Linking future ecosystem services and future human well-being

By C. Butler, W. Oluoch-Kosura. 2006

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ecosystem services are necessary, yet not sufficient for human well-being (however defined). Insufficient access to the ecosystem provisioning service of food is a particularly important factor in the loss of human well-being, but all ecosystem services contribute in some way to well-being. Although perhaps long obvious to ecologists, the links between ecosystems and aspects of human well-being, including health, have been less well understood among the social science community. This situation may now be starting to change, thanks in part to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). Causality between ecosystem services and well-being is bidirectional; it is increasingly clear that functioning societies can protect or enhance ecosystem services, and accordingly, that societies with impaired well-being (best documented in the case of chronic diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS) can also experience a related decline in ecosystem services. The future state of human well-being and of ecosystem services is more than the co-evolution of these two fundamental elements. Human well-being also depends, critically, upon the human institutions that govern relationships between human individuals and groups, and also between humans and ecosystem services. The scenarios working group of the MA found that human well-being is highest in the Global Orchestration scenario, which assumes the fastest evolution of beneficial institutions, and is lowest in the Order from Strength scenario. Human well-being was found to be intermediate in the other two scenarios (Adapting Mosaic and Techno-Garden) even though these scenarios share a much greater recognition of the importance of ecosystem services to human well-being.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3bfd92a87a4e58aa3666375bb82f76c77757c947

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Elasticity in ecosystem services: exploring the variable relationship between ecosystems and human well-being (2016, background): “…Kenya, 17WWF Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya conceptual progress, significant gaps remain in our understanding of how ecosystems actually contribute to different people’s wellbeing (Butler and Oluoch-Kosura 2006, Carpenter et al. 2009) and to alleviation of multidimensional and dynamic poverty (Alkire 2007).”
Wetlands as Settings for Human Health: Incorporating Ecosystem Services and Health Impact Assessment into Water Resource Management (2011, background): “Some groups of people are more dependent on ecosystem services, and the effects of these services’ degradation can be shown to be immediate and direct, sometimes reinforced in a cyclical manner (Butler and Oluoch-Kosura 2006).”