Fostering Ecosystem Services for Mitigating Climate Change and Sustaining Food Production Systems in Developing Economies

Abstract

Among the greatest challenges of the 21st century is maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services (ESs) to sustainably feed the projected 9–10 billion people of the world by 2050. Presently, incentives to preserve ESs in developing economies are limited, implying that there are no direct market mechanisms to signal the scarcity or degradation of a service until it fails. ESs are public goods with no direct owners. Hence, payment for ecosystem services (PES) is a voluntary transaction that aims at filling this gap by creating a new market for services, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, watershed protection and landscape values. Emerging PES has challenged the culture of natural resource depletion without consideration of sustainability. Sustainability is core of climate change vortex, and developing economies are worst hit. Food insecurity and failing agricultural systems will further endanger the fragile balance of life in the region. Until the right approaches to de-risking ecosystem sustainability emerge, the perpetrators of climate change will keep getting away with the harmful effects to our corporate existence. This treatise critically examined how ESs can foster sustainable food production given their holistic inter-relatedness to the subject of climate change mitigation, in the light of global development goals.