JHK has an expertise in developing, applying and customizing ecosystem service frameworks to businesses, land use planning organizations and governmental agencies of all scales. For further discussion on how ecosystem services can benefit your organization please refer to the write up below or feel free to contact us at info@jhkss.com.
What Are Ecosystem Services?
Ecosystem services views the environment from a functional and dependence perspective. It is based upon an ecosystem's ability to generate goods and services that companies and communities use and need to sustain their well-being; wetlands that provide water filtration, forests that provide climate regulation, areas that provide food, fuel, and fiber, resources used in production processes, etc.
The services nature provides has economic value. They are represented in the cost of replacing the ecosystems and services with technologies or other known substitutes versus the cost of conservation to retain the natural infrastructure. For instance, New York City faced water quality and quantity issues. The city debated over the issue of building new water filtration plants or implementing watershed protection within the Catskills watershed, which is one of three major basins from which the city obtains its water. Filtration plants were estimated to be about $6 to $8 billion, and about another $3,000,000 annually to operate, whereas a program to purchase and preserve up to 350,000 acres of land in the Catskills watershed was estimated to be $250 million. When faced with the choice, New York City decided to implement protection of the Catskills watershed.
What Can Be Learned From Ecosystem Services?
The concept of ecosystem services presents a realistic method in balancing environmental conservation with business and community developmental goals.
How Are Ecosystem Services Applied?
For any business, community, or governmental agency that utilizes and depends on finite resources, ecosystem services offers a new way of managing environmental interactions. Such an approach frames resources and land use planning around the social, financial, and environmental utilities that ecosystems provide businesses and communities.
Why Consider Ecosystem Services?
Click below for further explanation.
- Promotes investment in conservation
Ecosystem services promotes justified investment in conservation by correlating an organization’s well being to the status of the environment. Investment in conservation sustains the earth’s infrastructure for our benefit, an infrastructure that we need to survive, and an infrastructure that provides communities and businesses with necessary food, fuel, air, climate regulation, water regulation, soils regulation, etc. Investing in conservation is similar to investing in other necessary economic, social and political infrastructures, such as education, product development, communications, or governance.
- Prioritzes your well-being
Current environmental management frameworks place the protection of the environment at the center of the framework. In an ideal setting such a framework would justify conservation of the natural environment, however, when compared with economic and political interests, such an argument is easy to refute. The framework lacks tangibility, and does not present the why to conserve and protect, it merely presents that we should, for it is the right thing to do. Overall, a focus on communal and company well being, utility, and benefits allows the examination of how ecosystems influence human outcomes.
- Promotes accountability
It is widely agreed that everyday decisions are perpetuating the degradation of ecosystems on a global scale. Tradeoffs are inherently occurring within all decisions; choices to keep ecosystems and services intact are weighed against the options to convert the services to alternate uses.
The traditional approach treats ecosystems and the environment as externalities. In contrast, ecosystem services internalizes the environment as something that can be conserved to contribute to company and community development.