Ecosystem Services: Lessons From the Past for a Sustainable Future - Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Change - page 116

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Ecosystem Services: Lessons From
the Past for a Sustainable Future
Ecosystem services are the essential attributes of ecological systems upon which all human-
kind depends. They are generally categorized according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assess-
ment (MEA) as provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural ecosystem services (see
Figure 6.1), and include provision of clean water, food, wood, and other resources, climate
regulation, soil formation, and carbon storage, alongside education, recreation and steward-
ship, all of which are supported by biodiversity and ecological processes like photosynthesis,
pollination, and soil formation (MEA 2005). Recently, there have been a plethora of attempts
to work out how near to, or how much we have exceeded, the planet's capacity to supply eco-
system services, and these developments will be extremely important in planning a sustain-
able future (Rockström et al. 2009, Brook et al. 2013, Griggs et al. 2013, Hughes et al. 2013).
However, predicting future changes in ecosystem services is difficult in the face of unpredict-
able climate change, uncertain scenarios of economic development, and the possibility of
non-linear responses as thresholds in ecological capacity are reached. There is therefore
exciting potential to use insights from long-term data to understand the resilience and vari-
ability of a range of ecosystem services.
There is currently much interest in defining how much of the world's ecosystem services
we are using, and whether our present and future trajectories are sustainable (Carpenter
et al. 2009, Glaser 2012, Griggs et al. 2013, Hughes et al. 2013). To make realistic assessments,
we need to know how ecosystem service provisioning looked, prior to the major transforma-
tions that have been wrought since the beginning of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al. 2007,
2011, Dearing et al. 2010, Zalasiewicz et al. 2011, Gillson and Marchant 2014). Dearing et al.
(2012) identified more than 50 ecosystem services, including water cycling and purification,
biodiversity, climate regulation, and aesthetic and cultural services, for which there are
palaeoenvironmental proxies. They produced a regional regulating services index by aggre-
gating the proxy records from lake sediments from the lower Yangtze basin, in China (Dear-
ing et al. 2012). For the period 1800-2006, the palaeo-data show that environmental
degradation since the 1950s is strongly coupled to rapid economic and population growth. In
this area, the late nineteenth century was the last time when the regulating service index was
stable, suggesting sustainable land-use ceased over 100 years ago (Figure 6.2). Agricultural
intensification, which began in the 1980s, is essential to reducing rural poverty, but the