Why ecosystem services should be counterbalanced by nature’s thermodynamic costs

Abstract

The neoclassical, unilaterally-defined value concept of ecosystem services (ES) as ‘benefits’ must be counterbalanced by a transparent and valid assessment of thermodynamic costs that result from degrading mature climax ecosystems. It is because willingness to pay-based methods of ES valuations produce unsustainable value relations that promote continuation of business-as-usual and further destruction of the fragments of nature. The authors argue that conversions from temperate forest to built environments result in economic losses of supporting and regulating ES that are more than two hundred times greater than the economic benefits. The loss of the cooling effect from evapotranspiration, replaced by warming from sensible heat creation in built environments, results in energetic impacts that are two orders of magnitude greater than those from greenhouse gas emissions. This is why, for sustainable landscape decision-making, the preference method results have to be compared to the costs that nature and humans have to bear due to anthropogenic changes in the natural landscape. Economic agents should start to pay for their ‘heat footprint’, ie. for thermodynamic losses caused by their transformation of natural ecosystems. By incorporating solar energy dissipation losses as costs to ecosystems, the proper value relations can be achieved, with climax forests as the most valuable producers of supporting and regulating ES. Humans are unable to equivalently substitute such forests using human technologies.