Current land-use patterns could see the value of ‘ecosystem services’ – the natural processes that sustain life – plummet by mid-century. But with the right policies we can turn this trend around.
Quentin Wheeler, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
The presidential candidates should be talking about exploring and cataloguing our biosphere, which holds vital clues for how humanity should navigate the future.
Invasive species cause some $120 billion in damages across North America yearly – and that’s just direct costs. A study of one species in one Wisconsin lake indicates the real toll is much higher.
With a future of droughts looming for the US West, Utah’s Wasatch watershed offers a good model that combines conservation with nature-based recreation.
The notions of “natural capital” and “ecosystem services” try to highlight the value of nature. But but by putting dollar figures on nature do we actually devalue it?
Listing the value of bees, beavers and others on the pages of the world’s financial press helps to show that ecosystems deliver benefits worth staggering amounts of money - yet we scarcely keep track of it.
Should conservationists ‘sell’ the value of nature by focusing on the ecosystem services nature provides people? Surveys show this may be the wrong tack.
Forests, wetlands, wildlife, waterways all provide valuable services to society. Would we take better conserve natural resources if we paid for these ecosystem services?
The NCRIS-funded Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) benefits pastoralists, business, tourism and Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Cutting it will hurt them all.
Is it worth trying to put a price on the natural world, when things like water and food are priceless? Yes, says Paul Sutton - without knowing the value of the environment, we might not value it at all.
The Conversation organised a public question-and-answer session on Reddit in which James Dyke, a lecturer in Complex System Simulation, discussed planetary boundaries and whether global industrialised…
Journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot recently wrote a powerful polemic against the concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital, arguing that they were leading us on a neoliberal “road…
Criticism of sport hunting nearly always focuses on whether hunting is cruel or not. A good example was provided by the recent controversy surrounding Melissa Bachmann, a keen hunter and television personality…