Untangling the Environmentalist's Paradox: Why is Human Well-Being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?

By C. Raudsepp-Hearne, Garry D. Peterson, Maria Tengö, E. Bennett, Tim G Holland, K. Benessaiah, G. MacDonald, Laura R. Pfeifer. BioScience, 2010

496 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Environmentalists have argued that ecological degradation will lead to declines in the well-being of people dependent on ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite large global declines in most ecosystem services. We assess four explanations of these divergent trends: (1) We have measured well-being incorrectly; (2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining; (3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature; (4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being. Our findings discount the first hypothesis, but elements of the remaining three appear plausible. Although ecologists have convincingly documented ecological decline, science does not adequately understand the implications of this decline for human well-being. Untangling how human well-being has increased as ecosystem conditions decline is critical to guiding future management of ecosystem services; we propose four research areas to help achieve this goal.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c113909040b16dca7f933f04a8469164ebb328f

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Citations in the corpus

When, Where, and How Nature Matters for Ecosystem Services: Challenges for the Next Generation of Ecosystem Service Models (2017, background): “…understand a complex system (Norgaard 2008), the interactions between social and ecological processes are not often incorporated in ES assessment tools (figure 3; Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010), rendering these tools incomplete and potentially causing predictions of ES provision to be inaccurate.”
Linkages between ecosystem services and human wellbeing: A Nexus Webs approach (2018, result): “This latter point is consistent with 123 the findings of Raudsepp-Hearne et al. (2010) that food production, which has increased over the 124 last several decades, has outweighed the detrimental effects to wellbeing driven by declines in other 125 ecosystem services, such as soil degradation and…”
Plant Invasions in Protected Areas (2013, background): “Humanity and nature are intimately linked, yet people are living within the ‘environmentalist’s paradox’ (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010): human wellbeing continues to improve (for at least some people, and perhaps even a majority), while many indicators of the state of the environment, such as the inc”
Understanding the relationships between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation: A conceptual framework (2014, unknown): “Raudsepp-Hearne et al. (2010) discuss this in relation to the ‘environmentalist's paradox’, the idea that wellbeing continues to rise globally, as ecosystem services are degraded.”
Strengthening conceptual foundations: Analysing frameworks for ecosystem services and poverty alleviation research (2013, background): “Various research agendas have emerged from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), including one concerned with understanding more fully the links the MEA makes between ecosystem services and human wellbeing and poverty (Carpenter et al., 2009; Daw et al., 2011; Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010).”
Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap (2015, methodology): “[1] depended on the model we use or the differences 46 among the datasets (the Seufert et al.”
The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship (2011, background): “…that 15 of 24 types of ecosystem services are in decline globally (MA 2005), concluded that provisioning services are currently more important than supporting and regulating services for human well-being, as measured by the rise in HDI over the 1970–2005 period (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010).”
Ecosystem services provided by amphibians and reptiles in Neotropical ecosystems (2013, background): “…within a species, their ecological functions, and the ecosystem services they provide, because ecological degradation and simplification can lead to a decrease in the ecosystem services that are likely to have a negative impact on the human welfare (Luck et al. 2003; Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010).”