Ecosystem services
What does living nature have to offer to humanity?
It’s December and Cristina, who spent the whole year saving money to rent a house on the coolest beach on her state’s coast, arrives for the much-deserved vacation with the whole family. After cleaning up the mess, the kids run to that sea bath. Cristina notices a very bad smell and soon realizes that a small and smelly river flows near where she chose to swim. But it’s alright! Nothing can ruin your wonderful vacation. Three days later, the husband has his feet full of ringworm and the children spent the night with a fever and vomiting in the nearest emergency room. Damn! It ruined half the vacation.
The fact is that nature offered a free service to us, a beach with fresh, clean waters to enjoy in the summer, and we only realized when the service stopped being offered with quality. The services that nature offers us are called ecosystem services, provide us with well-being and, ultimately, favor the sustainability of life on earth (MEA; ONU, 2005). The services are not limited to a beach with clear waters, but also, clean air to breathe, water to drink and irrigate crops, natural landscapes that bring us fun and contemplation. Even less obvious things like insects to pollinate and guarantee the production of food (fruits, vegetables, cereals, grains) and forests that contribute to the natural cycle of rains to happen in balance, are essential services for our well-being.
Of course, the well-being of a community involves individual and collective activities that sometimes we don’t even realize how they impact us. What ruined Cristina’s vacation, our dear family mother, was the fact that the local government did not guarantee proper sewage disposal and treatment system, homeowners, in the absence of a sanitation system, did not care about implanting proper pits, and factory owners did not bother to deal with the production waste from their companies. And everything was thrown into the rivers that flow into the ocean. It happens a lot. Waste from factories and sewage from homes contain many bacteria, some of which are harmful to our bodies. These tailings and sewage are also food for invisible algae that live in the water, and under normal conditions, do not cause any major problems. But these algae, in the face of so much food, start to reproduce uncontrollably, causing what we call eutrophication. The eutrophic water becomes cloudy, which prevents sunlight from entering. Without sunlight, other algae that need that light to generate energy die. Many fish that eat these algae also die. This is a chain reaction that, after many years, has no turning back.
Also, to clean the water, the air is a very important ecosystem service for humans, for obvious reasons. But even so, factories, oil refineries, cars, motorcycles, trucks throw all the waste from their chimneys and exhausts into the air we breathe. The value of clean water and air is much more than bathing in the sea and breathing deeply without suffocating. Governments would save millions of people who become ill with problems associated with poor water and air quality did not have to be served by the health system. Cristina, for example, spends a lot of money on medicine every year when children suffer from respiratory problems associated with pollution.
Air and water occur in abundance on planet Earth, but they are not infinite. They would even be infinite, if we, again, we’re not destroying the free natural pumps that nature provided us and that filter water and air very efficiently: the trees. Forests, by returning the humidity of the atmosphere that they capture from the soil by the roots, are largely responsible for maintaining the rain cycle. The Amazon rainforest, for example, produces much of the rain that falls in the South and Southeast of Brazil (José Marengo, interview BBC Brasil, 2012). The South of South America, compared to other areas of the same latitude in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, should be a great desert. However, instead, it is considered a fertile area, responsible for about 70% of the wealth produced in South America (Carlos Nobre, TEDxAmazônia, 2010), in large part, thanks to the rains that come from the Amazon.
Besides helping in the formation of rains and helping to regulate the climate, native vegetation helps to protect the sources and reserves of water above and below ground. The roots of plants help to stabilize the soil, preventing sediments from being carried and deposited in rivers, destroying their gutters. Roots also help to slow the flow of water, preventing flooding, and filter out pollutants from cities and pesticides from crops that could contaminate groundwater. When a natural area is transformed into areas used economically by man (e.g. urban areas, pastures and agriculture) there is the addition of non-permeable areas. The rainwater, then, does not infiltrate to replenish the water table, and pesticides and urban pollutants, in addition to sediments are loaded into the bodies of water, compromising their quality.
But, let’s go back to Cristina on the beach. Finally, the children got well and the husband found on the maps that “little beach” farther away, where the water quality seemed better. After deciding to send an e-mail to the city hall’s ombudsman asking for more care with the sewer network, she finally relaxes by the sea. In her favorite magazine, she reads that the great decrease in bee populations can affect the harvest of fruits, cereals, coffee and even chocolate. She thought of the coffee with a chocolate cake that cost her R$25 the previous afternoon and quickly canceled the basic orange juice she had just ordered. When did living become so expensive? Poor Cristina, she has no peace.
Cristina continued reading and discovered that pollination is an essential ecosystem service. Between 60–90% of plant species of commercial interest depend on animals as pollinators. International organizations have been warning of a decline in pollinator populations worldwide. But in some places, people are already benefiting from what nature has to offer to save money. For example, on a coffee farm in Costa Rica, some researchers realized that if coffee plantations were located next to small forests, the harvest would be greater, all because of the presence of native pollinating bees. Cristina decided to drink only Costa Rican coffee.
So, next time you hear that human actions are the biggest threat to the sustainability of planet Earth, please don’t wrinkle your nose. Think that water and air pollution, the conversion of native forest areas to the expansion of cities, agriculture and livestock, and the destruction of the diversity of animals and plants are the reasons why ecosystem services are so threatened. Think of nature as a component of the economy, which has a balance that needs to be maintained to function.
The moment is past when human beings need to understand that, to continue enjoying the natural services essential to the quality of life, it is necessary to find ways to exploit natural resources sustainably. Human civilization can coexist harmoniously with nature and enjoy its products. However, to reverse the processes that break the natural balance, it is necessary to take actions that range from charging governments with signatures and complying with international agreements, through policies that protect natural resources, to individual attitudes, such as rethinking their mode of consumption and the impact it has on the environment. We must keep in mind that the balanced ecosystem offers human civilization, not only services that are indispensable to our well-being, but also that enable the very existence of life on the planet. Cristina, of course, is already aware of this.
Written by: Cintia Freitas
Translated by: Bruna Zveiter
