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Humankind is Totally Dependent on Nature - How Can We Define, Quantify, and Track Nature's Vital (and Some Not So Vital) Benefits to Inform Decision Making?
Citation:
Landers, D. AND A. Nahlik. Humankind is Totally Dependent on Nature - How Can We Define, Quantify, and Track Nature's Vital (and Some Not So Vital) Benefits to Inform Decision Making? Presented at Joint Aquatic Science Meeting, Portland, OR, May 18 - 23, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
The Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Classification System (FEGS-CS) has been well received by the scientific community and as it incorporated into decision making, it is likely to be used by many different entities (communities, government and non-government organizations, private sector, etc.) as the preferred choice for an environmental currency that can be linked to choices regarding sustainability. Understanding the beneficiary-scape, as discussed in this abstract, is an important step toward moving the FEGS-CS forward.
Description:
Ecosystem Services have received increased scientific attention for a decade, yet the natural and social scientists working on mainstreaming these concepts are still struggling with the task. FEGS (Final Ecosystem Goods and Services) are an informative and useful concept as they embody both biophysical components of nature and human beneficiaries. We present a FEGS Classification System (FEGS-CS), focusing on aquatic systems, that minimize double counting, which is difficult to avoid using the Millennium Ecological Assessment perspective. The FEGS-CS directly identifies potential beneficiaries which connect nature’s bounty to humans. An important remaining piece of this framework is to identify what information regarding beneficiaries is needed for valuation and how might this information be obtained. This information may be viewed as understanding a beneficiary-scape for a defined area on the earth’s surface. Defining the information needs and providing it will likely require a mixed assembly of natural and social scientists. An ideal outcome from such a joint effort could be the definition of a systematic approach to efficiently derive an adequate quantity of beneficiary information suitable for FEGS valuation.