Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For the chosen indicators, both provision and requirement must then be
quantified. In some cases, common units may be self-evident (e.g., volume of
water) but for others it may be difficult to derive common scales for both, and
this may need to be taken into account when indicators are being chosen.
For example, quantifying biodiversity in terms of species diversity may be
achievable for many groups of organisms, but it is likely to be intractable to
establish a meaningful figure in this metric for what people expect, or want,
from the system. It may be more practical to work with the presence or absence
of key taxa, or the occurrence of particular types of recognisable biodiversity.
In some cases, the requirement may already be present in, for example, health
standards, where the choice of units is already determined.
If all these issues can be resolved (albeit imperfectly), then the ESP can be
constructed from the ratios of provision and demand. At this stage, we have a
measure of how well the system is delivering what humans demand of it. This
is useful in its own right, but it also provides a framework within which the
quality outcomes of different management changes could be explored. To do
this requires an understanding of the interrelationships between the ecosys-
tem services concerned. Although a challenging task, such understanding need
not be fully mechanistic but might be empirical, or even based on expert
opinion. Equipped with such information the consequences of different man-
agement options can be explored, and potentially presented to stakeholders in
an integrated way (e.g., Fig. 16.5 ).
Industry, development and pollution
Using Sheffield as an example, we have illustrated the environmental impact of
industrialisation and how decline in heavy industry has been associated with
improvements in ecological quality. Good environmental/ecological quality is
desired by many societies in developed countries and is a stated goal of
European legislation (i.e., WFD), and we have proposed a framework for assess-
ing ecological quality based on ecosystem services. The same societies that
desire good quality environments also require the products of heavy industry
to sustain their lifestyle; a lifestyle aspired to by many developing and increas-
ingly industrialised countries. In this section, we broaden our discussion to
consider the global aspects of trade in industrial products and ecosystem
services.
The environmental, economic and social developments of countries are
inextricably linked. Economic development is associated with improvements
in human well-being (e.g., reduced infant mortality, increased food security
and enhanced life-span), but may also be associated with increased demand for
ecosystem goods, and environmental degradation, including habitat loss and
pollution. Left unabated, these will result in deterioration of ecosystem services
and hence have detrimental effects on well-being (e.g., poor water and air
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