The ecosystem service framework can provide policy-makers and practitioners with a comprehensive approach for building on and enhancing traditional approaches to solving environmental challenges. Adopting an anthropogenic or human-centric perspective, the ecosystem service framework focus on how people benefit from and place value on nature, and the processes behind this delivery of benefits. This idea is not unique to the ecosystem service framework and have a long history in policy, planning and research. For example, forest functions (e.g. Dieterich, 1953) and functional landscapes (de Groot, 1992), or earlier still, economic ornithology (late 19th century) use similar approaches to human-nature relations.

The current understanding of ecosystem services has its roots in Gretchen Daily’s seminal book “Nature’s services” (1997) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which came a few years later (2005). Since then, ecosystem services have been the focus of several global programmes such as TEEB and IPBES.

Classification

Based on previous categorizations of ecosystem services (Daily 1997; de Groot et al. 2002), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005) and The Economics of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity (TEEB, 2010) grouped ecosystem services in four major categories: provisioning, regulating, habitat, and cultural and amenity services.

Provisioning services include all the material products or goods obtained from ecosystems, including genetic resources, food, building materials and fibre.

Regulating services include all the benefits obtained from the regulation by ecosystem processes, including the regulation of climate, water, and some human diseases and thus mitigating adverse impacts on human well-being.

Supporting or habitat services are those that are necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services. Examples include biomass production, nutrient cycling, water cycling, provisioning of habitat for species, and maintenance of genetic pools and evolutionary processes.

Cultural services are the ecosystem contributions to human well-being mediated through non-material processes (e.g. the mind or culture) and include spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experience as well as their role in supporting knowledge systems, social relations, and aesthetic values.

Biodiversity

There is a direct connection between human well-being and biodiversity. The most apparent connection is through the biodiversity support for all ecosystem services (e.g. Chapin et al., 2000), but there are also linkages through the evolutionary genesis of biodiversity together with the ecological processes underlying patterns and trends (Levin, 2000). However, the relation between biodiversity, understood as species diversity, and ecosystem service generation is not necessarily strongly correlated (Naidoo et al., 2008). Reframing biodiversity as functional diversity may help, as functional diversity is based on functional traits, i.e. physical or behavioural characters that can have a direct influence on ecosystem service generation. Functional traits can be divided into two categories relevant for discussing present and future ecosystem performance (Gonzalez and Loreau, 2009). Effect traits relate to the different functions, while response traits indicate how organisms may respond to different environmental conditions and changes. Response diversity, i.e. variation within response traits (sensu Elmqvist et al., 2003), has been suggested to be the most effective approach for preservation of those aspects of functional diversity that benefit humans (Mori et al., 2013). That said, the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning cannot be revealed by ecological studies of communities that focus on the structure and behaviour of species and populations alone. Beyond individual traits or trait combinations, information is needed on the flux of energy and matter through the ecosystem and causal process change behind a final outcome that could become a service – under certain circumstances.

Service Providing Units

Understanding the ecological processes that can potentially generate ecosystem services will help planners and management facilitate the translation and realization of ecological processes into services. Processes can be traced back to the places and units in which they take place, e.g. photosynthesis and primary production in plants or the interaction between a pollinator and a crop needing pollination (Burkhard et al., 2009; Luck et al., 2003). These service providing units have can be analysed and understood in terms of internal qualities and location specific context. Depending on the type of service, internal qualities relate thresholds in size or level of ecological organization (species, community, ecosystem), as well as temporal dynamics (many services only exist at specific times). Different dimensions of context (socio-technological, environmental, ecological and cultural, see Andersson et al., 2014) will influence the output from the service providing unit by either promoting or suppressing service realization. Knowing where services come from and landscape changes that may affect service delivery is key to the operationalization and use ecosystem services in planning.

Multifunctional landscapes and bundles of ecosystem services

As already indicated, most landscapes are multifunctional in the sense that they provide more than one ecosystem service. Drivers of change as well as different management regimes can have effects limited to a single service but are far more likely to have multiple impacts, many of them indirect. The connection or co-occurrence of services has been approached through an analytical focus on bundles of services (Foley et al., 2005; Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010), and including many services in analyses and assessments is essential for identifying trade-offs and synergies within decision making. Using a more mechanistic understanding of ecosystem service generation, for example through the service providing unit approach above, will help explain the roots of multi-functionality, or at the very least, the environmental aspect of multifunctionality. With the added understanding of scale and context dependence we can advance our understanding of when bundles of ecosystem services unravel as a consequence of reducing the size of an area (as there might be thresholds) or the wider implications of land use change (e.g. loss of local biodiversity due to regional fragmentation of green infrastructure).

The figure below illustrates bundles of ecosystem services in the Norrström drainage basin based on a deep survey of services which are quantifiable using publicly available data. Bundles of ES are identified by k-means clustering. The five groups of bundles (on the right side of the figure) are represented by rose-wind diagrams and named according to their characteristics. The diagrams are dimensionless, as they are based on normalized data for each service, and a higher surface area indicates the higher production of a particular service. The municipalities included in each group of bundles are highlighted in dark gray on the maps located at the left side of the figure. (from Queiroz et al. 2015)

Ecosystem services and the social-ecological system perspective

Ecosystem services are products of social-ecological systems (sensu Berkes and Folke, 1998) and realized only in the interplay between the potential service production (in often intensively managed ecosystems) and access to the benefits for those who need or desire them. As a parallel to the supply and demand side of markets ecosystem services can thus be understood as the final outcome of potential and utilization. The social-ecological systems perspective highlights also how e.g. social institutions and cultural practices have been influenced by and co-evolved with the utilization of ecosystem services (e.g. Colding and Folke, 2001; Ostrom, 1990, 1999).

Value dimensions

In practice, the ecosystem service concept has become widely associated with monetary valuation. In a decision making context, monetary valuation can be designed to contribute the marginal values needed for cost—benefit analyses (e.g. Naidoo and Ricketts, 2006) which could potentially inform many policy decisions (Arrow et al., 1996). However, most ecosystem services have additional non-material or intangible dimensions (Chan et al., 2012). In some cases, these intangible dimensions can matter more to people than do the affiliated material benefits (money and desirable physical changes such as sustenance or shelter). For example, owning and working in forest provides timber but may also be a way of life with ethical, political, or spiritual aspects. An ecosystem service approach in an area where forestry is an important livelihood should explicitly include ecosystems’ contribution to valued ways of life through well-being, sense of stewardship and identity etc., in addition to the concurrent income generating service.

Valuation is therefore expressed in two forms:

• Monetary
• Non-monetary

To get a deeper problematization of the issue of monetary vs non-monetary valuation of ecosystem services, see this lecture by Thomas Hahn on the topic:

Direct Link

Contributors

Erik Andersson (topic steward), Thomas Hahn (video lecture)

References

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