Ecosystem services management: an integrated approach

Abstract

Attracting professionals from diverse disciplines, the ecosystem services conceptual framework with integrative character strives to provide a solution to the drastic decline of the natural resources of our planet. Nonetheless, losses of ecosystem services accelerate more rapidly than ever. As humans interact with nature, increasing their global presence in both scale and intensity, the need for a new macroeconomic world emerges. This world should be based on an integration of nature and society (nature-societal) or society and ecosystems (socio-ecosystem), which will facilitate the transition toward sustainable ecosystem services management. Achieving this new macroeconomic economic paradigm would require redesigning a new thought process that embraces ecosystem services as precious goods, rather than unlimited and free, unappreciated resources. Market and government are not sufficient for this new macro-economics, in which ecosystem services are its main content. We suggest an integrated set of market, government, and human values to manage ecosystem services, as traditional, narrow, economic, political and scientific solutions alone do not adequately address the sustainable use of natural ecosystems. Culture, created from human values which, to a certain extent, can be influenced or directed, has the capacity to influence the interactions between nature, social and economic systems. The ancient Chinese philosophy of ‘unity of man with nature’ provides principles which can guide and develop human values into a new, positive force with the potential to harmoniously manage sustainable ecosystem services.