Ecosystem services, they've been around for
a while. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has put ecosystem services on the
radar of policy makers, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB
) is working hard to get natural capital accounting mainstreamed into national
accounts. World Resources Institute has done some great work developing reports
and methodologies that illustrate the relevance of ecosystem services for
different sectors while giving actors in the public, private and non-profit
sectors the tools to incorporate ecosystem services in their decision making
and planning processes.
My research starts with these notions that
the economy and the environment are inextricably linked. The broader
environmental consequences of economic activities are often held up as a
challenge to modernity. Looking around it is reasonable to wonder whether our
current societal arrangements and orientation are somehow internally flawed and
destined for extinction? A large and important question. However I am stepping
into this problematic and accepting certain things as more or less constant in
the nearer time frame. For me it is the dependency of economic activities on
the environment that is of interest, and I have taken ecosystem services as my
unit of analysis for examining these relationships.
Providing factors of production, transport
of goods and receiving waste streams, the environment provides a range of
essential and often non-substitutable goods and services to the economy. Some
of these goods have market values while others are less easily incorporated
within traditional economic analysis. There exists a substantial literature
around the valuation of ecosystem services, with the primary aim of better
characterising the joint environmental-economic system. Resilience, and in
particular social-ecological resilience, is of increasing interest to scholars
in this area.
My thesis work is three-fold: 1) to
illustrate the importance of taking a step back and adopting the underlying
ecological system as the basis for interpreting ecosystem services in the
context of an environment-economy complex; 2) to argue the importance of
cultural dimensions to the valuation of ecosystem services, both from a risk
mitigation perspective, and in terms of intergenerational equity as a
precondition for sustainable development; and, 3) to examine the political
economy of watersheds and document how competition between various actors for
access to the ecosystem services they need can affect the institutionalisation
and implementation of water resources policy.
The goal is to publish these three research
initiatives as individual papers – all success in that regard will be reported
here – as well as to weave them together into a larger narrative. That second
objective will be explored more in subsequent communications through this blog.
References
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment - http://www.unep.org/maweb/en/index.aspx
TEEB - http://www.teebweb.org/
World Resources Institute - http://www.wri.org/
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Weaving Ecosystem Services into
Impact Assessment: http://www.wri.org/publication/weaving-ecosystem-services-into-impact-assessment
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The Corporate Ecosystem
Services Review: http://www.wri.org/publication/corporate-ecosystem-services-review
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