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An example of an ecosystem service is pollination, here by a honey bee on avocado crop. Ecosystem services are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These ecosystems, when functioning well, offer such things as provision of food, natural pollination of crops, clean air and water, decomposition of wastes, or flood ...
Ecological goods and services (EG&S) are the economical benefits (goods and services) arising from the ecological functions of ecosystems. Such benefits accrue to all living organisms, including animals and plants, rather than to humans alone. However, there is a growing recognition of the importance to society that ecological goods and ...
The basic conceptualization of nature from the perspective of environmental economics is that manufactured capital can be used as a substitute for natural capital. [13] The definition of PES provided by environmental economics is the most popular: a voluntary transaction between a service buyer and service seller that takes place on the condition that either a specific ecosystem service is ...
Ecosystems sustain life-supporting functions and provide ecosystem services like biomass production (food, fuel, fiber, and medicine), the regulation of climate, global biogeochemical cycles, water filtration, soil formation, erosion control, flood protection, and many other natural features of scientific, historical, economic, or intrinsic value.
Ecosystem services are ecologically mediated functional processes essential to sustaining healthy human societies. [6] Water provision and filtration, production of biomass in forestry, agriculture, and fisheries, and removal of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the atmosphere are examples of ecosystem services essential to public health and economic opportunity.
Ecosystems, for example, contain abiotic resources and interacting life forms (i.e., individual organisms that aggregate into populations which aggregate into distinct ecological communities). Because ecosystems are dynamic and do not necessarily follow a linear successional route, changes might occur quickly or slowly over thousands of years ...
In 2020, the EC definition was updated to further emphasise that "Nature-based solutions must benefit biodiversity and support the delivery of a range of ecosystem services." [18] The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report pointed out that the term nature-based solutions is "widely but not universally used in the scientific literature".
The report identified four major categories of ecosystem services: provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. [46] It concludes that human activity is having a significant and escalating impact on the biodiversity of the world ecosystems, reducing both their resilience and biocapacity. The report refers to natural systems as ...