Natural capital regeneration

Ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) grouped them into four types:

• Provisioning services: products such as food, fresh water, timber, fibre, fuel and medicines.
• Regulating services: regulation of climate, floods, disease, water purification, pollination and pest control.
• Cultural services: spiritual, recreational, aesthetic and educational benefits, such as sacred groves and tourism.
• Supporting services: basic processes that make the others possible, such as soil formation, nutrient cycling and primary production.

Many of these services have no market price, so they are easily ignored in decisions.

Environmental degradation

Environmental degradation is the decline in the quality of the environment through depletion of resources (water, soil, forests), destruction of habitats, pollution and loss of biodiversity. When natural capital is degraded, the flow of services falls: a deforested hillside gives less water regulation and more floods and soil erosion.

Regenerating natural capital

Regeneration means allowing or helping natural capital to recover: afforestation and natural regeneration of forests, watershed development, soil conservation, restoring wetlands and mangroves, sustainable harvest limits for fisheries, and payment for ecosystem services, in which those who benefit pay those who protect the service (for example, downstream cities paying upland farmers to protect forests).

Ecological footprint

The ecological footprint, developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in the 1990s, measures the area of biologically productive land and water needed to produce the resources a person or population consumes and to absorb its wastes (mainly carbon dioxide). It is expressed in global hectares (gha). It is compared with biocapacity, the productive area actually available. When footprint exceeds biocapacity, there is ecological overshoot, which means natural capital is being run down. Earth Overshoot Day marks the date each year when humanity's demand exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in that year.

Key points

• Four ecosystem services: provisioning, regulating, cultural, supporting.
• Degradation reduces the flow of ecosystem services.
• Ecological footprint is measured in global hectares.
• Footprint > biocapacity = overshoot.

Common mistakes

• Classifying pollination as provisioning; it is a regulating service.
• Confusing ecological footprint (area) with carbon footprint (tonnes of CO₂e).