Introduction - An Ecosystem Services Approach

Welcome to my blog! Over the course of my university module on 'Water and Development in Africa', I will be exploring and blogging about the relationships between water resources and various ecosystem services it provides. A wide range of topics and examples will be investigated, ranging from the physical processes generating ecosystem services to possible changes in the provision of, access to and types of ecosystem services provided by water resources in the future depending on environmental change, and socio-economic trends.

Ecosystem Services?

Popularized by the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment 2005, Ecosystem services is defined as:

  

'The benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food and water; regulating services such as regulation of floods, drought, land degradation, and disease; supporting services such as soil formation and nutrient cycling; and cultural services such as recreational, spiritual, religious and other nonmaterial benefits.'

Source

The ecosystem services approach implies that any changes to the services provided will affect human well-being in some ways, linking the physical distribution of water to socio-economic impacts. Growing demand for ecosystem services may lead to either 1) development at the expense of another resource which may be of equal or even greater importance or 2) simultaneous growth in demand and degradation in resource itself. Despite relying on the provision of ecosystem services, management interventions rarely consider environmental impacts and often undervalues or completely disregard ecosystem services.

Freshwater as an 'umbrella service'

Water is essential to the healthy functioning of the hydrologic cycle and sustains a wide range of freshwater-dependent ecosystems. Water can be viewed as being the 'umbrella service', being the basis to services within both consumptive and non-consumptive uses. The following table taken from IIED, 2007 summarises some of the provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural services provided by freshwater ecosystems.

Table 1 Source

The ecosystem services approach views ecosystems as provider of marketable goods and services. The concept of valuing nature in monetary terms is highly controversial and while it indeed provides economic incentives to preserve and protect certain ecosystems/resources, critics argue that a neo-liberal approach in commodifying nature may lead to unequal access or even irreversible damage to other natural resources (Gomez-Baggethunand Ruiz-Perez, 2011).


Although an ecosystem services approach is more integrative than approaches dominated by environmental determinism, it should be noted that issues of access and power relations between stakeholders are not directly implied and are often excluded in studies advocating for an ecosystem services approach. Critical issues of this approach will be investigated in later posts.