Ecosystem services

Scientific

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) categorized ecosystem services into four classes:

• Provisioning services — food, fiber, [[water|fresh water]], genetic resources, biochemicals
• Regulating services — climate regulation, disease regulation, pest regulation, water purification, pollination, erosion control, flood regulation
• Cultural services — spiritual values, recreational values, aesthetic values, educational values, sense-of-place values
• Supporting services — soil formation, nutrient cycling, primary production, the underlying processes that make all the other services possible

The framework’s distinguishing analytical move was to make these contributions visible — and, where economically tractable, monetized — in policy and economic decisions that otherwise treated ecosystem destruction as costless. The 1997 Costanza et al. paper “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital” estimated the global economic value of ecosystem services at $33 trillion/year — at the time substantially larger than global GDP — making the case for conservation in language policy economists could not ignore.

Cultural / political

The framework has been criticized along several lines:

• Commodification critique. Reducing ecological functions to monetary values is itself an act of cultural-political work that may foreclose other forms of valuation. Indigenous scholars in particular have argued that translating sacred relationships with land into dollar-equivalents replaces one form of dispossession with another.
• Legibility problem. The framework makes legible only those services that translate to human-economic value. Functions that are valuable to non-human species, that operate at temporal scales beyond economic relevance, or that humans don’t currently understand, are systematically undercounted.
• Substitution fallacy. Once a service has a dollar value, replacing the natural system with a human-engineered substitute that delivers the same dollar-equivalent service can appear economically equivalent — but the natural system’s resilience, complexity, and [[emergence|emergent properties]] are not captured in the substitution math.

The framework remains the dominant policy-friendly framing despite the critiques because its translation of ecology into economic-policy language is uniquely effective in environments where ecology-by-itself does not get policy attention. The IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), the Millennium Assessment’s institutional successor, has begun using the alternative framing “nature’s contributions to people” to address some of the critiques while retaining the framework’s policy utility.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares substrate with: [[regenerative-agriculture]]
• Shares approach with: [[true-cost-of-food]] · [[biomimicry]]