Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability
Language: English
Pages: 121
ISBN: 0309252423
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Natural environments provide enormously valuable, but largely unappreciated, services that aid humans and other earthlings. It is becoming clear that these life-support systems are faltering and failing worldwide due to human actions that disrupt nature's ability to do its beneficial work.
Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability documents the National Academies' Keck Futures Initiative Conference on Ecosystem Services. At this conference, participants were divided into 14 interdisciplinary research teams to explore diverse challenges at the interface of science, engineering, and medicine. The teams needed to address the challenge of communicating and working together from a diversity of expertise and perspectives as they attempted to solve a complicated, interdisciplinary problem in a relatively short time. Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability describes how ecosystem services scientists work to document the direct and indirect links between humanity's well-being and the many benefits provided by the natural systems we occupy.
This report explains the specific topics the interdisciplinary research teams addressed at the conference, including the following:
-how ecosystem services affect infectious and chronic diseases
-how to identify what resources can be produced renewably or recovered by developing intense technologies that can be applied on a massive scale
-how to develop social and technical capabilities to respond to abrupt changes in ecosystem services
-how to design agricultural and aquacultural systems that provide food security while maintaining the full set of ecosystem services needed from landscapes and seascapes
-how to design production systems for ecosystem services that improve human outcomes related to food and nutrition
-how to develop appropriate methods to accurately value natural capital and ecosystem services
-how to design a federal policy to maintain or improve natural capital and ecosystem services within the United States, including measuring and documenting the effectiveness of the policy
-how to design a system for international trade that accounts for impacts on ecosystem services
-how to develop a program that increases the American public's appreciation of the basic principles of ecosystem services
National Academies Press (www.nap.edu) in print and free PDF versions. About the National Academies The National Academies comprise the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, which perform an unparalleled public service by bringing together experts in all areas of science and technology, who serve as volunteers to address critical national issues and offer unbiased advice to the federal government and the
Pennsylvania State University Jessica A. Sanderson, USG Corporation Sabina L. Shaikh, University of Chicago Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability 58 ECOSYSTEM SERVICES IDR TEAM SUMMARY—GROUP 6A Sarah Jane Keller, NAKFI Science Writing Scholar University of California, Santa Cruz IDR Team 6A was asked to develop appropriate methods to accurately value natural capital and ecosystem services. Human population
the ecosystems that produced them. Other ecosystem services, such as seed dispersal, nutrient cycling, and water purification are typically not reflected in markets at all. The team faced well-trod ground. There have been many attempts to incorporate the qualitative or quantitative values of ecosystem services into decision-making. Additionally, debates about whether or not it is appropriate to assign dollar values to ecosystem services have been waged for decades. With economists, ecologists, an
Baum, University of Victoria • Robin L. Chazdon, University of Connecticut • Francie Diep, New York University • Anantha K. Duraiappah, United Nations University • Jimena Forero, University of Puerto Rico • Andrea Ghermandi, Cà Foscari University of Venice, Italy • Gary W. Johnson, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics • Eduard T. Niesten, Conservation International • Darius J. Semmens, U.S. Geological Survey • Ariana E. Sutton-Grier, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration IDR
Charting a Path to Sustainability 12 ECOSYSTEM SERVICES services and disease-related outcomes. However, a quick Google search revealed that existing ecological approaches used for diseases like Lyme disease already seemed to contain some of the same elements team members were trying to fit into a new model. The team concluded that adapting existing modeling approaches from disease ecology and epidemiology, as well as other related fields, to make them more relevant to ecosystem services