Tackling Ecosystem Services, Part 2 (LP&M #4)

We know that nature is a complex adaptive system. Systems theory has taught us that with such systems, the relationships between its parts are nonlinear, often nested, and have unknown thresholds. Any forces acting upon a complex adaptive system can interrupt its processes, have its ecological threshold surpassed, and deliver it into a new paradigm altogether.

Enhancing or maintaining biological diversity is the best we can do to address the potentially dire case of a surpassed ecological threshold. Because they can only be identified once they are surpassed, the key to increasing a city's resilience and making it more sustainable is to reduce its demands and strain upon the biological diversity (and subsequent ecosystem services it supports) within its geographical limits while recognizing and drawing upon its regional assets. This is about relocalization. This is about shifting the contemporary model for quality of life to one that embraces one planet living and frugality over consumption.

Despite the wholly anthropocentric definition of ecosystem services (ES), they currently offer the greatest hope to raising the stature of nature in our current economic paradigm. If ES can grow as a model to drive sustainable development, while they grow with richness in definition and understanding, biological diversity could be maintained and enhanced. If not for its rapidly changing climate, such an approach might maintain this planet's ecological thresholds within their current paradigms.

Global climate change is still the game changer. We could succeed at all of this–using ES to maintain biological diversity to, in turn, achieve resilient cities–and yet, a changing climate could tip any number of ecological thresholds into paradigms unfit for human existence. How, then, might ES be used to help human settlements transition into this era of great uncertainty? What might they teach us about transitioning into a post-fossil fuel world? Because of global climate change, ecosystem services must address mitigation and transition.