Robert Costanza

A safe operating space for humanity

Identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change, argue Johan Rockstrom and colleagues.

The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital

This article provides a crude initial estimate of the value of ecosystem services to the economy. Using data from previous published studies and a few original calculations the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 16 biomes was estimated. The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earths life-support system. They contribute to human welfare both directly and indirectly and therefore represent part of the total economic value of the planet. It was estimated that for the entire biosphere the value (most of which is outside the market) ranges US

Economic and ecological concepts for valuing ecosystem services

16-54 trillion/year with an average of US

Global mapping of ecosystem services and conservation priorities

33 trillion/year. Due to the nature of uncertainties this must be considered a minimum estimate. In addition the global gross national product total is around US

Energy and the u.s. Economy: a biophysical perspective.

18 trillion/year.

Contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda

The purpose of this special issue is to elucidate concepts of value and methods of valuation that will assist in guiding human decisions vis-a `-vis ecosystems. The concept of ecosystem service value can be a useful guide when distinguishing and measuring where trade-offs between society and the rest of nature are possible and where they can be made to enhance human welfare in a sustainable manner. While win-win opportunities for human activities within the environment may exist, they also appear to be increasingly scarce in a ‘full’ global ecological–economic system. This makes valuation all the more essential for guiding future human activity. This paper provides some history, background, and context for many of the issues addressed by the remaining papers in this special issue. Its purpose is to place both economic and ecological meanings of value, and their respective valuation methods, in a comparative context, highlighting strengths, weakness and addressing questions that arise from their integration.

Assessing ecosystem health

Global efforts to conserve biodiversity have the potential to deliver economic benefits to people (i.e., “ecosystem services”). However, regions for which conservation benefits both biodiversity and ecosystem services cannot be identified unless ecosystem services can be quantified and valued and their areas of production mapped. Here we review the theory, data, and analyses needed to produce such maps and find that data availability allows us to quantify imperfect global proxies for only four ecosystem services. Using this incomplete set as an illustration, we compare ecosystem service maps with the global distributions of conventional targets for biodiversity conservation. Our preliminary results show that regions selected to maximize biodiversity provide no more ecosystem services than regions chosen randomly. Furthermore, spatial concordance among different services, and between ecosystem services and established conservation priorities, varies widely. Despite this lack of general concordance, “win–win” areas—regions important for both ecosystem services and biodiversity—can be usefully identified, both among ecoregions and at finer scales within them. An ambitious interdisciplinary research effort is needed to move beyond these preliminary and illustrative analyses to fully assess synergies and trade-offs in conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Defining and predicting sustainability

A series of hypotheses is presented about the relation of national energy use to national economic activity (both time series and cross-sectional) which offer a different perspective from standard economics for the assessment of historical and current economic events. The analysis incorporates nearly 100 years of time series data and 3 years of cross-sectional data on 87 sectors of the United States economy. Gross national product, labor productivity, and price levels are all correlated closely with various aspects of energy use, and these correlations are improved when corrections are made for energy quality. A large portion of the apparent increase in U.S. energy efficiency has been due to our ability to expand the relative use of high-quality fuels such as petroleum and electricity, and also to relative shifts in fuel use between sectors of the economy. The concept of energy return on investment is introduced as a major driving force in our economy, and data are provided which show a marked decline in energy return on investment for all our principal fuels in recent decades. Future economic growth will depend largely on the net energy yield of alternative fuel sources, and some standard economic models may need to be modified to account for the biophysical constraints on human economic activity.

Economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment

Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework.

Linking Ecology and Economics for Ecosystem Management

Evaluating ecosystem health in relation to the ecological, economic and human health spheres requires integrating human values with biophysical processes, an integration that has been explicitly avoided by conventional science. The field is advancing with the articulation of the linkages between human activity, regional and global environmental change, reduction in ecological services and the consequences for human health, economic opportunity and human communities. Increasing our understanding of these interactions will involve more active collaboration between the ecological, social and health sciences. In this, ecologists will have substantive and catalytic roles.