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The concept of ecosystem services: contributions, pitfalls and alternatives

Published on February 28, 2023   34 min

A selection of talks on Plant & Animal Sciences

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0:00
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.
0:29
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.
1:12
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.

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