Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
In summary, with interest growing and concepts emerging and developing,
the challenges for the soil science community to develop an operational soils
component for the ecosystems approach have been stated as:
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Creating the appropriate frameworks to determine the natural capital and
intermediate-and-final goods and services supplied by soils that benefit
human well-being, maintain the Earth's life support systems, and promote
biodiversity.
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Identifying appropriate measurement and monitoring programmes with
agreed metrics to develop the evidence base on the 'state and change' of soil
natural capital and the ecosystem services that flow from it.
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Developing the means to value benefits from soils which can feed into the
frameworks being developed in other disciplines and, where possible,
develop synergy with existing national accounting frameworks such as GDP
and state-of-the-environment (SoE) reporting.
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Engaging in the development of decision support tools that incorporate 'soil
change', that will enable the most informed comparison of trade-offs in the
decision-making process, cognisant of the enormous practical challenges
this implies.
In the following section we explore a synthesis, developing a stock-and-flow
framework that, like Dominati's,
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brings together the ecosystem service and
natural capital concepts.
1.4 Stock-and-flow Ecosystem Service Framework for Soils
A valuation index, similar to GDP, helping us to make our economies more
sustainable is one major goal of the ecosystems approach. GDP focuses on the
value of final goods and services, the major criticism being that there is no
accounting for resource depletion and degradation. Ecosystem service concepts
must avoid this pitfall if they are to give a reasonable representation of
ecosystem service delivery as well as resource use to aid sustainable delivery.
Therefore, we need some system that tracks not only the ecosystem services
delivered, but the state of the soil resource as services are delivered. This
encourages us to think of ecosystem service delivery in terms of a supply chain.
Soils are composed of fundamental stocks of 'matter, energy and organisation'
- these are the building blocks. Processes act on these stocks, combining and
transforming them, resulting in intermediate goods and services from which
society doesn't derive direct benefit; these stocks and intermediate goods and
services form the soil ecological infrastructure.
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If we are to achieve
sustainability we must understand the linkage between the health of the
ecological infrastructure and the delivery of final ecosystem goods and
services. Sustainable options are often more expensive than short-term
resource mining because effort is expended in maintaining the infrastructure.
The stock-and-flow framework then recognises that soils may contribute
final ecosystem services by following one of two routes, which can be thought
