‘Ecosystem services’ is one of those terms that was nowhere and is now everywhere. The concept is not new. But the definition is relatively recent, and it highlights a truth that has remained hidden in plain sight for millenia and that we forget at our own risk: nature is everywhere and we need it for everything.
What are ecosystem services?
We have always been talking about ecosystem services; we just didn’t call them that. But the concept is not complicated. Ecosystemic services are all the ways in which we humans benefit from the way existing ecosystems work.
Plainly put: what do we get from the world we live in?
Trivially, we get food and water. But we also get medicine, mineral resources, construction materials, and a long list of other necessities.
At the beginning of the 21st century there was an attempt at defining and categorizing what it is exactly that we benefit from: the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a UN initiative. They coined the term “ecosystemic services”. Pragmatic and utilitarian, it had the advantage of capturing the attention of the business world. Some of these services are obvious. Others, not so much. Let’s have a look.
Needed for everything
Ecosystemic services are not limited to providing us with food, water and construction materials. When the MA tackled the task of establishing a classification of ecosystem services it came up with four different categories.
All the things we as humans need and use to live constitute the first category of ecosystemic services: provisioning services. We are provided with food, medicines and raw materials from plants, animals and minerals. In a less obvious aspect of the same service, happy geographic accidents give us hydroelectric power; we have been cooking and heating our homes using biomass for millenia, and we adorn ourselves and create art with pigments, stones and metals. The planet is a vast repository of resources from which we’ve been benefiting without worrying too much about their depletion or degradation.
There’s a second category of ecosystemic services, and we’ve been made aware of it rather abruptly: regulation services. The way well-functioning ecosystems regulate themselves give us plenty of benefits. Bogs purify water, sequester carbon and act as buffers in case of floods. A myriad of creatures process waste. Pollinators (there are many beyond bees!) keep our food system chugging along.
None of these services work by themselves and that’s why the supporting services category exists. Pollinators depend on other species to survive. A by-product of decomposition is soil formation, which is crucial to our food system and survival. The existence of habitats such as prairies, forests or brushland support a variety of pollinator species that guarantee the resilience of the whole pollination process. Photosynthesis takes energy from the sun, fixes carbon, converts it into biomass and generates oxygen. Living and non-living processes, from oceans to beetles, contribute to the nutrient cycle and make it possible for essential nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus to reach all living beings, including us.
And finally there’s the cultural services: the benefits we derive from the enjoyment and inspiration the natural world provides. If this category sounds a bit superficial, we’re not telling it right. The beauty (and associated health and wellness benefits) of a particular landscape, ecosystem or species, is the foundation of most of the tourism industry and the whole of the ecotourism sector. Many elements of ecosystems, be it mountains, animals or particular landscapes, have a significant cultural or religious significance for people. And although this category is the most disputed, its importance for the hospitality sector makes it a necessary addition to this article.
Value does not equate money
From the moment that the term “services” is associated with ecosystems it is perhaps inevitable that people try to assign them a monetary value. And there have been attempts and approximations. All of them amount to a staggering sum. But their value, others argue, is beyond money. These services are irreplaceable, and thus it doesn’t matter how much they cost: we have what we have. It’s not as if we could go to a competitor for a better cost-quality ratio ecosystem service!
Knowing is half the battle
Legislative bodies and scientific institutions are paying attention to these interactions and relationships: the term “ecosystemic dependencies” is showing up forcefully in the public discourse. Loss of habitat, loss of biodiversity, climate change and soil erosion are generating outcomes that endanger food production, genetic biodiversity and resilience mechanisms that have been working until now. And there are concerted efforts, by a number of scientific and international institutions, to better understand what we’re dealing with and how to avoid a destructive spiral if some tipping points are reached. While these efforts continue, rising awareness on the idea that for humans to live we need strong, resilient and interconnected ecosystems is a necessary first step towards an increasingly urgent solution.
Conclusion
Call it ecosystem services or call it “nature”: the complexity and interdependency of life and non-life interactions in the planet sustains humanity’s life. It’s necessary to pay close attention to these relationships and to the extent on which we, as a species, depend on these services.
The key word here is not “services”. It’s “dependency”. Because we depend on a planet that, to sustain us, needs… everything else.