Environmental Services Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Environmental services has become a central concept in environmental management. Environmental services are functions of ecosystems that are valuable to society. They include carbon storage by vegetation, water, and soil; water filtration and flood control by wetlands and upstream slopes; the provision of wildlife habitats, genetic diversity, scenic beauty, and recreational opportunities by forests and other ecosystems; and the production of useful materials. Ecosystem services is also used to describe these environmental services.

For many private, government, and international environmental agencies, conservation of environmental services is replacing protection of endangered species and wilderness as a policy focus. Ecosystem services is the central organizing idea in the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. As a representation of scientific and policy consensus about the biosphere, the assessment is the successor to the influential 1987 Brandt Commission Report, Our Common Future.

The assessment warns that humans are overusing or undermining ecosystem services so much that we are “living on borrowed time,” and defines four categories of ecosystem services: Provisioning services, such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services, such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling.

The idea of environmental services promotes recognition of the myriad ways in which individuals, communities, and economies depend upon the “life-support functions” of ecosystems, both nearby and distant. It draws attention to the fact that most of these services remain external to economic calculations: they are provided at no monetary cost to those who depend upon them or profit from them. The measuring and mapping of ecosystem functions can help to clarify what will be lost or gained as a result of different land use decisions and conservation regulations. Environmental and ecological economists estimate the economic values of ecosystem functions so as to provide a more informed and rational basis for these social choices.

Marketing of Services

Some carry this idea further, arguing that the world’s natural environment can best be safeguarded by the privatization, monetary pricing, and market exchange of environmental services. The premise of this “conservation by commercialization” strategy is that it will foster more efficient resource use and the greatest conservation gains for the least cost. Environmental services markets are already established in industrialized countries. New, global green markets are being designed to link local ecosystem service providers with government agencies, nongovernment organizations, and private investors worldwide.

The such largest markets involve carbon emissions reduction credits. They permit the buyer, such as a power company, to continue emitting CO2 or other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in excess of the amount allowed by law or promised by the company. The funds paid by the buyer of these credits, also called offsets, are meant to finance activities to reduce emissions by another firm or create new carbon sinks in another community or country. For example, they might fund a tree plantation in the tropics or pay landowners not to cut existing forests. Markets in offsets for damage to biodiversity and other ecosystem services are also being developed.

These markets are highly controversial. Their advocates of say they offer “triple-win” solutions for buyers, for sellers (such as the owners or stewards of forests), and for nature, with no significant sacrifices by anybody. Others maintain that, while the concept of ecosystem services is a useful aid to decision making, market prices cannot encompass the full values of nature or the different benefits of ecosystems to people who depend on them for survival and people who admire them from a distance. Even strong advocates of environmental services markets debate whether they can simultaneously foster conservation and “reward the poor,” which is the stated goal of many international environmental services projects. Some critics contend that putting a monetary price on ecosystem services lays the groundwork for expropriating them from poorer people and weaker countries, enabling the world’s wealthy to “own” and determine the fate of the planet’s ecosystems.

In any case, the environmental services conceptparticularly when linked to the idea that ecosystem functions should be commodified-is not epistemologically innocent. Environmental services trading requires new ways of representing nature, new methods of measuring nature’s values, and new institutions to standardize and reproduce those representations and methods.

The increasing prominence of environmental services markets in the policies of governments and international agencies makes them an important frontier in the re-regulation of socionature. A critical question is: in whose interests will this re-regulation it be carried out?

Bibliography:

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis (Island Press, 2005);
Stephen C. Farber, Robert Costanza and Matthew Wilson 2002 “Economic and Ecological Concepts for Valuing Ecosystem Services” (Ecological Economics 41, 375-392, 2002);
Sven Wunder, Payments for Environmental Services: Some Nuts and Bolts (Center for International Forestry Research, 2005);
Natasha Landell-Mills and Ina T. Porras, Silver Bullet or Fools’ Gold? A Global Review of Markets for Forest Environmental Services and their Impact on the Poor (International Institute for Environment and Development, 2002);
Friends of the Earth International, Nature for Sale: The Impacts of Privatizing Water and Biodiversity (FOEI Amsterdam, 2005).