Review of Future Energy Supply and Targets for Climate Change: The Idea of Ecosystem Services - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 126

• Production of grasslands, fertilizers and food
• Storage and recycling of nutrients
• Crop pollination
12.4 Understanding our Environment
Everything we do within the environment, whether consumption or production or
exchange of processes, commodities and services can be traced to constituents
provided by nature (Dasgupta 1996). For example the atmosphere is a swirl of bio-
logical, chemical and physical dynamic processes and keeping them balanced is
one of the most indispensable services that one may receive from an ecosystem
(Wall 2000). If ecosystem services are not maintained and developed, one could
think of how hard it will be to re-create them. Temperature control could be a
good example to show the relation between change in temperature and the effect
on the environment. For example human beings can only survive within a certain
range of optimum temperatures. All warming and cooling devices (which are
themselves based on a network of natural systems) might not be able to maintain
these optimum ranges of temperature, should ecosystem services collapse or fail to
function adequately (Wall 2000). Without them regulating the global climate and
temperatures year round, it is possible that the Earth's temperature would fall out-
side the range that is necessary for human survival; or liquid water would become
scarce (Ibid.). This means human survival in such scenarios would be a big prob-
lem that could cost a lot of money on technologies for heating or cooling the envi-
ronment, which those technologies themselves would also need to relay on ecosys-
tem services (Farber et al. 2002; Daily and Ellison 2002). When these ecosystem
services do not function as we understand them today, it is for example possible to
envisage other scenarios in which there will be no air or no water; no food because
the species that pollinate our crops do not exist any more. It is only when the role
and value of ecosystem services is understood that humanity will invest in pre-
serving ES within levels requisite for sustaining quality human life (Farber et al.
2002).
12.5 Valuation of Ecosystem Services
It is recognised that valuing ecosystem services directly facilitates the achieve-
ment of sustainability; and their values can be useful within the context of well-
informed strategic decision-making to facilitate a better representation of the three
pillars of sustainability i.e. (Slootweg and Beukering 2008):
• Financial sustainability of environmental and resource management;
• Social sustainability by facilitating participation of stakeholders and by high-
lighting and addressing equity issues;