About two years ago, FiSch launched a research project on ecosystem services. A group of Christian scholars, with backgrounds in philosophy and/or ecology, formed the Faith-in-Scholarship Working Group on Ecosystem Services (FiSWES). After a number of face-to-face meetings, we continued to work on improving the ecosystem services framework with insights from a Christian philosophical framework. We (Richard Gunton, Eline van Asperen, Andrew Basden, David Bookless, Yoseph Araya, David Hanson, Mark Goddard, George Otieno and Gareth Jones) are pleased to announce that this work has now led to a first publication, in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal in the fields of ecology and evolution. We expect the article to be available online in the next few weeks, so watch this space! Also, for more information on a Christian conference on this topic, please scroll down to the end of this post.
So how did we go about this? We followed Andrew Basden’s ACE approach: affirm, critique and enrich. In essence, this is also the structure we follow in our TREE article.
Affirm: Ecosystem services (ES) provides an important framework in conservation science and policy. It analyses the many ways in which people benefit from ecosystems, and uses these as incentives for conservation. It has been very successful in motivating people to conserve ecosystems, and has broadened people’s understanding of the different ways in which natural habitats benefit humans.
Critique: The use of ES has not been without controversy. The main criticism arises becomes it encourages people to put a price on the different ‘services’ that an ecosystem provides. But many of the benefits that people derive from ecosystems cannot really be commodified. Think for example of recreation. You can measure how much money people spend on visiting nature reserves, or how much it saves the NHS if people’s health improves as a result, but do such numbers really express the full benefit? Monetisation and commodification can also lead to bias towards those stakeholders who are richer, more vocal or better connected. These issues, and the fact that the definitions and categories used in ES are often vague and contradictory, point to a deeper underlying conceptual problem.
Enrich: In order to do justice to the plurality of motives people have for conservation, and the multiplicity of stakeholders, we propose a framework that focuses on mutual human—environment relationships and the diverse ways in which particular people value particular places. To do this, we offer a comprehensive, mutually irreducible set of axes to consider, derived from aspectual theory. For a particular place and a specified stakeholder we can then ask howthe stakeholder appreciates the place in these kinds of ways.
If this all sounds a bit abstract to you, the article contains a diagram to outline the different axes and some examples of stakeholders. And of course we are planning to develop this further. We really hope this will be a constructive contribution to the discussion around ES.
If you’d like to learn more, the John Ray Initiative’s annual conference on 18 March in Birmingham has the theme ‘Nature in the balance: Can we put a value on the environment, and should we?’ A number of FiSWES members will be giving talks or leading workshops. We’d love to see you there!
Here’s the full reference of the article:
Gunton, R.M., van Asperen, E., Basden, A., Bookless, D., Araya, Y., Hanson, D.R., Goddard, M.A., Otieno, G., Jones, G.O. (2017): Beyond ecosystem services: valuing the invaluable. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
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