Ecosystem Services - Ecological Systems - page 85

because the springs that fed them dried up; rivers famous in history and song have

shrunk to humble brooklets” (p. 9). He also draws connections between deforestation
and climate: “With the disappearance of the forest, all is changed. At one season, the
Earth parts with its warmth by radiation to an open sky - receives, at another, an
immoderate heat from the unobstructed rays of the sun. Hence the climate becomes
excessive, and the soil is alternately parched by the fervors of summer, and seared by
the rigors of winter. Bleak winds sweep unresisted over its surface, drift away the
snow that sheltered it from the frost, and dry up its scanty moisture” (p. 186). Finally,
he even wrote of decomposition services: “The carnivorous, and often the herbivo-
rous insects render an important service to man by consuming dead and decaying
animal and vegetable matter, the decomposition of which would otherwise fill the air
with effluvia noxious to health” (p. 95).
Other eloquent writers on the environment emerged following World War II,
including Fairfield Osborn ( Our Plundered Planet , 1948), William Vogt ( Road to
Survival , 1948), and Aldo Leopold ( A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from
Here and There , 1949). Each discusses ecosystem services without using the term
explicitly. In The Population Bomb (1968), Paul Ehrlich describes anthropogenic
disruption of ecosystems and the societal consequences of doing so, addressing the
need to maintain important aspects of ecosystem functioning. Along these lines, the
Study of Critical Environmental Problems (1970) presents a list of key “environ-
mental services” that would decline with a decline in “ecosystem function.”
This list was expanded upon by Holdren and Ehrlich [ 29 ]. Meanwhile, in the
1960s and 1970s, economists set out to measure “the value of services that natural
areas provide” ([ 35 ], p. 12), with efforts focused on agricultural production [ 3 ],
renewable resources [ 11 , 34 ], nonrenewable resources [ 18 ], and environmental
amenities [ 23 ].
By the early 1980s, efforts were initiated to investigate two questions: the extent to
which ecosystem function (and the delivery of services) depends on biodiversity, and
the extent to which technological substitutes could replace ecosystem services. The
first question is addressed in chapter Species Diversity Within and Among
Ecosystems , this volume. The second question was tackled by Ehrlich and Mooney
[ 21 ]. Work on these topics proliferated and, in 1997, a collective effort was made to
synthesize the wealth of scientific information that had accumulated on the functioning
of ecosystem services, with a preliminary exploration of their economic value, and of
key issues meriting further work [ 14 ].

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Recent Advances

Four major advances of the last decade have revitalized research on ecosystem
services and brought them into the public eye. First, the MA represented a visionary
and seminal step in global science - it was the first comprehensive global assess-
ment of the status and trends of all of the world's major ecosystem services. It was
requested by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2000 and carried out