Restoring Nature's Capital, a recent publication from the World Resources Institute (WRI), proposes an innovative strategy for business, governments, and civil society to reverse current ecosystem degradation. By treating natural systems as huge capital assets vital to our continued economic and social growth, the report takes a fundamentally human approach to valuing nature's goods and services. According to the authors, sustaining healthy ecosystems and investing wisely in "nature's capital" will depend heavily on the concept of governance: who makes decisions, how are they made, and with what information.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
In 2005, the groundbreaking Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) provided the first comprehensive global evaluation of ecosystem health. The results of the four-year international study were startling: of 24 ecosystem services surveyed, 15 are in serious decline and five hang in the balance; only four have improved. We face a troubling reality that the benefits we receive from nature, including freshwater, food and protection from natural hazards, may not be able to meet the needs of current and future generations. Three types of ecosystem services described in the MA include:
- Provisioning services: food, water, and other life-sustaining materials. These services are the most easily recognized and valued by society.
- Regulating services: water filtration, storm protection, erosion control and carbon sequestration, just to name a few.
- Cultural services: recreation as well as spiritual and aesthetic value.
Source: Restoring Nature's Capital
Challenges to Valuing Ecosystem Services
The unsustainable use of nature's resources often arises from the inherent trade-offs between different types of services provided by a single resource. For example, humans often favor provisioning services, such as harvesting trees for timber, over other types of services provided by forests, such as carbon sequestration and water regulation. As a result, regulating and cultural services, which are more difficult to value in dollars, are often neglected by national accounting systems and excluded from economic decision-making.
An Action Agenda to Sustain Ecosystem Services
The MA was designed to be policy relevant, but not prescriptive. To help translate its results into action, WRI commissioned papers from 17 policy experts from around the globe on what they believed were the key policy, institutional and governance implications of the MA findings. Restoring Nature's Capital drew on these expert reviews, WRI's series of World Resources Reports, and other sources to identify five major barriers that currently impede sustainable management of ecosystem services:
- lack of information to connect healthy ecosystems with development goals;
- insufficient local rights to decision-making that affects ecosystems;
- poor coordination of decision-making across local, national, and international levels;
- limited accountability of business and governments for actions affecting ecosystem services; and
- missing or distorted financial incentives for responsible management of ecosystem services.
RELATED LINKS:
Restoring Nature's Capital: An Action Agenda to Sustain Ecosystem Services (pdf)
