Tackling Ecosystem Services, Part 3 (LP&M #6)

If global climate change is the game changer, the planning focus of cities needs to be building capacity for resilience. The adoption of ecosystem services (ES) by the planning departments of cities could foster an increase in biological diversity within their boundaries and, in turn, improve their capacity for resilience. Despite the constant existence of unknown unknowns, planning efforts would be more appropriately spent concerning the known unknowns–the fact that there are unknown thresholds with regards to natural systems.

There is a reciprocal relationship between ES and community resilience. ES are the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems. Resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a disturbance, or pulse of energy that threatens a departure from its current state (the state that humans have grown accustomed to), by resisting this force and rapidly recovering. To ensure resilience, ecosystems need to maintain a high level of ecological function. Likewise, the level of ES provided to humans is directly related to the level of ecological function that ecosystems maintain.

To demonstrate this relationship, one could take a look at Apis mellifera, the honey bee. Honey bees are commonly known to provide the regulating ES of pollination, an added $15 billion value ES in the United States alone. Pollination, is an integral component to the productivity of the urban food system. If colony collapse disorder was to spread further and wipe out the honey bee species, urban food systems would become fragile and less productive, having to rely upon the more ineffective pollination services from the likes of hummingbirds, butterflies, and wind. This fragility equates to lower resilience and a greater potential for susceptibility to crossing the unknown threshold of the ability for the natural system, pollination from the Apis mellifera, to ever provide its particular ES to the human race again.

While honey bees are just one species, planning efforts could benefit other species by planning with them principally in mind. Providing a diversity of bee forage spread throughout a region, while supporting natural beekeeping on a broad decentralized scale, would build resilience into the systems upon which boney bees need to thrive. In return, this would support an increase in resilience in the pollination services upon which agriculture depends to also thrive.