Ecosystem services and institutional rules

Environmental problems often arise from deficient, uncertain or confusing information about what ecosystem goods and services are available, how they are important to humans, who benefits and over what scales, combined with incomplete, inconsistent or unenforceable rules, rights and responsibilities. Establishing rules, rights and responsibilities at the range of spatial and temporal scales at which ecosystems function is a major challenge. Furthermore, the costs of implementing regimes of property rights and responsibilities can be beyond many land owners and managers. The concept of ecosystem services is being adapted and tested in Australia as a way to address some of the limitations of information and institutional rules. It attempts to express the benefits of ecosystems in language and concepts that the majority of land managers and users can understand and identify with, and it lays the foundations for developing formal and informal markets in which a fuller range of the beneficiaries of ecosystems contribute to the costs of their maintenance.