Ecosystem services in decision making: time to deliver

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org T Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) advanced a powerful vision for the future (MA 2005), and now it is time to deliver. The vision of the MA – and of the prescient ecologists and economists whose work formed its foundation – is a world in which people and institutions appreciate natural systems as vital assets, recognize the central roles these assets play in supporting human well-being, and routinely incorporate their material and intangible values into decision making. This vision is now beginning to take hold, fueled by innovations from around the world – from pioneering local leaders to government bureaucracies, and from traditional cultures to major corporations (eg a new experimental wing of Goldman Sachs; Daily and Ellison 2002; Bhagwat and Rutte 2006; Kareiva and Marvier 2007; Ostrom et al. 2007; Goldman et al. 2008). China, for instance, is investing over 700 billion yuan (about US$102.6 billion) in ecosystem service payments, in the current decade (Liu et al. 2008). The goal of the Natural Capital Project – a partnership between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund (www.naturalcapitalproject.org) – is to help integrate ecosystem services into everyday decision making around the world. This requires turning the valuation of ecosystem services into effective policy and finance mechanisms – a problem that, as yet, no one has solved on a large scale. A key challenge remains: relative to other forms of capital, assets embodied in ecosystems are often poorly understood, rarely monitored, and are undergoing rapid degradation (Heal 2000a; MA 2005; Mäler et al. 2008). The importance of ecosystem services is often recognized only after they have been lost, as was the case following Hurricane Katrina (Chambers et al. 2007). Natural capital, and the ecosystem services that flow from it, are usually undervalued – by governments, businesses, and the public – if indeed they are considered at all (Daily et al. 2000; Balmford et al. 2002; NRC 2005). Two fundamental changes need to occur in order to replicate, scale up, and sustain the pioneering efforts that are currently underway, to give ecosystem services weight in decision making. First, the science of ecosystem services needs to advance rapidly. In promising a return (of services) on investments in nature, the scientific community needs to deliver the knowledge and tools necessary to forecast and quantify this return. To help address this challenge, the Natural Capital Project has developed InVEST (a system for Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem ECOSYSTEM SERVICES ECOSYSTEM SERVICES ECOSYSTEM SERVICES