Environmental education - Ecosystem services
Strengthening in society the idea that nature is the foundation of wellbeing is a task that requires the greatest efforts by institutions, schools, companies, associations and groups or private individuals.
Factors such as climate change or pollution, generated to a greater extent by human action, pose a growing threat to the preservation of these 'ecosystem services' (food, water, energy, process control, leisure, etc.), which are essential to the future of each and every one of us.
Learning about the many benefits provided by ecosystems to humans, is essential in order to become aware of everything that is at stake for citizens in this sense.
Living well within the limits of our Planet, is the objective of the European Environment Action Programme to 2020, this involves the protection and conservation of the ecosystems, which are our Natural Capital.
What are the ecosystem services?
The biodiversity of species, i.e. the group of plant and animal species, in their interaction with the habitat are the ecosystems. These species perform different functions in each ecosystem and produce a series of flows of services, which are vital to maintaining our health, welfare and prosperity.
Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, including those benefits that people perceive and those they do not perceive.
These services are classified into three groups:
- supply or production (such as food, water, energy),
- regulation (such as climate control, water purification, pollination),
- cultural (education, aesthetics).
Some services, such as supply services are better known and rated, such as food production, either from natural or cultivated ecosystems. But other services, such as maintaining clean air, having quality water, or having inspiring landscapes, are more invisible, so they are not taken into account sufficiently when rating the ecosystems that produce them.
For this reason, it is necessary to highlight the importance of ecosystem services for social development and human wellbeing.
The best decisions based on the best knowledge
Relevant areas for the provision of ecosystem services should be managed in a sustainable way and ensuring the current and future provision of these services. For this we need to improve knowledge, by developing new methods of study, as well as the application of the results to the sectoral policies (agriculture, transport, industry, rural development, cities).
Miren Onaindia
Professor of Ecology and Director of the UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Development and Environmental Education at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Oxford, University of Veracruz in Mexico and University of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She is a member of the Scientific Council of the UNESCO MAB Biosphere Reserve programme. Her research focuses on the study of biodiversity and ecosystem assessment, applicable to environmental conservation and sustainable land management. She has published several scientific articles, as well as informative and educational publications.
- Second stage of Nursery Education and first stage of Primary Education. What do trees give us? (PDF, 669 KB)
- Primary Education. What do rivers give us? (PDF, 405 KB)
- Obligatory Secondary education. Do we really know what the ecosystems of our environment give us? (PDF, 404 KB)
- Secondary Education and Professional Training. What are the advantages of conserving the ecosystems of our environment? (PDF, 428 KB)
- Between us all. Nature: basis of our everyday life (PDF, 495 KB)
The results from environmental valuation can guide policies aimed at correcting markets failures through taxation, subsidies or command and control measures.
Valuation techniques can reveal preferences related to the natural environment that are not accurately expressed in markets because of imperfect information, ill-defined or lacking property rights, bounded rationality, moral hazard and/or free riding. The results from environmental valuation can guide policies aimed at correcting markets failures through taxation, subsidies or command and control measures. But while environmental valuation can capture certain aspects ignored in markets (in particular non-use values), techniques targeted at eliciting individual preferences are partly subject to the same phenomena that make markets fail - in particular imperfect information. We can never know the preferences of future generations, or the exact shape of ecosystem services supply curves including thresholds that can cause sudden collapses. There are further problems involved in aggregating expressions of individual ordinal utility.
To tackle these issues, an important component in environmental education should be to bring together citizens or interest groups with different expertise and diverging preferences and facilitate deliberation in using group valuation techniques. This would shape social preferences and make them more explicit. It would also improve understanding of different views, and of why conflicts around environmental issues arise.
One way to work with group valuation in education is to set up role plays. Learners are switch roles with each other and negotiate on a common valuation of e.g. a particular ecosystem service. Each learner acts according to how s/he thinks that a co-learner would behave when negotiating the valuation. Then they discuss how well the role play conveyed the actual valuations among them. Finally, the participants will negotiate on a common valuation based on their actual stake in the ecosystem service discussed.
The situation around small lakes in the Indian city of Ahmedabad is an example where this role play has been tried out. The lakes are surrounded by informal settlements that both use and pollute the water. There is an interest among real estate owners and others in restoring the lakes to make them more attractive as recreational areas. At the same time there are organizations representing the slum dwellers that focus on provision of ecosystem services from lakes that can improve the living conditions in the informal settlements. By inviting real estate owners and representatives from the informal settlements to switch roles and act based on how they think that the other part views the lake, differences can be made explicit and analysed, which is a necessary condition for eventually reaching an agreement on how to develop the area.
Alexander Hellquist
Programme ManagerSwedish International Centre of Education for Sustainable Development
Uppsala University
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