Ecosystem Services and Field of Dreams Paradox
Fans of the movie know the line: “If you build it they will come.” Replace “they” with “ecosystem services” and it sums up the key paradox of the ecosystem services paradigm.
Add people (and their associated development) to remote, unspoiled nature and most measures of ecosystem service value will indicate that we’ve just created a net benefit for society, that we’re better off. Why? Because now there are people in close proximity to nature who can directly benefit from nature’s services, like flood control, water filtration, waste assimilation, etc. Before, this remote piece of land might have been sequestering carbon and hosting a few eco-tourists—but now it’s doing oh, so much more.
If we religiously follow relied-upon metrics and logic of ecosystem service value we might end up drawing this perverse conclusion, even though we know intuitively that there is great value in pristine nature. The problem is a fundamental asymmetry in the tools and methods used for assessing, characterizing and valuing different types of ecosystem services.
On one hand is a classic utilitarian service like fresh water supply for New York City from forests in the Catskills watershed, or storm surge protection in the Gulf Coast wetlands. For these, methods like replacement cost and avoided cost accounting satisfy us with (some say) a fairly accurate measure of actual money we’d have to lay down if we fail to protect them.
Remote lands, on the other hand, are inconvenient to value. Although some use-values may apply, their core value lies in much more intangible qualities—option, existence, bequest, spiritual values—all of which our quantification methods are inept at capturing.
By recognizing that it’s much harder to deal with remoteness and its intangibles within the ecosystem services framework, we’ll at least be on guard about avoiding perverse conclusions that come from these asymmetries.