The Value of Ecosystem Services

 

For more than 60 years, the Gross National Product (GNP) has been the scorecard used by economies around the world to measure how well (or how badly) they are doing. While GNP, as presently constructed, is certainly a useful indicator of the extent and growth of certain types of human activity, it is highly deficient in capturing many features of the economy that contribute to the real well being of the people.

GNP does not recognise non-quantifiable or non-monetisable variables such as human health, well being, happiness or fulfillment. Nor does it take into account unpaid or underpaid work (e.g., housewives, mothers, volunteers, the informal sector). Also, it does not include the vast contributions that nature makes to the economy through the provision of vital and very valuable ecosystem services.

Designing strategies for sustainable development requires a much better understanding of nature’s services. If our economic activity destroys the capability of the ecosystem to sustain our life support systems - which it will do if their value is incorporated in decision-making - future generations will pay a very heavy cost for our neglect.

Some ecosystem services have almost infinite value. Those that maintain the oxygen in the air we breathe, the ozone that protects us from the Sun’s ultraviolet rays, the quality of the water we drink and the fertility of the soil that produces our food are so basic to supporting life itself that they cannot even be evaluated. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that maintains the planet’s temperature at levels that permit biological processes to function is another such service.

Some ecosystem services are quite obvious and even visible. These are relatively easy to appreciate: fish, game, fruits and nuts from the wild. Many crops are pollinated by bees, butterflies, bats and other natural processes, without which much of our food would be too expensive to produce. In other cases, seeds are spread or germinated by these above-mentioned processes. Furthermore, maintaining the local microclimate, controlling the spread of crop pests and disease and binding the soil so as to prevent erosion are other commonly known processes.

Less well-known but often even more valuable are the invisible processes such as those that regulate the flow of nutrients through the ecosystem – nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, sulphur and the rest. Without these life itself, let alone crops and biomes such as forests, grasslands, mangroves, corals, etc., would not exist.

Ecosystem services are, thus, responsible for regulating, recharging and purifying our water bodies – on or below the ground – for our drinking and agriculture, to produce timber, fuel, fodder, fibre for our industries and to mitigate floods, droughts and natural disasters.

Ecosystems are well known for other services that are greatly valued by people: as habitats for biodiversity, genetic resources, migratory species; as enablers of ecotourism and many sports and recreational activities; and as sources of cultural values in the form of aesthetic beauty, intellectual stimulation and many different disciplines of science.

Our economic systems do not fully acknowledge the value of such ecosystem services. Both as stocks (equivalent to primary wealth) and as flows (equivalent to the returns from that wealth, treated as an investment), they are almost entirely neglected in our calculations of economic activity, GNP, stock market indices or other parameters. Since they do not appear in any economic model, they are neglected by economists and, therefore, by policy makers.

The current crises of climate change, peak oil, water scarcity, food price fluctuations and many others amply demonstrate the dangers inherent in such neglect.

A paradigm shift in perspective in national and international planning and policy is, thus, needed to ensure that the services provided by nature are adequately accounted for in the measurement of development indicators. This approach will also help in more equitable distribution of responsibility for ecosystem conservation amongst nations, based on their contribution to global ecological regeneration. Scattered experiments in different parts of the world that have adopted this approach have already started demonstrating its merit in indicating the extent of well being of people and promoting sustainable development.

Human society has reached a stage in its development pathway where recognising the value of ecosystem services and taking appropriate measures for their conservation is no longer a matter of choice but critical to its very existence and continuance.
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