After I did my Pantanal economics presentation, I got really interested in this idea of ecosystem services which I hadn't met before. It seemed to me like a really interesting way of demonstrating the value of ecosystems to humanity and how interrelated we are to them. I found some examples of this kind of ecosystem service thought in practice, and it is definitely an area that I would like to look further into. I feel that if we can use economic tools and policy to create the right incentives and design a market that creates the desired conservation outcomes, it would be much more robust than continued legislation.
Pollination is one economic service provided by the ecosystem that I hadn't thought about. Though there isn't much intensive agriculture in the Pantanal, in the US farmers often have to buy crates of bees to pollinate their hives at great cost. A study (Kramer, 2005) that I found indicated that often these services could be fulfilled by wild bees rather than commerical honeybees, provided that the surrounding habitats were well preserved. If the scale of agriculture was too intensive, the ability of the bees to provide this free service dropped, but could still maintain useful backup and support. A relatively small investment in maintaining the surrounding ecosystems could generate far more efficient economic outcomes than direct modification.
Kremen, C. (2005), Managing ecosystem services: what do we need to know
about their ecology?. Ecology Letters, 8: 468–479.
doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00751.x
No comments:
Post a Comment