Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital - Part One
A multi-part series on why your life depends on nature and why it is under threat
Have you ever stopped to think about all of the services and provisions you get from nature, for free? Of those things, have you ever experienced them being taken away from you? Did you explore why they were taken away and who benefited from that? Those services and provisions have a name - ecosystem services - and they’re central to every aspect of environmental and natural science, studies, and management.
This article is the first of a series outlining what these services are; how they can and are lost; and, what experts around the world are doing to ensure you and your children have what should be a god-given right to have, plentifully.
But before we delve into the detail, let’s explore the landscape at a high level.
The 30,000 ft Overview
For centuries, the global population of humans meant that our collective activity barely made a dent in the environment. We could harvest for consumption, clear land to grow food and settle, dispose of waste, drink, and eat what nature provided, and the billion or so of us and our impact could be absorbed by nature. It would bounce back with little or no change at a global scale. In 2023, it’s a very different story. To paint the picture, let’s use an analogy - a rat in your house.
One rat is annoying. It poops, nibbles on stuff, scuttles through the ceilings, and no one really wants it around. But, you have a cat. In time, the cat catches it, kills it, and we dispose of it. Then we tidy the mess the rat made and everything returns to normal. That’s one mouse, in a ~200m2 house. No big deal. Now imagine, 8 rats in your house. And they’re breeding so their numbers just keep increasing. And they’re eating your insulation, your drywall. Crawling over you at night, pooping on the beds. Now add one last dimension - imagine you, nor your cat cannot kill them, because every time you throw something at them, they come back stronger.
While deliberately provocative, this is essentially the situation nature faces on a daily basis. 150 years ago, the global population was around 1.5 Billion people. About two people for every square km of land. November 15, 2022, we hit 8 Billion - 15 people for every square km of land. Not only that, but our consumption of natural resources over that time, per person, has increased at an epic rate. In 1970, when the world had 3.7 Billion people and we consumed about 27 Billion tonnes of natural resources per year. Today, with a little over double the number of people, that consumption is estimated to have exceeded 100 Billion tonnes per year.
Break that down - each of us, on average, consumes 11.76 tonnes of natural resources per year, whereas back in 1970, we consumed, on average, 7.2 tonnes per person. This consumption is destroying the planet’s ability to provide the ecosystem services we want and deserve to have for ourselves, and our children. That fact is the most powerful driver for environmental professionals that I have met - and for me, much more powerful and concerning than climate change in spite of the bias that exists in policy and media.
Resilience and the Adaptive Cycle
The science of resilience is essential in understanding natural life and natural systems and the impact we have on them; ecological and social. Underpinning the resilience of all life and all systems is the adaptive cycle. It operates at all spatiotemporal scales, at all times, from the minute and micro-second periods through to the global and millennial, everything is flowing through this cycle, always. It explains why civilizations collapse, economies crash, and ecosystems crash.
The Adaptive Cycle
To walk you through it, let’s use a simple example and something we should all be able to picture - a forest. Picture yourself walking through the forest on a nice day. There are huge towering trees, overhead, birds flying through them. The understory is healthy with trees and plants of all shapes and sizes. As you look around you see some species are the same, but there’s huge diversity with a myriad of different species within the area. And those species change whether you’re in a valley by a creek, walking up a hill that is shaded from the sun, or on a peak. Different species are in different places.
Now let’s walk through the stages of the adaptive cycle, as per the diagram above, with this forest.
K - Conservation
When you walked through in your mind’s eye, the forest system was in a stage of conservation. It’s fairly stable and won’t change much, day to day. If you visited it again next year, it would probably be similar if not largely the same. Until it is disturbed…
Ω - Collapse/Release
A huge storm or fire rips through the system and destroys much of what is there. This disturbance is not only an inevitable reality, but it also allows for change and growth, which is necessary.
r - Growth/Exploitation
Once the disturbance is over - the storm has passed or the fire is out - the forest will begin to reform. New plants will grow from the light that is now shining through because of the destroyed canopy. They’ll utilize the nutrients created through the death of all those trees as they decompose and enrich the soil.
α - Reorganization
As the growth of different species occurs, they will settle into different parts of the forest. Creeksides will be dominated by species that thrive in moist environments while hilltops will be dominated by those that enjoy exposure and light. Over time, as different plants fruit, different species of birds, insects, and mammals will start to settle as they can consume what is being grown. A forest system is reborn, similar to what it once was.
Or will it?
Success or failure depends on resilience
Resilience is the measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables - C. S. Holling, 1973
In essence, a system’s resilience is defined by its ability to return to the state it was in before the major disturbance. That is, the K-state after collapse and reorganization is the same, or close to, the K-state before the collapse. In healthy ecosystems, this is often a reality. When resilience is eroded, however, it isn’t the case at all.
The below depicts how the presence/absence of resilience within a system determines its fate in the long run. If the system is resilient, the inevitable disturbance will not shake the system out of its primary basin of attraction. In the forest system, the basin of attraction was what you walked through in your mind’s eye. However, if resilience is low, the system will shift into an entirely new basin of attraction and settle there. Once there, it is extremely hard to get it back to the way it was without destroying the resilience of the new system, and then coaching it, or manufacturing it back to the way it was.
So What?
What does all this mean for you? The below depicts a historic example of what can happen. Think about it in terms of the services nature provides for you as a human and what happened as a result of this change. In Part Two, we’ll delve into this further and how the ecosystem services you want and to enjoy so readily, are threatened by a lack of resilience.