Ecosystem services price, good or bad

Ecosystem services price, valuing them should be done. However, they are public goods and the value should not lead to exploitation.

All ecosystems do in some way deliver regulating services, provisioning services, supporting services and social and cultural services. Now that we have lost many of these services, we realise that we have undervalued these services for many decades.  We will not significantly change the present economic system to not have a monetary value BUT we can change it to not only have a monetary value. The Covid 19 pandemic has highlighted the cost of ignoring ecosystem services and hopefully the economic system, which caused ecosystem degradation and the pandemic (one of many) will cause a revaluation of the economic system.

Climate change in all its manifestations is the real problem and is happening on a global scale at an increasing rate. Modern societies compete with each other at an individual, community, national and global scale, in order to acquire goods and services and they mine nature in order to do it. We are now in the situation that the exploitation of nature exceeds the ability of nature to supply those services, and have increased the risk that many ecosystems will be so significantly changed that their services can no longer be recovered. Nature will survive, but the services it offers may not be what we want or even suitable for the human species.

Simple societies even from as recently as 100 years ago had to cooperate with each other, neighbours and nations in order to survive. Nature was not exploited to the same degree and usually recovered from exploitation, and a balance was maintained. Unfortunately, humans as a species have so dominated and overexploited nature that nature cannot re-establish the balance that existed for 10 000 years

Ecosystems need to be valued at rates that take into account all the services that they can supply sustainably for this and future generations. We need to do this with cooperation across the globe. We must all think locally and have the courage to act globally (Jane Goodall) and time is now of the essence.

Ecosystem services have a relative magnitude of twice the global GDP. However, they should not be valued for conventional markets. Otherwise, they will get exploited by large corporations such as has happened with coal, oil and gas. The over exploitation of these resources globally has led to the destruction or significant global changes of the air that we breathe, with increasingly significant alterations to the land and sea environment. The air and environment are certainly public goods.

Ecosystem services are public goods and require new institutions to manage them for the public good. Global energy demand is destroying the environment globally and we still subsidise it. The value can then be used for policy decision making at all levels of public institutions with an overriding condition of creating a long term, sustainable solution for present and future generations. The ecosystem services price must reflect the value of the services provided but not be a traded value. All public land and water should have a proper value attached to it. This would facilitate protection and enforcement for its protection for the future.

Michael Austin Greenheart projects