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COUNTERACTING ECOSYSTEM LOSSES DUE TO DEVELOPMENT
Citation:
HANSEN, V. E. COUNTERACTING ECOSYSTEM LOSSES DUE TO DEVELOPMENT. Presented at CABERNET Conference: Theme 1: Integrating Urban Land Management, Belfast, UK, April 13 - 15, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
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Description:
Interventions into ecosystems to develop the built/socio-physical environment involve normative decisions regarding human well-being that inevitably compromise ecosystem capacities, but ecosystem sustainability is conditioned by properties established by ecosystems and unrelated to human concerns. Therefore, if ecosystems are to be sustainable, development must meet human objectives within ecological properties. Because nothing physical can be comprised at any rate above zero and be sustained, losses due to socio-physical development must be counteracted via quality added such that cumulative ecosystem quality is positive. However, because individual development sites are no longer analytically linked to larger ecosystem structures, functions, and processes, site-level land-use decisions can negatively affect natural systems, but alone can do little to affect them postively; and opportunities for site level land-use decisions to have net positive effects on ecosystems are esentially unrealized. To have a net positive effect on ecosystems, it is essential that land-use decisions at the site level are balanced with decisions that improve quality at the ecosystemic scale.