Ecosystem Services Charting a Path to Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Research Team Summaries (2012) / Chapter Skim
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Conference Summary
Conference Summary
Pages 1-6
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Agriculture -- the cornerstone of large, complex human societies -- would collapse but for the reservoirs of clean freshwater, soil laced with essential nutrients and microbes, and stable climates generated by natural systems. It's becoming clear that those life-support systems are faltering and failing worldwide due to human actions that disrupt nature's ability to do its beneficial work.
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Two teams recommended applying revealed preference analysis measurements to the task of comprehensively valuing ecosystem services. Another said interactive social games could expose the way any person values intangible ecosystem services by tracking their choices among actions that create tradeoffs between different competing values.
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Putting numbers to the map showed where the greatest losses occurred with the biggest opportunities to recover phosphorous. The team evaluated a long list of potential technologies to do the job and suggested a pilot project: Using anaerobic digestion to treat animal manure produced in concentrated animal feeding operations.
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They identified factors that encourage or discourage societal preparation and resiliency: Is the crisis caused by human actions, and over what time scale and spatial extent does the event occur? Finally, the team recommended developing a case study library and a game-based tool to help people explore the range of options available for adapting large populations to abrupt change.
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Taking ecosystems services seriously reveals how fragmented and self-defeating policies emerge from fragmented and competitive decisionmaking bodies entrusted with social and economic planning. Perhaps, just as the melded efforts of scientists speaking across wide disciplinary boundaries can best meet the challenges posed at this conference, new comprehensive political bodies might better put ecosystem services goals into practice locally and globally.
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