Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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Environmental sustainability by providing better insight in the long and short
term trade offs of investment decisions.
If ecosystem services are considered inexhaustible, indestructible and are known
as free goods, especially the less tangible services, then it follows that giving them
a value would be very challenging. This is because their values would be under-
estimated since they would be considered free of charge. Nevertheless, based on
an argument that it is urgent to develop them in order to fight climate change and
mitigate the increasing associated environmental problems, appropriate values
need to be given to them (Farber et al. 2002; Daily 2000). These values need not
only attach importance on the survival of human life, but also on all other func-
tions that underlie modern civilization (Balvanera et al. 2001; Chan et al. 2006).
However, the idea of ecosystem services has already been recognised among sci-
entists, as reflected by the emergence - between economics and ecology - of the
discipline ecological economics that begins to describe what potential value could
be attach to a particular ecosystem services (Slootweg and Beukering 2008; Free-
man 1993; Franz 2006).
The monetary value of ecosystem services might be assumed to be zero, but
this is incorrect and misses an opportunity to harness this value for a viable and
profitable incentive-disincentive system that will guarantee ecosystem services
and natural ecosystem longevity. Without an appropriate market for ecosystem
services, their degradation may continue unabated and the lost services may have
to be artificially replaced with expensive technology and at high collateral costs.
Today, there are a lot of ongoing debates within the scientific community on the
valuation of ecosystem services (MEA 2005b; Albrechts 2008). Furthermore, po-
litical, economic and environmental models that could better explain the need for
their valuation are being presented (Fongwa and Gnauck 2009; Farber et al. 2002).
Also government and businesses are recognizing the latent value of many ecosys-
tem services (World Bank 2010), and these actors are willing to pay for the pro-
tection of these services and provide opportunities for business development
within ecosystem services. But there is also the problem of free rider syndrome
which leads to the requirement of huge subsidies for ecosystem service mainte-
nance. Therefore, governments should not subsidise or encourage those activities
which lead to overuse of resources and land degradation. Instead, an opportunity
exists in which businesses can be encouraged to leverage real financial incentives
to, for example, keep trees in the ground, maintain a mangrove forest, conserve
water catchments, and thereby protect ecosystem services. However, some people
may argue that market-based approaches could not solve ecosystem degradation
problems, especially as the poor depend more on natural ecosystems for their live-
lihood (World Bank 2010; MEA 2005b). This has led some to believe that it will
be difficult to determine appropriate market-based arguments for business devel-
opment for the preservation of ES. Nevertheless, it has been established that of all
the jobs in the world, the majority have either a direct or an indirect relation to
ecosystem services. This means that even the poor who are mostly in rural areas
that ecosystem services are highly distributed with resilience to such areas has the
potential to benefits them with the development of a good market system. There-
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