Nature's services
Nature's services is an umbrella term for the ways in which nature benefits humans, particularly those benefits that can be measured in economic terms. Robert Costanza and other theorists of natural capital conducted
extensive economic analysis of nature's services to
humanity in the 1990s. The economic contribution of seventeen of
these was found to be approximately US$33 trillion per year, greater than
the activities in the inter-human economy, which totaled about US$25 trillion.
This was based on estimated costs of replacing the services nature provides,
with equivalent services using methods wholly based on human infrastructure.
This study has been widely cited in natural capital, value of Earth and value of life debates. It is a cornerstone of human development theory
and Natural Capitalism. It has also had broad influence on theories
of service economy, which redefine commodity markets and brand name
product sales strictly as services: for example, governments providing
means of protection of the natural capital which automatically provides such services as:
Worldwatch Institute, World Resource Institute, Rocky Mountain Institute, Greenpeace, and various United Nations agencies, along
with a few governments (including the United Kingdom and Canada) are
actively expanding the analysis, with an eye to producing UN standards for
valuating natural capital. This is anticipated to have a major effect
on money supply debates, as the creation of money by banks for purposes
of funding ecosystem depletion has become a major global governance issue,
of importance equivalent to land reform, developing nation debt and
terrorism. In combination, these are thought by some theorists, including Thomas Homer-Dixon, to be closely related to ecological depletion and heightened competition for scarce natural resources. If the nature's
services analysis is valid, then humans also compete to protect the
natural capital which in turn provides them services they cannot pay for
in a cash economy. Funding its depletion thus creates a vicious cycle.
However, this debate appears to have had little influence on
monetary policy or on WTO, IMF or G8 economic and trade policy. The anti-globalization movement, ecology movement, peace movement, and conservation movement, and their political ally the Green movement are increasingly vocal about the need to reflect the value of these services directly in real policy. Such an approach would, for example, mean not funding such projects as the Three Gorges Dam which directly deplete and disrupt ecoregions on a huge scale. This debate precedes economic analysis of the services, which was
in part motivated by the observation that human instinct and economic analysis
very often yielded quite different impressions of the value of such ecosystems.
One criticism of this analysis is that it is largely conducted by those who have some
association with Gaia philosophy and human development theory and one or more
political movements seen to have an ideological bias in favor of a
higher valuation for nature's services than would be implied by a more
neutral point of view. Accordingly, many of the debates now focus on metrics and indicators
on which both advocates and detractors of monetary reform can agree. These are in
general indistinguishable from debates about measuring well-being to determine what
constitutes real inflation, that is, the amount of money required to live the same way,
and other debates regarding the social welfare function and what constitutes wealth.
See also
Referenced By
Debt | Debt (economics) | Ecological yield | Economics articles (master list) | List of economics articles | List of economics topics
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