Beyond Ecosystem Services: Valuing the Invaluable

The ecosystem services framework (ESF) is advantageous and widely used for itemising and quantifying ways in which humans benefit from natural places. However, it suffers from two important problems: (i) incoherence of definitions and (ii) a narrow approach to valuation, inadequate to represent the full range of human motives for conservation and the diverse interests of different stakeholders. These shortcomings can lead to a range of problems including double-counting, blind spots and unintended consequences. In this opinion article, we propose an ecosystem valuing framework as a broader and more rigorous way to deliver the benefits currently sought from the ESF, without the conceptual problems. Ecosystem services (ES) is a concept used to quantify diverse ways in which humans benefit from natural places. The ES paradigm is a very popular approach to incentivising nature conservation, increasingly used by conservation campaigners and policy makers around the world. The effectiveness of the ES paradigm as a conservation tool has been questioned in recent years following critiques both that the concept is vaguely defined and that the framework takes too narrow an approach to valuation that facilitates the monetisation of nature. By reducing a broad range of human motives to the category of services desired, the ES framework fails to do justice to the complex reality of different human attitudes towards particular ecosystems and their conservation.