CAPTURING THE VALUE OF ECOSYSTEM
Services Despite their obvious importance to human well being, people tend to think of
ecosystems as being economically productive in narrow terms, often assigning value only
to the production of conventional commodities or to real estate development. Provision
of ecosystem services is only rarely considered in cost–benefit analyses, preparation of
environmental impact statements, or other assessments of alternative paths of
development. There is no shortage of markets for ecosystem goods (such as clean water
and water melons), but the services underpinning these goods (such as water purification
and bee pollination) often have no mone tary value. This is in part because ecosystem
services are generally public goods, free to any user, and therefore difficult to value.
Because people mostly do not pay for them, it can be difficult to discern what the supply,
demand, and willingness to pay for services actually are.
As a result, there are no direct price mechanisms to signal the scarcity or degradation of
these public goods before they fail. While for some goods and services price reflects value
or importance, when ecosystem services are assigned monetary value they tend to be
priced much lower than their importance suggests. This is true in part because when
supply is much larger than demand, prices are low, no matter how necessary the good.
The pricing of dia monds and water is illustrative. Lost in the desert, a traveler would
happily trade all the diamonds in the world for a single cup of water; back in the
marketplace, our traveler would find that diamonds are many, many times more costly
than water. Water is inexpensive or free because, like many ecosystem goods and
services, it tends to be far more abundant than the volume demanded by people; when
ecosystems are functioning well, even more is available.
Precise valuation of ecosystem services is often not required to provide appropriate
economic incentives for protecting the ecosystems that supply them. Incentives need only
make it more economically appealing to a landowner to maintain hedgerows as habitat
for native pollinators than to cultivate every last square meter of a field, for instance, or
make it pay to preserve a wetland rather than filling it to build houses. A farm, as
illustrated below, might generate enough income from nonagricul tural commodities to
alter its land management regime.
Incentives to protect and maintain ecosystems can be provided by the government,
privately through markets, or through hybrid institutions such as cap and trade systems
supported by government policy. A variety of tools for valuing ecosystem services and
creating incentives for their conservation are currently being developed, including capital
markets such as the Chicago Climate Exchange, wetland mitigation banks, and outright
payments, often involving private–public partnerships, for services, as is occurring in
Australia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. These market based approaches provide a much better
indication of value than early, more theoretical attempts to quantify the value of eco
system services. While valuation is not necessarily a solution or end in itself, it is a
powerful way of organizing information and an important tool in the much larger process
of decision making.
The Need for Fundamental Laws In Ecology
Humans have always strived toward finding a structure or a pattern in their observations
– to develop a theory. Science does not make sense without theory. Without theory, our
observations become only a beautiful collec tion of impressions without explanation or
application to solve problems of human interest. The alternative to scientific theory is to
observe everything which is not possible. A well developed theory can be used to make
predictions. Our scientific knowledge has to be coherent in order to apply the underlying
theory and explain our observations.
Ecology has only partially been able to condense the systematic collection of observations
and knowledge about ecosystems into testable laws and principles. During the last few
decades systems ecologists have developed hypotheses that together with basic laws
from biochemistry and thermodynamics are proposed as a first attempt to formulate
fundamental laws in ecology. The inherent complexity of ecosystems means that it is
necessary to break from the long reductionistic scien tific tradition to a new holistic
ecological approach. Reductionistic science has had a continuous chain of successes since
Descartes and Newton. Lately, however, there is an increasing understanding for the need
of knowledge syntheses to a more holistic image. Today this search for a holistic
understanding of complex sys tems is considered one of the greatest scientific challenges
of the twenty first century by many scientists. Several important contributions to systems
ecology have attempted to capture the features and characteristics of ecosystems, their
processes, and their dynamics.
The different theories and approaches look inconsistent at first glance, but when
examined more closely, their com plementarity becomes evident . This commonality and
consensus regarding ecosystem dynamics was asserted by Jørgensen in the first edition
of Integration of Ecosystem Theories: A Pattern (1992), and later editions (2nd edn. 1997
and 3rd edn. 2002) have only enhanced the percep tion that the theories form a pattern
and that they are highly consistent. It is clear from recent meetings and discussions that
today we have a general ecosystem the ory which is rooted in a consensus of the pattern
of ecosystem dynamics. The ecosystem theory presented here combines the work of
several scientists, and provides a foundation for further progress in systems ecology,
ecosystem theory, and ecology. Furthermore, it may be feasible to use a few fundamental
laws to derive other laws to explain most observations
