All ecosystems are shaped by people, directly or indirectly and all people, rich or poor, rural or urban, depend on the capacity of ecosystems to generate essential ecosystem services. In this sense, people and ecosystems are interdependent social-ecological systems. The ecosystem concept describes the interrelationships between living organisms (people included) and the non-living environment and provides a holistic approach to understanding the generation of services from an environment that both delivers benefits to and imposes costs on people. Variation in biological diversity relates to the operations of ecosystems in at least three ways: 1. increase in diversity often leads to an increase in productivity due to complementary traits among species for resource use, and productivity itself underpins many ecosystem services, 2. increased diversity leads to an increase in response diversity (range of traits related to how species within the same functional group respond to environmental drivers) resulting in less variability in functioning over time as environment changes, 3. idiosyncratic effects due to keystone species properties and unique trait-combinations which may result in a disproportional effect of losing one particular species compared to the effect of losing individual species at random. Ecosystems produce multiple services and these interact in complex ways, different services being interlinked, both negatively and positively. Delivery of many services will therefore vary in a correlated manner, but when an ecosystem is managed principally for the delivery of a single service (e.g. food production), other services are nearly always affected negatively. Ecosystems vary in their ability to buffer and adapt to both natural and anthropogenic changes as well as recover after changes (i.e. resilience). When subjected to severe change, ecosystems may cross thresholds and move into different and often less desirable ecological states or trajectories. A major challenge is how to design ecosystem management in ways that maintain resilience and avoids passing undesirable thresholds. There is clear evidence for a central role of biodiversity in the delivery of some – but not all - services, viewed individually. However, ecosystems need to be managed to deliver multiple services to sustain human well-being and also managed at the level of landscapes and seascapes in ways that avoid the passing of dangerous tipping-points. We can state with high certainty that maintaining functioning ecosystems capable of delivering multiple services requires a general approach to sustaining biodiversity, in the long-term also when a single service is the focus.

/pdf/integrating-the-ecological-and-economic-dimensions-in-12s24nqbj6.pdf

Integrating the ecological and economic dimensions in biodiversity and ecosystem service valuation

In the last decade a growing number of environmental scientists have advocated economic valuation of ecosystem services as a pragmatic short-term strategy to communicate the value of biodiversity i...

/pdf/economic-valuation-and-the-commodification-of-ecosystem-is9l32xdl4.pdf

Economic valuation and the commodification of ecosystem services

/pdf/the-economics-of-valuing-ecosystem-services-and-biodiversity-324vqg1ydy.pdf

The economics of valuing ecosystem services and biodiversity

https://www.waddenacademie.nl/fileadmin/inhoud/pdf/04-bibliotheek/Themanummer_OCMA/16_Integrating_ecological__economic_and_social_aspects_to_generate_useful_management_information_under_the_EU_Directives___ecosystem_approach__OCMA.pdf

Integrating ecological, economic and social aspects to generate useful management information under the EU Directives' ‘ecosystem approach’

Integrated spatial flood risk assessment: The case of Zaragoza

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005b) has fundamentally changed the way in which scientists are thinking about the value of ecosystems. By harnessing recent results on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning to an assessment of the valued services that people obtain from the natural environment, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has brought the analysis of ecosystems into the domain of economics. Ecosystem services are defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. Since the value of any asset is simply the discounted stream of benefits that are obtained from that asset, the benefit streams associated with ecosystem services may be used to estimate the value of the underlying ecological assets. Those assets are not the traditional stocks of resource economics – minerals, water, timber, and so on – but the systems that yield flows of such things. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005b) distinguishes four broad benefit streams: provisioning services, cultural services, supporting services, and regulating services. The first of these is the most familiar. Provisioning services cover the renewable resources that have been the focus of much work in environmental and resource economics, including foods, fibres, fuels, water, biochemicals, medicines, pharmaceuticals, and genetic material. Many of these products are directly consumed, and are subject to reasonably well-defined property rights. They are priced in the market, and even though there may be important externalities in their production or consumption, those prices bear some relation to the scarcity of resources. The second category, cultural services, is similarly quite familiar. These services include a range of largely non-consumptive uses of the environment, and reflect the fact that the diversity of ecosystems is mirrored in the diversity of human cultures. Cultural services include the spiritual, religious, aesthetic, and inspirational wellbeing that people derive from the ‘natural’ world around them. They include the sense of place that people have, as well as the totemic importance of particular landscapes and species. More importantly, they include (traditional and scientific) information, awareness, and understanding of ecosystems and their individual components offered by functioning ecosystems. Some cultural services, such as ecotourism, are offered through well-developed markets. Others are not. Many cultural services are still regulated by custom and usage, or by traditional taboos, rights, and obligations. Nevertheless, they are directly used by people, and so are amenable to valuation by methods designed to reveal people’s preferences. The category of support services captures the main ecosystem processes that underpin all other services. Examples offered by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment include soil formation, photosynthesis, primary production, and nutrient, carbon, and water cycling. These services play out at quite different spatial and temporal scales. For example, nutrient cycling involves the maintenance of the roughly twenty nutrients essential for life, in different concentrations in different parts of the system. It is often localized, and is therefore at least

The valuation of ecosystem services

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The valuation of ecosystem services