Nature dependence Flashcards
Ecosystem Services
The value of nature to people has long been recognized, but in recent years, the concept of ecosystem services has been developed to describe these various benefits. An ecosystem service is any positive benefit that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people. The benefits can be direct or indirect—small or large.
Examples of ecosystem services are: the food we get from fish and mollusks, the recreation and aesthetic value from artificial structures, the coastal protection (dunes), and climate regulation from vegetation that stores carbon and mitigates the negative effects of CO2 concentration.
There are four types of ecosystem services:
- regulating - carbon sequestration, water and air purification
- provisioning - food, raw materials, medicines - material benefits
- cultural - tourisms, aesthetic value, all that are related to our culture (hard to attribute value to this) - nonmaterial benefits
- habitat - provide living space for resident and migratory species, maintaining the gene pool and nursery service. regulating, provisioning and cultural services depend on this.
Provisioning services
When people are asked to identify a service provided by nature, most think of food. Fruits, vegetables, trees, fish, and livestock are available to us as direct products of ecosystems. A provisioning service is any type of benefit to people that can be extracted from nature. Along with food, other types of provisioning services include drinking water, timber, wood fuel, natural gas, oils, plants that can be made into clothes and other materials, and medicinal benefits.
Venice lagoon example:
- artisanal fishing: how many tons of fish are extracted from the lagoon each year. Important also for cultural purposes, traditional fishing methods. Recreational fishing: main difference is the limit of fish they can fish and the fact that they do not use the fish for food (?) but they use the same fish population as artisanal fisher.
- Hunting: similar to recreational fishing activities: number of birds harvested. During winter the lagoon is a hotspot for wintering birds - during this phase hunters exploit this resource.
- Clam harvesting: 3 / 4 centimeters inside the sediments - to catch them the first layer of sediment must be removed. Fishing gear was quite impactful. Estimate the yield from these activities: ton/km2/yr
Regulating services
Ecosystems provide many of the basic services that make life possible for people. Plants clean air and filter water, bacteria decompose wastes, bees pollinate flowers, and tree roots hold soil in place to prevent erosion. All these processes work together to make ecosystems clean, sustainable, functional, and resilient to change. A regulating service is the benefit provided by ecosystem processes that moderate natural phenomena. Regulating services include pollination, decomposition, water purification, erosion and flood control, and carbon storage and climate regulation.
Venice lagoon examples:
- Climate regulation: by measuring the growth of the lagoon plants it is possible to measure their carbon sequestration rate. Growth of submerged vegetation + increase in salt marshes.
- Waste treatment: nitrogen and phosphorus are used by plants for nutrients. Also plants living in the water use nitrogen and phosphorus combined with light and carbon to grow. Eutrophication: more growth, more biomes. This is not necessarily good: during the night they use huge amounts of oxygen, which reduces the amount of oxygen in the water (bad for other organisms).
- Erosion prevention: capability of the sediment on the bottom to be stable. Process that produces this stability: presence of some algae that conserve the soil - biostabilization index.
- Lifecycle maintenance: capability of lagoon to maintain healthy population (fish for example): habitat’s nursery role.
Cultural services
As we interact and alter nature, the natural world has in turn altered us. It has guided our cultural, intellectual, and social development by being a constant force present in our lives. The importance of ecosystems to the human mind can be traced back to the beginning of mankind with ancient civilizations drawing pictures of animals, plants, and weather patterns on cave walls. A cultural service is a non-material benefit that contributes to the development and cultural advancement of people, including how ecosystems play a role in local, national, and global cultures; the building of knowledge and the spreading of ideas; creativity born from interactions with nature (music, art, architecture); and recreation.
Venice lagoon examples:
- Info for cognitive development: use of the lagoon for education purposes. How to estimate this number? number of visitors/people joining the activities.
- Traditions: the lagoon is a convoluted environment. The morphology was shaped by humans, but our behavior was shaped by the lagoon. Traditional venetian rowing - number of people practicing it.
- Tourism: number of visitors per year, with focus on small islands instead of historical centers. Data from public transport/tickets for each island for ACTV.
- Recreational navigation: the use of the lagoon for leisure boats. Number of boats per km2. Presence of navigable channels is connected to the sediment movement. People moving with boats appreciate a nice environment. The relation between culture and environmental services is not direct, but is there.
Supporting / Habitat services
The natural world provides so many services, sometimes we overlook the most fundamental. Ecosystems themselves couldn’t be sustained without the consistency of underlying natural processes, such as photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, the creation of soils, and the water cycle. These processes allow the Earth to sustain basic life forms, let alone whole ecosystems and people. Without supporting services, provisional, regulating, and cultural services wouldn’t exist.
Ecosystem services capacity
The ability of an ecosystem to sustainably supply a service under current ecosystem condition and uses at the highest yield or use level.
Ecosystem services flow
The term ‘ecosystem service flow’ may refer to actual service provision, or to the transfer path from supply to demand areas. It is the portion of ES capacity that is being exploited.
The flow can’t be higher than the capacity. In climate regulation, without human influence, usually the flow is equal to the capacity. In provisioning services like fishing, usually the flow is lower than the capacity, which is the only condition that allows us to have sustainable fishing.
Biophysical values
A biophysical value is a measure of the importance of components of
nature (living being or non- living element), of the processes that are derived from the interactions among these components, or those of particular properties of those components and processes.
Economic values
Economists group values in terms of ‘ use’ or ‘non-use’ value categories,
each of which is associated with a selection of valuation methods. Use values can be both direct and indirect, and relate to the current or future (option) uses. Direct use values may be ‘consumptive’ (e.g. drinking water) or ‘non-consumptive’ (e.g. nature-based recreational activities). Indirect use values capture the ways that people benefit from some-thing without necessarily directly seeking it out (e.g. flood protection). Non-use values are based on the preference for components of nature’s existence without the valuer using or experiencing it, and are of three types: existence value, altruistic value, and bequest value.
Good quality of life
The achievement of a fulfilled human life, the criteria for which may vary greatly across different societies and groups within societies. It is a context- dependent state of individuals and human groups, comprising aspects such access to food, water, energy and livelihood security, and also health, good social relationships and equity, security, cultural identity, and freedom of choice and action. ‘Living in harmony with nature’, ‘living-well in balance and harmony with Mother Earth’ and ‘human well-being’ are examples of different perspectives on good quality of life.
Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) system
A cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment. It is also referred to by other terms such as, for example indigenous, local or traditional knowledge, traditional ecological environmental knowledge (TEK), ethnoscience, indigenous science, and folk science.
Intrinsic value
This concept refers to inherent value, that is the value something has independent of any human experience or evaluation. Such a value is viewed as an inherent property of the entity (e.g. an organism) and not ascribed or generated by external valuing agents (such as human beings).
Instrumental value
An instrumental value is the value attributed to something as a means to achieve a particular end.
Integrated valuation
The process of collecting, synthesizing, and communicating knowledge about the ways in which people ascribe importance and meaning to NCP to humans, to facilitate deliberation and agreement for decision making and planning.
Knowledge system
A body of propositions that are adhered to, whether formally or informally, and are routinely used to claim truth.
