Mankind benefits from a multitude of resources and processes that are supplied by natural ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services and include products like clean drinking water and processes such as the decomposition of wastes. While scientists and environmentalists have discussed ecosystem services for decades, these services were popularized and their definitions formalized by the United Nations 2004 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a four-year study involving more than 1,300 scientists worldwide.

This grouped ecosystem services into four broad categories: provisioning, such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; and cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits. As human populations grow, so do the resource demands imposed on ecosystems and the impacts of our global footprint. Many people have been plagued with the misconception that these ecosystem services are free, invulnerable and infinitely available.

However, the impacts of anthropogenic use and abuse are becoming evermore apparent – air and water quality are increasingly compromised, oceans are being over-fished, pests and diseases are extending beyond their historical boundaries, deforestation is eliminating flood control around human settlements. It has been reported that approximately 40-50% of Earth’s ice-free land surface has been heavily transformed or degraded by anthropogenic activities, 66% of marine fisheries are either overexploited or at their limit, atmospheric CO2 has increased more than 30% since the advent of industrialization, and nearly 25% of Earth’s bird species have gone extinct in the last two thousand years . Consequently, society is coming to realize that ecosystem services are not only threatened and limited, but that the pressure to evaluate trade-offs between immediate and long-term human needs is urgent.

To help inform decision-makers, economic value is increasingly associated with many ecosystem services and often based on the cost of replacement with anthropogenically-driven alternatives. The on-going challenge of prescribing economic value to nature, such as through processes like biodiversity banking, is prompting transdisciplinary shifts in how we recognize and manage the environment, social responsibility, business opportunities, and our future as a species. The simple notion of human dependence on Earth’s ecosystems probably reaches to the start of our species’ existence, when as hunter-gatherers we benefited from the products of nature to nourish our bodies and for shelter from harsh climates.

Recognition of how ecosystems could provide more complex services to mankind date back to at least Plato (c. 400 BC) who understood that deforestation could lead to soil erosion and the drying of springs . However, modern ideas of ecosystem services probably began with Marsh in 1864 when he challenged the idea that Earth’s natural resources are not infinite by pointing out changes in soil fertility in the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, his observations and cautions passed largely unnoticed at the time and it was not until the late 1940s that society’s attention was again brought to the matter. During this era, three key authors – Osborn , Vogt , and Leopold – awakened and promoted recognition of human dependence on the environment with the idea of ‘natural capital’. In 1956, Sears drew attention to the critical role of the ecosystem in processing wastes and recycling nutrients.

An environmental science textbook called attention to “the most subtle and dangerous threat to man’s existence… the potential destruction, by man’s own activities, of those ecological systems upon which the very existence of the human species depends”. The term ‘environmental services’ was finally introduced in a report of the Study of Critical Environmental Problems , which listed services including insect pollination, fisheries, climate regulation and flood control. In following years, variations of the term were used, but eventually ‘ecosystem services’ became the standard in scientific literature.

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