Ecosystem Goods and Services Overview

Status of Ecosystem Goods and Services

• Every country possesses three forms of wealth: material, cultural, and biological.
• Biological wealth is often underestimated, signaling a grave strategic misstep.
• Ecosystems furnish essential goods and services to sustain human activities.
• Societal and economic activities rely on inputs from nature for their continuation.
• Ecosystem well-being is crucial for human well-being.
• Chapter 2 will focus on the status of ecosystem goods and services.
• Human development's reliance on natural resources and its environmental impact will be assessed.
• The goal is to identify reasons behind trends in ecosystem services and explore potential solutions for their sustained availability.
• The study will look at essential ecosystem goods like fuels, materials, water, and food.
• Selected ecosystem services to be examined include climate regulation, air and water quality, primary productivity, and pollination.
• An overview of the global status of ecosystem goods and services will conclude the chapter.

Fuels

• Biomass was humanity's primary fuel source until the Industrial Revolution.
• Fossil fuels have become dominant in the last 200 years.
• Fossil fuels derive from ancient biomass transformed by planetary processes in oxygen-starved environments.
• Coal, natural gas, and crude oil are highly concentrated hydrocarbons and carbon with high fuel value.
• Current trends show fossil fuels playing a dominating role in fuel consumption.
• Fossil fuels are nonrenewable because their extraction rate exceeds production rate, leading to depletion.
• Depletion is inevitable with the continuous consumption of nonrenewable resources.
• Overall fossil fuel use continues to rise, but specific locations show source depletion and new discoveries.
• Oil well production follows an S-curve, peaking and then declining.
• Hubbert accurately predicted a peak in US oil production based on US well observations.
• Production struggles to meet demand after the peak, causing resource scarcity and price increases.
• New finds (shale oil/gas), technologies (horizontal drilling, fracking), and reduced consumption (economic recessions, alternate technologies) delay the peak.
• A peak is inevitable for nonrenewable resources if extraction persists.
• Principal ecological damage from fossil fuels stems not from depletion but from impacts on air quality and climate regulation.

Materials

• Figure 2.4 shows the resource use for various materials.
• Total resource use has generally increased, while per capita use has declined for many resources.
• Declines in per capita use could result from resource constraints like the resource being past its peak.
• Resources used in a nonrenewable manner will show a peak if the rate of use is larger than the rate of replenishment.
• Resources like freshwater, phosphate, wood building materials, and wild fisheries harvest appear to be reaching a peak..
• Resources are expected to struggle in meeting demand and consumption will likely decline after the peak.
• This is particularly evident for resources without substitutes, such as phosphates and freshwater.
• New technologies and discoveries can postpone the peak, but can be more expensive.
• Human reliance on materials can be understood by comparing the mobilization of various elements.
• Anthropogenic mobilization is larger than natural flows for many elements used as catalysts (iridium, osmium, platinum, palladium).
• For most elements, anthropogenic mobilization is roughly equal to natural mobilization.
• Elements like sodium, chlorine, carbon, and calcium have relatively small anthropogenic mobilization.
• Damage to ecosystem services and human health results from the introduction of mobilized elements (lead, arsenic, mercury) into the environment.
• Mobilization would not be an environmental issue if these elements circulated within the anthropogenic system.
• Over 50,000 new molecules have been synthesized, potentially causing harm to ecosystems unable to neutralize their presence.
• Pesticides, heavy metals, and refrigerants are examples.
• Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were banned due to their effect on the ecosystem service of protecting the Earth from ultraviolet radiation.
• Plastics are a ubiquitous category of material, they disrupt marine life by forming expansive floating islands of waste.
• Waste materials hurt marine life by entering the food chain and accumulating in species.

Water

• The human withdrawal of fresh water has increased as population, consumption, and development have increased.
• Most water is used for growing food.
• High water use leads to increasing water stress in many parts of the world.
• Water stress is expected to increase in the near future.
• High-stress areas use 40% of water, while extremely high-stress areas use 80% or higher.
• These levels indicate vulnerability to disruptions in water availability and possible human conflict.
• Freshwater demand results in ecological disruption in major rivers.
• Dams hold back over 6500 km³ of water (15 percent of annual river runoff).
• Positive impacts of dams include generating electricity, enabling irrigation, and controlling floods.
• Negative impacts of dams include ecological deterioration, disruption of animal migration, and resettlement of human populations.

Food

• Food is an important provisioning service provided by agroecosystems.
• Enough food is available for everyone, however, the supply of cereals available per person per year has declined in the last two decades.
• Smaller per capita supply increases price volatility and vulnerability to scarcities.
• Scarcities are linked to challenges in food distribution or purchasing power, not inadequate production.
• The total wild fish catch is leveling off, and on a per capita basis, it has already peaked.
• An increasing fraction of fish comes from aquaculture.
• Fisheries have collapsed in many parts of the world, and most of the large specimens have been fished out of the world's oceans.
• Food production has increased, not only by expanding land use but also by intensifying agricultural activities to increase yield per hectare.
• The "green revolution" of the 1970s, that increased yield, included hybrid high-yield crop varieties, irrigation, artificial fertilizers, and pesticides.
• Industrialized farming has side-effects that degrade ecosystem services (biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, water provisioning, soil fertility).

Soil

• Soil plays an essential role in food production and carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles.
• Human activities move large quantities of earth by construction, urbanization, and agriculture.
• Earth movement by humans could build a 4000 m mountain range 100 km long and 40 km wide over the last 5000 years.
• Most earth movement has happened in recent decades and is often due to intensive farming's negative impacts.
• Erosion rates in the central USA exceed 2000 m/Myr, while on the Loess plateau in China, they are 10,000 m/Myr.
• Natural rates of soil production are estimated to be between 50 to 200 m/Myr.
• The rate of soil loss in the USA before European contact was 21 m/Myr.
• Across the world, soils are severely degraded.

Air Quality Regulation

• Ecosystems regulate air quality by transporting, absorbing, and mitigating emissions.
• An emission becomes a pollutant when its concentration exceeds nature's capacity to use or capture it.
• Sulfur and nitrogen oxides emitted from fossil fuel use surpass nature's ability to regulate air quality.
• Sulfur dioxide emissions peaked in Europe and North America in the 1970s due to regulations, increased use of oil and natural gas, and shifting manufacturing to China.
• Emissions from developing countries (China and India) and international shipping have been increasing.
• Acidification affects lakes and forests and destroys ancient monuments (St. Paul's Cathedral, Acropolis, Taj Mahal).
• Emissions have killed forests, and there have been incidents of birds falling from the sky due to the pollution.
• Air pollution in North America and Europe has killed 25-40 million people, impacts have been shifting to the eastern part of the planet.
• The use of technology, economics, and policies may solve this problem in the developing world.

Climate Regulation

• Greenhouse gas concentrations have varied naturally in the last several thousand years but have exhibited a different trend since the Industrial Revolution.
• CO2 concentrations have exceeded 400 ppm, about 40% higher than in the last 800,000 years.
• CO2 emissions greatly exceed nature's capacity to capture it.
• Methane concentrations are more than double the highest in almost one million years.
• Nitrous oxide concentrations have increased by about 14 percent.
• Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases exceed nature's capacity to regulate Earth's climate, most scientific studies conclude.

Water Quality Regulation

• Ecosystems such as wetlands, rivers, and lakes have a natural ability to regulate water quality.
• Wetlands are called nature's kidneys since they remove pollutants, sequestering carbon, and providing food.
• Wetlands are being lost worldwide, with the most loss in the USA between 1950 and 1970
• Some states, such as Ohio and California, have lost over 90 percent of their wetlands.
• The Black Swamp was a large wetland that extended from northeast Indiana through northwest Ohio to Lake Erie.
• The Black Swamp covered approximately 4000 km² and was gradually drained in the second half of the nineteenth century.
• Wetlands were considered to be worthless areas for human uses, however, the unexpected side-effects of draining this wetland included the deterioration of water quality in Lake Erie.
• Artificial nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers degrade water quality.
• Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential nutrients, however, air is 78 percent nitrogen but plants cannot absorb it in that form.
• For centuries, humanity relied on traditional methods such as crop rotation, however, the Haber-Bosch process converts atmospheric nitrogen into a reactive form of ammonia.
• Fertilizer use has quadrupled fertilizer use in four decades, but plants do not use all the fertilizer.
• Some is lost to the air by conversion to nitrous oxide (N2O), and some is lost to water as dissolved nitrates.
• Flows have become of the same order of magnitude as the flow of reactive nitrogen due to natural processes.
• Nitrous oxide contributes to climate change 300 times greater than carbon dioxide by mass.
• Nitrogen runoff leads to harmful algal blooms and eutrophic or dead zones, same for phosphorus.

Net Primary Productivity

• Plants convert sunlight into biomass
• Net primary productivity (NPP) is the amount of carbon fixed by plants per year.
• Increasing population and per capita consumption leads to appropriating a larger fraction of the planet's NPP.
• NPP appropriation is done by transforming the Earth's surface and increasing the dependence of food on primary productivity (intensive animal farming).
• Human appropriation of NPP increased from 6.9 Gt carbon per year in 1910 to 14.8 GtC/yr in 2005 (13 to 25 percent of potential NPP).
• NPP on Earth has an upper limit due to sunlight, which limits the amount of primary production.

Pollination

• Pollinators provide a service that enhances the production and nutritional content of foods (almonds, apples, oranges, cucumbers, pumpkin, rapeseed, soybean, alfalfa, cotton).
• Insect pollinators provided over $215 billion in 2005 (9.5 percent of global agricultural production).
• Insects pollinate about 75 percent of crop species and up to 94 percent of wild flowering plants.
• Most staple crops like rice and wheat rely on wind pollination.
• Essential micronutrients such as vitamins are insect-pollinated like beans.
• Higher nutritional value results from cross-pollination.
• The populations of pollinators are declining.
• Wild pollinators are declining in North America and Northwest Europe and studies have documented a decline in the occurrence and diversity.
• Domesticated honey bee population in the USA declined, but recent practices have reversed this trend.
• 16.5 percent of vertebrate pollinators like birds and bats are threatened.
• Pollinator-dependent crops is increased by 300 percent over the last 50 years.
• Yield decreases due to a lower stability than that of pollinator-independent crops .
• Reasons for decline in pollinators include land-use intensification, climate change, alien species, and pests and pathogens.
• Large-scale factory farming diminishes habitats and systemic pesticides that spread throughout impair foraging of bees.
• Adoption of genetically modified crops resistant to weedicides wiped out weeds for pollinator food.

Biodiversity

• Biodiversity is essential for maintaining its resilience and ability to provide goods and services.
• The planet has experienced five mass extinctions, with a sixth underway, the previous such event was the disappearance of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
• Extinctions are estimated to be up to 1000 times greater than the natural rate and is increasing.
• Population extinction is estimated that half the number of animals on the planet are gone, this includes common and endangered animals.
• The large specimen in the oceans have been fished out.

Overall Status

• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment assessed the status of ecosystem goods and services.
• Of the 24 ecosystem services, 15 are degraded, 5 are mixed, and only 4 have been enhanced.
• Several planetary boundaries are being exceeded due to anthropogenic impacts.
• Biodiversity loss and disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles are significantly above the safe limit.
• Climate change and land system change are in a zone of uncertainty or increasing risk.
• Human activities have impacted the planet so much that the present belongs to a new geological epoch.

Summary

• Chapter 2 shows that a number of essential ecosystem services are degraded or declining.
• The primary reason behind these ecosystem service degradation is the pressure imposed by human activities.
• The deterioration raises doubts about the sustainability of human activities and the well-being of current and future generations.