Valuing the reciprocating services that humans can provide to ecosystems

Abstract

Long-term sustainability requires that humans consider not only what ecosystems can do for them, but also how humans can ‘give back’ or reciprocate. Indigenous Australians call this ‘caring for country’. Industrial societies have routinely undervalued both the ecosystem services (ES) that nature provides to humans and the reciprocating services (RS) that humans provide to ecosystems. The policy challenge is to find ways of encouraging more RS in industrial societies. The practice of monetarily valuing ES helps highlight their importance and has brought the environment to the forefront of many international policy discussions. We argue that sustainability could be further enhanced by better valuing RS. First, the simple acknowledgement and celebration of RS (without monetary valuation) could change institutions, social norms, and behaviours. Second, numerous institutions now provide financial incentives for people to undertake nature-positive projects (a type of RS), but nature-positive investments are hampered by information failures. Comprehensive assessments of the expected value of proposed projects, could fill information gaps and guide investments towards projects that are likely to generate the most benefit. But these are difficult to do well. We discuss some of the particular difficulties of generating meaningful value estimates for RS that generate diverse benefits at large scale, or that create change in highly connected systems. We note the need for more transdisciplinary research to further improve methods; arguing that if we only do what we are currently good at (valuing discrete benefits at small scale and using crude approaches to scale upwards) then we will continue to overlook, undervalue and under resource many of the critically important RS that support us all.