Thursday, June 21
11:40 a.m. - 1 p.m.
AC223 (AA112 for overflow)
The event will be live streamed. Watch online!
Ecosystems are connected to human well-being in a number of complex ways at multiple time and space scales. These benefits are known as ecosystem services, and aquatic ecosystems are among the most valuable in providing these services to humans. How best to understand and model these connections presents a great challenge for ecosystem services science (ESS). Successfully tackling this challenge can raise awareness and provide information to better manage our natural capital (natural ecosystems and their products that do not require human activity to build or maintain). For ecosystem services to occur, this natural capital must be combined with other forms of capital that do require human intervention to build and maintain. These include built or manufactured capital, human capital (e.g., human labor and knowledge), and social capital (e.g., communities and cultures). Thus ESS is inherently an integrated, transdisciplinary science that is concerned with the way these four forms of capital contribute to human well-being and the synergies and trade-offs among them. The process of valuation of ecosystem services is about quantifying and modeling these synergies and trade-offs to allow better management. It requires a deeper understanding of the interconnections among human psychology and decision processes, ecosystem processes and functions, and economic production and consumption processes at multiple time and space scales. The challenges of ESS are huge and will require a significantly more transdisciplinary approach than our current academic institutions are comfortable with. But the payoffs are also huge. Our future depends on making rapid progress in this area.
ROBERT COSTANZA is a vice chancellor’s chair in public policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is also currently a senior fellow at the National Council on Science and the Environment in the U.S., a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center, an affiliate fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, a deTao master of ecological economics at the deTao Masters Academy, China, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK). Professor Costanza’s transdisciplinary research integrates the study of humans and the rest of nature to address research, policy, and management issues at multiple time and space scales, from small watersheds to the global system. He is co-founder and past-president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and founding editor of the society’s journal, Ecological Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of ten other international academic journals. He is also founding co-editor in chief of Solutions a unique hybrid academic/popular journal. Professor Costanza is the author or co-author of more than 600 scientific papers and 27 books. His work has been cited more than 75,000 times in Google Scholar with an h-index of 108. More than 300 interviews and reports on his work have appeared in various popular media and he has written more than 70 articles for the popular press.
