Norgaard 2009: Ecosystem services: From an eye-opening metaphor to a complexity blinder

This was a nice paper about the problematics of ecosystem services, or more precisely,
its “practical” use in connection withmarket economy, rather than as a metaphor as originally intended. It has become such a fashionable concept that’s supposed to solve all the problems in the world that its effectiveness in the real world has rarely been questioned.

This was one of those papers where thoughts that at some level had already been in our minds were put into proper words, and while reading you just go “yes, exactly, I agree!”. But for the very same reason it perhaps didn’t provoke that much discussion because we didn’t find much to criticize or question in it. Although it was perhaps not the easiest paper for us ecologists to read (and could have ideally been a bit more compact too), I think we all had managed to actually read it, of which a few extra point to the author – not that common, I have to admit!

Points made by the authors (sorry for the boring bullets..)

• ecology behind ES is not strong enough to identify levels of sustainable use

• risk of biasing ecological research towards this ecologically very insignificant concept (see the P.S.!)

• interactions caused by ES projects with other aspects of economy are typically ignored, which makes achieving sustainability impossible

• many ES may have been misestimated in the past and the current situation is therefore worse than is believed and current actions are not adequate

• ideas with a noble purpose may end up going horribly wrong when connected with market dynamics/economics. Like in the case of the REDD programme, which mostly serves the wealthy countries’ will to “continue combusting fossil hydrocarbons”.

• What is required instead is “becoming serious about environmental governance”

Although we did enjoy the paper, at least some of us were left with a rather hopeless
feeling in the end – if the only solution really is such a massive revolution of the way basically our entire civilization works, is it ever going to happen, or are we just inevitably going to consume until we can no more, and leave a completely messed-up planet behind us? Credit to the authors though for an attempt to provide “what to do” instructions, although not as concrete as one might hope for.

All in all, we didn’t leave our pulla break too depressed, just more convinced than ever
that jumping on the ES bandwagon is not the solution to probably much anything… well, maybe a bit exaggerated, let’s go for “part of a larger solution” as Norgaard writes, assuming its dominance does not “blind us to the complexity of the challenges we actually face”.

P.S. A funny coincidence was, that on the very same day as we discussed this paper, there was the DL for a targeted call by a Finnish foundation where a major theme was research on ecosystem services. As one might guess, we didn’t apply…

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.009