Environmental Services and Land Change

Land-use change is a human decision.  An actor evaluates economical and physical characteristics of a piece of land before deciding how to use it.  Rationally the actor should choose a course of action in his/her own best financial interest.  The choice may not always be in the best interest of the society as a whole or even the world. Examples like deforestation, climate change, erosion, and degradation can be seen as individuals not valuing environmental services provided by landscapes and instead looking toward individual economic benefits.  In what ways can environmental services be incorporated into the decision-making process of individuals is a question that has not yet fully been addressed.

Environmental services are the conditions and processes in the natural ecosystems that function in sustaining human life (Daily, 1997; Zhang et al., 2007).   Today, environmental services are mostly unrecognized and taken for granted. This has resulted from a framework of thinking that the environment is something that must be conquered and disservices mitigated.  Disservices like pests and weeds impacting agricultural systems (Zhang et al., 2007) or flooding and fire that impact our built environments.  Conquering the environment has led to more resource extraction and land productivity, fueling development and the modern economy.  The unattended consequence of modifying the environment is that the services provided by it have also been destroyed. Services like carbon pools, water supply, soil conservation, and biodiversity.  People have reached a level of development where smart sustainable approaches are needed, ones that continue development while amplifying environmental services and mitigating disservices.

The case study of the educational trust Kamehameha Schools development plan offers insight into land-use decisions that integrate environmental services into planning (see Goldstein et al., 2012). Their case shows a notable gap between the environmental services for society and the economic benefit (Goldstein et al., 2012).   The best economic return would have been to sell for commercial development.  The organization with long historic roots and prominent role in the community had to use moral values when choosing development options.  This was the motivation in developing with environmental services in mind, but the question of not developing also shows a problem with the current economic system. If they chose the path of conservation, not developing at all, they would have had to continue to pay taxes on the land meaning an economic loss.  In there own interests they must develop. Valuing environmental series can change the calculation.  At very least not taxing land providing services would have relieved economic pressures to develop.  At best giving some sort of payment for environmental services would have led to a positive force at preserving the land.  The current economic system required them to make tradeoffs, find ways to develop while preserving as much environmental services as possible.

What is needed is changes in how environmental services are valued.  Much attention has been applied to valuing environmental services (Zhang et al., 2007; Ninan & Inoue, 2013), but it is impossible to know what the true economic value of these services are since they are not accounted for in economic decisions.  Furthermore the biophysical aspects of environmental services are still not fully cataloged.  These services are taken for granted, much like the sun is assumed to continue to shine, the environment is assumed always to operate. The environment is not like the sun, it is close to us and people modify it.   Moving forward as a global society we must look to development that takes into account the full impact.  We still have not seen the full consequences of our current development paradigm.  Development is projected to grow at an alarming rate in the global tropics (Seto et al., 2012).  This offers both a challenge and an opportunity.  The challenge is not to develop in business as usual approaches, which can have devastating impacts on global carbon pools and biodiversity hotspots.  The opportunity is to find market solutions that will prompt sustainable development and stewardship of the environment.   Now that people have shown they can modify the environment towards economic benefits, they need to show that they can modify it to social and environmental benefits as well.  When we do that we will have a development paradigm for the future.

Works Cited

Daily, G., (1997). Nature's Services. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Goldstein, J. H., Caldarone, G., Duarte, T. K., Ennaanay, D., Hannahs, N., Mendoza, G., ... & Daily, G. C. (2012). Integrating ecosystem-service tradeoffs into land-use decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,109(19), 7565-7570.

Ninan, K. N., & Inoue, M. (2013). Valuing forest ecosystem services: What we know and what we don't. Ecological Economics, 93, 137-149.

Seto, K. C., Güneralp, B., & Hutyra, L. R. (2012). Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(40), 16083-16088.

Zhang, W., Ricketts, T. H., Kremen, C., Carney, K., & Swinton, S. M. (2007). Ecosystem services and dis-services to agriculture. Ecological economics,64(2), 253-260.