Co-investment in ecosystem services: global lessons from payment and incentive schemes

Nature cannot be valued, but the services that people derive from it can. No amount of money can buy us a new planet Earth with its natural history. However, where money is made in destroying its rich natural capital, money might shift human behaviour towards less destructive ways of making a living. This could especially be so where people are poor and where the benefits they derive from destroying natural capital are small relative to the damage done and its value to others. However, this basic idea is in reality interacting with complex social-ecological systems in a world of economic and political feedbacks. In a nutshell, that's what this book is about (and why it has so many pages).The Millennium Ecosystem Assessmen-1has popularized a language of ecosystem services, defined as the benefits people obtain from nature (or natural capital). Ecosystem services contribute to human wellbeing through direct utilitarian values as well as through indirect enabling of human capabilities2. They are broadly categorized as provisioning (goods), regulating (reduced variability), cultural (intangible wellbeing) and supporting (natural recovery) services. Where most 'supporting' services act at the multi-year or decadal time scale of ecological restoration, there may be a further category of evolutionary services provided by the basic processes that sustain biodiversity on a longer time scale.

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