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The Concept of
Ecosystem Services:
Contributions, Pitfalls,
and Alternatives.
My name is Sharachchandra Lele.
My first name can be
shortened to Sharad.
I am a distinguished fellow,
at the Center for
Environment and Development
in ATREE, Bengaluru,
which is a research institute.
I'm also an adjunct professor
at the Indian Institute for
Science, Education and Research
in Pune and Shiv Nadar
University in Delhi.
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In this lecture, I'm
going to provide
an overview of the idea
of ecosystem services.
The essence of my
arguments is as follows.
The concept of
ecosystem services
and its economic manifestation,
whether in the form of valuation
or payments for
ecosystem services,
are a serious force in
the current thinking
on environment conservation
and sustainable development.
This concept obviously
has strengths,
but it also has significant
limitations and pitfalls,
not just in the way it is
implemented in practice,
but also in its very
conceptualization.
A better framework, therefore,
would be more self-reflective,
more broad-based in values,
and more realistic in its
characterization of nature.
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If one were to trace the
emergence and growth
of the phrase
'ecosystem services'
as Fisher et al.,
did in this paper
in Ecological Economics,
you see an explosion
of this idea
or the term, or the
use of the term
in the scholarly literature
starting about 1995.
That's because the
Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment Report,
which popularized the idea
of ecosystem services,
was published in 2005.
Then you really see a
boom in the literature
on ecosystem services.
