Value Pluralism in Practice: Integrating IPBES to Refine Ecosystem Services Assessments in South Africa

Abstract

As global biodiversity loss continues to increase, effective valuation of natural capital is a prerequisite for effective environmental planning decisions. The introduction of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in 2005 brought the concept of ecosystem services into the limelight. After that, The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) mirrors the MA's original use of the term ecosystem services and goes further by openly embracing concepts from multiple worldviews on human-nature relationships and knowledge systems. The emergence of the latter promises to provide new and improved suggestions for existing assessment methods in many countries around the world. One such example is Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) in South Africa. By summarizing the current assessment methodology of the NCA in South Africa, this paper summarizes the current limitations of the NCA and suggests that the integration of the IPBES method into the NCA can effectively solve the above problems. The paper also analyses the first national form of IPBES organization, the Brazilian BPBES, to illustrate the need to tailor IPBES selectively to the specific problems of the country to achieve the best results. This paper is an attempt to optimize the methodology of the South African national-level ecosystem services assessment and an exploration of the application of IPBES, a conceptual framework linking nature and people.