and a socially-trained qualitative and quantitative scholar of values, culture, risk, and decision analysis (Terre). We think that these critiques are largely misplaced once one under-stands the context and multiple potential uses of ecosystem services valuation, as we explain further on. Among all the ecosystem services, supporting services alone contribute about 50% and the rest of the services account for less than 10% in the same. Such an approach does not consider the intrinsic value of those life forms not directly used by us, and could take away focus from the causes of biodiversity loss well summarized by Braimoh et al. “Essentially these communities of organisms are our life support system.”. The Danube floodplain and wetlands, especially their regulatory role as a nutrient sink, have been valued at 650 Million Euro per year (Gren et al. Prof. Albert van Jaarsveld, President and CEO of the National Research Foundation in South Africa and a workshop co-chair, notes the two-step nature of this challenge. However, the underlying data and models can be applied at multiple scales to assess changes resulting from various scenarios and policies. We also know that ecosystems contain multiple services which we call ‘ecosystem services bundling.’ Other ways are to bring in non-monetary valuation in collaboration with behavioural economists, psychologists and anthropologists in a transdisciplinary way, and the sometimes ignored distributional aspect of ecosystem services — how benefits are distributed across different groups of people.”. Despite the advances in knowledge about our footprint on the planet — for example we have a good idea of countries’ individual bio-capacity and how much of it is actually being used by the population thanks to ecological footprint analysis — the emphasis on development and growth is more salient to our everyday lifestyles.

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