Abstract
AbstractThis article develops an approach that applies macroeconomic concepts to the interpretation of complex, water related natural processes. By translating and re‐interpreting these processes into a language that is more accessible to a broader audience otherwise unaccustomed to its terms will likely help sharpen our understanding of the terrestrial water cycle. For economists, we describe climate‐forming natural processes in a manner consistent with the fundamentals of the mainstream approach. For noneconomists, parallels from economically determined, relatively short‐term observations can be applied conceptually to identify dynamics which occur over much longer and therefore more elusive natural occurrences, in particular considering the role of forests and how persistent land conversion over a millennium has shaped the earth's surface and impacted climate stability. The set of “supporting ecosystem services” highlighted in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) coincides with the ground phase of the terrestrial water cycle, taking the concept beyond the ecosystem service perspective and identifying it as a planetary service. Ecosystem and planetary services differ in the same way that microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives do. The water cycle intensity of a geographical area may well be related to a rainfall multiplier that measures the ability of continental ecosystems to increase the amount of water moving across terrestrial surfaces and descending as rainfall through transpiration and deposition, and re‐transpiration and re‐deposition of the water content in the air that originally arrives from the oceans. Building upon the MEA's association of human wellbeing with ecosystem features, the rainfall multiplier serves as a physical indicator and measure of the natural basis of wellbeing creation.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness Human Water > Value of Water
Highlights
From an economic and accounting point of view, CO2 in the atmosphere and nature can be conceptualized as a stock variable (Stern, 2008)
This paper aims to highlight the analogous disparities that emerge in comparisons between natural processes/systems and economic systems
Applying macroeconomic language to ecosystem processes helps to put a greater emphasis on the frequently overlooked aggregation effect produced by terrestrial ecosystems
Summary
From an economic and accounting point of view, CO2 in the atmosphere and nature can be conceptualized as a stock variable (Stern, 2008). The effect of land conversion on ecosystem primary production parallels the decline of business opportunities (lost added value creation) due, for example, to the impact of rising interest rates on economic activity In both cases, the outcome is the diminishing capacity of the public budget to maintain a smoothly functioning social system which further shrinks the resource efficiency frontier. The evolution of the scientific debate and thinking on forests' role in promoting water availability for social purposes has revealed the importance of understanding the role of massive evapotranspiration mechanisms (the supply-side role forests play) on precipitation patterns and the distribution of water resources across terrestrial surfaces (Ellison, 2018; Ellison et al, 2012; Ellison et al, 2017; Keys et al, 2016; Sheil, 2014; Sheil & Murdiyarso, 2009; Wang-Erlandsson et al, 2018) This strategy for thinking about forest-water interactions has shifted the focus to quantifying the contribution of ecosystem functioning (evapotranspiration) to the total volume of precipitation over land and the degree to which it can supplement the volume that the oceanic circulation originally provides (Creed & van Noordwijk, 2018). From a different perspective, it can pinpoint the territories where cultivation has resulted in a stronger curtailment of natural succession resulting in a lower level of contribution of the multiplication effect than the average of other territories, and in this way overexploiting a common and presumably “public” resource
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