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agricultural practices which promote soil's natural capital and self-regulation
are needed to realise sustainable production.
4 Approaches to Ecosystem Service Valuation
There is a considerable demand for valuations of ecosystem services and
natural capital from those who seek to argue that these receive insufficient
attention from policy-makers and believe (perhaps correctly) that being able to
put a 'price tag' on ecosystems will strengthen their argument. Indeed, several
such 'total valuations' have been conducted, the most famous being that by
Costanza et al.,
11
and the UK's Department for the Environment has
commissioned economists to value the nation's ecosystem services.
80
Notwithstanding the potential propaganda value of these valuations, the
desire to value ecosystems and their services misunderstands the nature and
purpose of valuation. First, as has been pointed out,
9
it is the effects on human
welfare that are valued, not the ecosystems themselves or their services, and
these effects are produced through combining ecosystem services (or natural
capital) and human or physical capital. Second, it is the incremental change in
the ecosystem service or natural capital which is valued, not the ecosystem
service itself, and only at the smallest of scales will the two be identical. As has
been pointed out,
81
any attempt to estimate the ''total value of the world's
ecosystem services and natural capital'' (as in ref. 10) would be a ''serious
underestimate of infinity'', and a similar criticism could be levelled at total
valuations of a nation's ecosystem services. Finally, economic valuation is
predominantly concerned with the effects on human welfare of specific and
plausible human actions, which may affect ecosystems, the services they
provide, or the way these services are used. It is really the human action or
intervention which is valued, not the ecosystem or ecosystem services which it
affects. Thus, instead of valuing soils per se, what we can and should do is
value the costs and benefits of actions which we might plausibly take which will
improve (or degrade) our soil, in order to determine whether the action is
desirable. Valuations of this kind are difficult for soil protection actions since,
as noted above, soil change affects human wellbeing through many
intermediate processes, many of which are imperfectly understood by science.
As a consequence, they remain rare and good information on the net benefits
of
d
n
1
r
2
n
g
|
1
soil
protection
is
severely
lacking
in
both
developed
and
developing
countries.
Acknowledgements
Funding for David Robinson and Brian Reynolds was provided in part by the
European Commission FP 7 Collaborative Project 'Soil Transformations in
European Catchments' (SoilTrEC) (Grant Agreement No. 244118).
