nvironmental
stresses from land development, water demands, air pollution and
harvesting of marine and other species increasingly threaten our common
ecological wealth. Examples of the latter include degradation of water
quality on account of agricultural and developed land uses, loss of
habitat and species abundance as land cover is modified or water is
diverted to urban and agricultural use, and depletion of species from
over harvesting. Studies analysing ecosystem goods and services have
been prepared so as to make these ecological changes and their economic
implications visible to the decision makers. Land and water are the
basic natural resources for biomass production and they constitute the
core of any ecological system. The very base of production is under
great stress in many parts of our country due to severe biotic pressure
and ever intensifying development as evident from the current and
projected scenarios.
Ecosystem Service Valuation (ESV)
is being developed as a vehicle to integrate ecological understanding
and economic considerations. It is a holistic approach for quantifying
the monetary value of these services so that various stakeholders
including land owners, planners and policy makers can better understand
the trade-offs when altering natural ecosystems. The key to
understanding the importance of ecosystems and incorporating this
understanding in economic and other policy decision making processes is
to establish a link between a given ecosystem and its goods and services
and their valuation by the society.
Various policy choices are
available to reduce the degradation of ecosystem services and retain
their benefits. These include regulatory approaches such as establishing
‘no take’ zones in fisheries, technological approaches such as promoting
drip irrigation systems and economic approaches which may include
assigning private property rights to the resource and enabling the
owners to charge for the use of the service. In recent years, there has
been an increase in the use of economic instruments to promote the
conservation of ecosystem services. In some cases, the producers of
services that were formerly free have now started being compensated by
the government for providing these services.
With the combined efforts of
local communities, civil society, research communities, governments and
international organisations, regular collection and analysis of data on
ecosystem services has become fundamental to making informed decisions
on issues that affect or are affected by ecosystem health. The
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provides a framework for tracking the
status and trends of ecosystem services. The challenge is to establish
regular monitoring and assessment of services at all scales and to fill
in the gaps identified in the assessment. Any future ecosystem
monitoring and assessment needs to draw on both traditional and
scientific knowledge, and emphasise the links between ecosystems and
people. New technologies, such as web-based interfaces that display
spatially referenced information on a virtual globe provide ways to
share, analyse and disseminate information across different levels.
The decisions on management and
use of ecosystem services are influenced by various actors such as
government, international donors and conservation groups. However, it is
increasingly being recognized that more bottom-up approaches involving
local communities are required in decision-making processes.
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