Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: The Priceless Resource
By Ashok Khosla
If our economic activity destroys the capability of the ecosystem to sustain our life support systems, which it will do if our decision
systems continue to ignore their value, future generations will pay a very heavy cost.
Some ecosystem services have almost infinite value. Those that maintain the oxygen in the air we breathe, the ozone that protects us from the Sun’s ultra violet rays, the quality of the water we drink and the fertility of the soil that produces our food are so basic to supporting life itself that these cannot even be evaluated quantitatively. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that maintains the planet’s temperature at levels that permit biological processes to function is another such service.
Some ecosystem services are quite obvious and even visible. These are relatively easy to appreciate: fish, game, fruits and nuts from the wild. Many crops are pollinated by bees, butterflies, bats and other natural processes, without which much of our food would be too expensive to produce. In other cases, seeds are spread or germinated by such processes. And maintaining the local microclimate, controlling the spread of crop pests and disease and binding the soil to prevent erosion are other processes that are commonly known.
Less well known but often even more valuable are the invisible processes such as those that regulate the flow of nutrients through the ecosystem – nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, sulfur and the rest of the biogeochemical cycles. Without these, crops and biomes such as forests, grasslands, mangroves, corals, would not exist and nor would life itself.
Ecosystem services are thus responsible for regulating, recharging and purifying our water bodies – on or below the ground – for our drinking and agriculture, for producing the timber, fuel, fodder, fiber for our industries and for mitigating floods, droughts and natural disasters.
Ecosystems are well-known for other services that are greatly valued by people: as habitats for biodiversity, genetic resources, migratory species; as enablers of ecotourism and many sports and recreational activities; and as sources of cultural values in the form of aesthetic beauty, intellectual stimulation and many different disciplines of science.
‘Nature-tech’—technologies inspired by nature—are among the most tantalizing prospects for realizing a low carbon, resource-efficient Green Economy in the 21st century. The natural world, in all its splendor and diversity, has already solved many of the sustainability challenges facing humanity in ingenious, unexpected and even counter-intuitive ways. If humans could only unravel the fascinating chemistry, processes, structures and designs that organisms from bacteria and mollusks to reptiles and mammals have evolved and tested over millions of years, perhaps then we would have new and transformational solutions to the many challenges faced by a planet of inhabited by more than seven billion people.
At a more meta-biological level, not only do biodiversity and ecosystem services directly and indirectly provide us with so many life-supports, the very machinery of life and evolution is itself a major process in need of nurturing: it got us to the here and now and it will be needed to get us to there and then. There is neither a past nor a future without the process that created life and its continual unfolding over the Billenia.
Our economic systems do not fully acknowledge the value of such ecosystem services. Both as stocks (equivalent to primary wealth) and as flows (equivalent to the returns from that wealth, treated as an investment), they are almost entirely neglected in our calculations of economic activity, GNP, stock market indices or other parameters. Since they do not appear in any economic model, they are neglected (i.e., assumed to be zero) by economists and therefore by policy makers.
The current crises of climate change, peak oil, water scarcity, food price fluctuations, financial systems and many others amply demonstrate the dangers inherent in such neglect. Designing strategies for sustainable development requires a much better understanding of nature’s services on the part of every concerned citizen.
Dr. Ashok Khosla is chairman of Development Alternatives Group, India