Obscuring Ecosystem Function with Application of the Ecosystem Services Concept

Abstract: Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and related biodiversity as ecosystem services to humanity. Despite the economic success of programs such as the Catskill/Delaware watershed management plan in the United States and the creation of global carbon exchanges, today's marketplace often fails to adequately protect biodiversity. We used a Marxist critique to explain one reason for this failure and to suggest a possible, if partial, response. Reframing ecosystem functions as economic services does not address the political problem of commodification. Just as it obscures the labor of human workers, commodification obscures the importance of the biota (ecosystem workers) and related abiotic factors that contribute to ecosystem functions. This erasure of work done by ecosystems impedes public understanding of biodiversity. Odum and Odum's radical suggestion to use the language of ecosystems (i.e., emergy or energy memory) to describe economies, rather than using the language of economics (i.e., services) to describe ecosystems, reverses this erasure of the ecosystem worker. Considering the current dominance of economic forces, however, implementing such solutions would require social changes similar in magnitude to those that occurred during the 1960s. Niklas Luhmann argues that such substantive, yet rapid, social change requires synergy among multiple societal function systems (i.e., economy, education, law, politics, religion, science), rather than reliance on a single social sphere, such as the economy. Explicitly presenting ecosystem services as discreet and incomplete aspects of ecosystem functions not only allows potential economic and environmental benefits associated with ecosystem services, but also enables the social and political changes required to ensure valuation of ecosystem functions and related biodiversity in ways beyond their measurement on an economic scale.     

The production of uneven access to land and water in peri-urban spaces: de facto privatisation in greater Accra

ABSTRACT

Peri-urban spaces are frontiers of privatisation where inequalities in access to land and water evolve. In this article, we analyse a particular mode of land and water privatisation in peri-urban spaces of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), Ghana. We illustrate that in the domain of land, traditional authorities tend to act as private owners rather than custodians of customary land, while in the domain of water, multiple private water providers have emerged next to the official water utility. A combined reading and analysis of these processes as forms of de facto privatisation contributes to understanding the similarities in the control over and access to land and water in peri-urban spaces. We show that in the de facto privatised control context of the peri-urban GAMA, access gained to land and water has to be actively maintained. Both gaining and maintaining access exhibit socio-economic inequalities and this is particularly so in the case of maintaining access. The article is a call for a better connection between land and water studies in order to deepen understanding of the processes at play in peri-urban spaces.     

Ethics and biodiversity offsetting

Biodiversity offsetting is an increasingly applied tool aiming to compensate for environmental damage caused by exploitation projects. Critics, however, raise concerns over the purported effectiveness of offsetting and question the ethical underpinnings and implications of offsetting. These ethical dimensions have largely been overlooked in research, which may lead to offsetting systems that fail to respect the values intended to be safeguarded. To address these dimensions, 5 ethical objections in the scientific literature were identified: offsetting violates nature's intrinsic value; losses of nature cannot be compensated for by human interventions; too little is known to make adequate trades; offsetting impedes virtuous dispositions toward nature; and offsetting has negative justice implications. We examined these objections and arguments against them based on the ethical concepts of intrinsic and instrumental values, anthropocentrism, nonanthropocentrism, and deontological, consequentialist, and virtue-ethical paradigms. Both nonanthropocentric and anthropocentric concerns were expressed in deontological, consequential, and virtue-ethical framings. Objections mostly had a deontological or virtue-ethical basis, whereas counterarguments were based on consequential reasoning, but common ground in practice is often conceivable. Based on our findings, we formulated 10 recommendations for policy makers and 5 questions for practitioners to consider. We propose, for example, that policy makers clarify aims, legislate on no-go areas, and govern the use of multipliers. We suggest that practitioners consider, for instance, how to improve case-specific knowledge and promote learning and stakeholder engagement. We hope these recommendations and questions will encourage further discussion of the ethics of biodiversity offsets and ultimately strengthen the respect for biodiversity and human-welfare values at stake in offsetting projects.