Nature's Services Worth Trillions
2/18/97
OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE
The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science brought scientists and economists together to hear the message
that ecosystems are "worth trillions." Given that without ecosystem
processes, life would not exist, this hardly seems surprising.
Nonetheless, this photocopy of the Environmental News Service article
makes the compelling case that the world's ecosystems are both vital
and critically imperiled.
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Nature's Services Worth Trillions, Scientists Told
Posted to the web: Mon Feb 17 17:28:07 EST 1997
The Environment News Service, Copyright, 1997
SEATTLE, Washington, Feb. 17'97 (ENS) - The goods and services
provided annually by natural ecosystems are worth many trillions of
dollars in conventional economic terms, and the prosperity of all
societies hinges upon safeguarding them, Stanford ecologist Gretchen
Daily informed her scientific colleagues on Sunday.
Speaking at a symposium on ecosystem Services at the annual meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Daily
said, "Humanity came into being after most of these services had been
in operation for hundreds of millions to billions of years. They are
so fundamental as to make them both easy to take for granted and hard
to imagine disrupting beyond repair, as human activity threatens to do
today."
The session was organized by Daily, who is Bing Interdisciplinary
Research Scientist in Stanford's Department of Biological Sciences,
and AAAS President Jane Lubchenco. It drew together top ecologists and
economists to discuss the urgent need for government and industry to
incorporate these lifesupport values into policies and planning.
These services are the life support functions normally performed by
ecosystems, such as purification of air and water; detoxification and
recycling of wastes; generation and maintenance of soil fertility;
pollination of crops and other plants; regulation of climate; and
mitigation of weather extremes like flood or drought.
In the process, ecosystems also provide goods like seafood and timber,
whose harvest and trade represent an important and familiar part of
the human economy. And ecosystems support the vast diversity of life,
the species that are sources of key ingredients of our agricultural,
pharmaceutical and industrial enterprises.
Ecosystem services operate on such a grand scale and in such intricate
and little-explored ways that most could not be replaced by
technology, Daily said. "Ecosystem services are absolutely essential
to civilization; they are priceless. Yet their lack of a price - they
are typically not traded in economic markets - has contributed to a
widespread lack of awareness of their very existence, and to a
corresponding misimpression that the ecosystems that supply them lack
value."
"Just as one cannot capture the full value of a human life in economic
terms, it would be absurd to try to estimate the value of nature in
strictly economic terms," Daily said. "But estimates of the lower-
bound, marginal value of nature's goods and services - in the
trillions of dollars - are critical to informing decision-makers."
Renowned Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich agreed, using this winter's
disastrous mudslides in Washington and Oregon as a case in point.
These mudslides were partly traceable to overharvesting of timber,
which disrupted the natural flood controls that forests exercise over
flows of water, Ehrlich said.
"The loss of nature's services is not some hypothetical future
disaster, or something restricted to poverty-stricken regions of the
world," said Ehrlich. "Interference with nature's services comes home
to the rich in higher fish prices and loss of sport fisheries; loss of
real estate values; higher risks from 'natural disasters' like floods,
droughts and possibly other extreme weather events," he said.
When ecosystems are disrupted, affluent North Americans suffer
outbreaks of agricultural pests; diseases such as Lyme disease and
giardia; acidification and decline of precious forests; and rapid
siltation of reservoirs, threatening the sustainability of irrigation
and power generation.
"Expansion of the human enterprise is seriously damaging the natural
systems that provide the services that underpin our economic
security," Ehrlich warned. The damage is a product of population
growth, increased consumption of resources per person, and the
cultural, institutional and technical means through which each unit of
consumption is supplied. "Yet a flood of lies and misinformation is
being generated by anti-environmental forces that helps keep that fact
from decision makers and from the general public," he said.
BROWNLASH "PREPOSTEROUS" ERLICH SCOFFS
Ehrlich coined the term "brownlash" to describe the efforts of those
trying to confuse the public about the findings of environmental
science. Brownlashers, whose ideas are a backlash against the "green"
findings of the scientific community, make a wide variety of claims
that he calls "preposterous." These include assertions that the ozone
hole is a hoax, that concern about global warming is unwarranted, that
there is no extinction crisis and, most outlandish of all, that
continued human population growth can be supported for 7 billion
years."
"Those claims are diametrically opposed to the scientific consensus,"
Erlich said.
"Those generating the brownlash are willing to risk nature's crucial
services to continue on a business-as-usual course - a course that may
be congenial to their personal financial interests. Nature's services
are supplied free of charge by ecosystems, in which biodiversity -
populations of plants, animals and microbes - are vital working parts.
The trees, shrubs and herbs growing on a Washington State hillside,
for example, not only help to control erosion and flooding, but they
also are involved in maintaining the balance of gases in the
atmosphere, cleaning the air and recycling wastes.
"That's why scientists are so concerned with the mass extinction of
populations and species now under way," Ehrlich said. "A balance
between human activities and safeguards for the natural systems that
provide economic prosperity is essential to human health, happiness
and survival."
Humanity is causing widespread losses of biodiversity through
destruction and alteration of habitats, transporting organisms to new
locations, and overharvesting living resources such as fishes, Ehrlich
said. "Loss of biodiversity is the most irreversible of the kinds of
damage Homo sapiens is inflicting on its environment."
Releasing enormous quantities of toxic substances, failing to conserve
soils, overexploiting non-living resources such as groundwater, and
modifying large-scale biophysical processes - especially altering
climates, thinning the ozone shield and disrupting biogeochemical
cycles - also add greatly to the assault that Homo sapiens is mounting
on its own life-support systems, he said.
Humanity causes the extinction of at least one species and thousands
of populations of other organisms every day, Erlich wearned. At the
same time humans are using up goods that crippled ecosystems will be
unable to replenish, for example by causing the annual loss of some 25
billion tons of soil, and overpumping the southern part of the
Ogallala aquifer at roughly 100 times its recharge rate.
"We are busily sawing off the limb on which we are perched - yet that
is never mentioned in the brownlash literature that attempts to
persuade people that environmental problems are relatively minor or
nonexistent," Ehrlich said.
Ehrlich called Daily's new book, "a critically important effort. He
hopes it will encourage decision makers to incorporate the value of
nature's services into policy-making. "For instance, the Forest
Service should include the costs of floods and mudslides in their
calculations of fees for timber harvesting."
"But the dollar value clearly only sets a lower bound on the worth of
the services. The value of our ability to feed ourselves or to avoid
catastrophic floods cannot be fully expressed in monetary terms. What
is the true cost of hundreds of millions of lives cut short or lived
in utter misery?
"Although many scientific uncertainties remain," Ehrlich continued,
"more than enough is known to allow humanity to start developing and
implementing steps to sustain its life-support systems and thus
preserve civilization.
Ehrlich outlined measures that would help preserve those systems by
reducing the scale of human activities:
* Foster the social and economic conditions that will bring an end to
population growth "as quickly as is humanely possible" and begin a
slow decline in human numbers.
* Make U.S. consumption sustainable, since we're the most
overconsuming society, and the most culturally influential. "We must
set an example for the rich, and simultaneously help the poor find
ways to increase necessary consumption."
* Wherever possible, develop and deploy more efficient, less
environmentally damaging technologies.
* "Most important of all, more equitable social, economic and
political arrangements should be sought to allow the implementation of
these goals, "he said. "Everyone can help, first by learning how our
life-support systems work, then by becoming politically involved and
pushing leaders in the right direction, and always by fighting the
racism, sexism, religious prejudice and gross economic inequity that
make it so difficult to preserve and restore the natural services upon
which humanity depends.
"To provide a reasonable chance of averting disaster, much more effort
will be required of natural and social scientists to find paths to
sustainability," Ehrlich concluded. "Scientists must also put more
effort into countering the brownlash. It now threatens seriously to
retard progress toward protecting nature's services and thus menaces
our grandchildren and the future of our species."