Ecosystem Services Go Beyond Money and Markets: Reply to Silvertown.

Silvertown [1] provides an outspoken critique on the concept of ecosystem services (ES), feeding a longstanding debate about how to express and conserve the value of nature for humans [2–4]. The paper raises valid concerns about ES monetization, its failure to ‘capture the multifaceted sense in which people value nature’, and market shortcomings in halting biodiversity loss. However, it also points to a supposed ‘dominant neoliberal ideology’ behind the ES concept and characterizes the problem of biodiversity loss as lying ‘deeper in anthropocentrism’. We argue that Silvertown [1] mistakenly equates the ES concept to marketization, incorrectly presumes a trend towards monetization, and inadvertently assumes that ES are anthropocentric only.