Obscuring Ecosystem Function with Application of the Ecosystem Services Concept

Abstract

Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and related biodiversity as ecosystem services to humanity. Despite the economic success of programs such as the Catskill/Delaware watershed management plan in the United States and the creation of global carbon exchanges, today's marketplace often fails to adequately protect biodiversity. We used a Marxist critique to explain one reason for this failure and to suggest a possible, if partial, response. Reframing ecosystem functions as economic services does not address the political problem of commodification. Just as it obscures the labor of human workers, commodification obscures the importance of the biota (ecosystem workers) and related abiotic factors that contribute to ecosystem functions. This erasure of work done by ecosystems impedes public understanding of biodiversity. Odum and Odum's radical suggestion to use the language of ecosystems (i.e., emergy or energy memory) to describe economies, rather than using the language of economics (i.e., services) to describe ecosystems, reverses this erasure of the ecosystem worker. Considering the current dominance of economic forces, however, implementing such solutions would require social changes similar in magnitude to those that occurred during the 1960s. Niklas Luhmann argues that such substantive, yet rapid, social change requires synergy among multiple societal function systems (i.e., economy, education, law, politics, religion, science), rather than reliance on a single social sphere, such as the economy. Explicitly presenting ecosystem services as discreet and incomplete aspects of ecosystem functions not only allows potential economic and environmental benefits associated with ecosystem services, but also enables the social and political changes required to ensure valuation of ecosystem functions and related biodiversity in ways beyond their measurement on an economic scale.

A review of urban ecosystem services: six key challenges for future research

“…The relatively large proportion of papers with a social perspective (11%) may also help to fill the acknowledged gap in valuation of cultural services Spangenberg and Settele, 2010) in the context of urban ecosystem services research. The ecosystem services concept has often been criticized for its narrow economic perspective (Gómez-Baggethun et al, 2010;Norgaard, 2010;Peterson et al, 2010), its use as an operational economic tool for decision-making , and for creating a 'technocratic approach' which selectively privileges certain types of knowledge with regard to biodiversity while ignoring others (Turnhout et al, 2013). Such critiques are not borne out from our analysis of urban ecosystem services research, which found that only 11 % of the studies apply an explicitly economic perspective and only 17% of studies undertook explicit monetary valuation of ecosystem services.…”

Conservation and concealment in SpeciesBanking.com, USA: an analysis of neoliberal performance in the species offsetting industry

“…As noted in several recent papers, restrictions in policy and research towards ecological measures amenable to commoditisation may constrain both ecological understanding and conservation outcomes (Peterson et al 2009;Vira & Adams 2009;Walker et al 2009;Norgaard 2010). The creation of conservation credits such as species credits as 'standard, noncontroversial' units to be sold on conservation markets, for example, requires that complex ecological processes and functions become simplified into 'proxy indicators' that can easily be traded (Robertson 2009, p. 4).…”

Making Nature Valuable, Not Profitable: Are Payments for Ecosystem Services Suitable for Degrowth?

“…The idea of ES was thought to be a metaphor [38] to represent the notion that nature serves humans [19] through ecological functions. The intention of the concept was largely pedagogical, intended to draw attention to social dependence on ecological processes and justify biodiversity preservation [1,19,39].…”

“…In this sense, PES are frequently perceived as a mechanism for the neoliberalization of nature [15][16][17]. PES make nature economically and monetarily negotiable, which brings considerable ethical implications as well as technical difficulties [8,[18][19][20], undermining human relationships with nature. Nevertheless, PES are becoming a sturdy trend in environmental governance and are not only shaped to work within the current economic model, but conceptually based within this model.…”