SPUD U LIKE

For the Generation Zs and Alphas, Spud U Like was a fast food outlet popular in the 80’s and 90’s, a forerunner to Subway. However, I am not here to talk about favourite fast food joints but ecosystem services, an overused but largely misunderstood phrase, and the humble potato is my metaphorical measure of them.

So what are ecosystem services? You can find various definitions but in essence “ all the processes and outputs that nature provides humankind with”. Most definitions break these down into four areas:

Provisioning Services:- The food we eat, our fuel, building products, medicinal resources, i.e the outputs that we directly consume;

Regulating Services :- Flood control, water purification, fire control, filtration, pollution mitigation, carbon capture, carbon retention, disease control, pollinator resources, urban cooling, energy demand reduction i.e things providing direct benefits.

Supporting services :- Shelter, habitat, upholding genetic diversity i.e more conceptual benefits.

Cultural Services:- Our identity, who we are and how we use our landscapes, economic prosperity, socio behavioural trends.

An ecosystem by definition is a dynamic community of living, and non living components.

The concept of ecosystem services and their benefits has been around for millennia. Plato allegedly documented the relationship between deforestation and water supply, many more primitive civilisations still live by the creed of being at “one with nature”. It was probably the industrial revolution and urbanisation that broke the bond between civilisation and the landscape. George Perkins Marsh in his book “Man and Nature” 1864 was one of the first to formally characterise relationships between natural and social systems but over the last 50 years, and more specifically the last 20 years, the value of nature and our place within it has gained greater recognition.

The economic value offered by natural assets is not in question, although the value itself can be difficult to define. In Zambia for example 44% of the average household income comes from ecosystem services, recent studies are suggesting 1/3rd of all global climate mitigation will come from natural assets. In the UK the value of nature is formally acknowledged, in 2007 Defra produced “An introductory Guide to Valuing Ecosystem Services, the Office for National Statistics annually produces a Natural Capital Accounts Methodology Guide. Whilst the process is still accepted to be “in development” the UKs stock, in 2019, was said to be worth ￡1.2trillion, can this really be ignored?

And yet there are still very few of us who really understand anything more than the most basic concept, that working with not against ecosystems is inherently good. I myself have recently witnessed a reluctance from other professionals to engage with the process because of a lack of verifiability, in today’s world we only act when there is a statistic to prove a cause and effect, itself an absurd notion because, as any statistician will tell you, statistics can be used to prove anything.

So why do I pick on the humble potato as my metaphor of choice. Well firstly the boring potato is still, in the UK, our number one vegetable, allegedly each brit consumes 103kg of spuds per year, mostly deep fried I’ll accept. My argument is that when it comes to ecosystem services not all potatoes are likely to be created equal, the King Edward has different characteristics from a Desiree, I don’t know which is better at capturing carbon, absorbing nitrates or delivering 100 gms of protein per mouthfull, and I suspect no one knows, but one will almost certainly be better than the other, and I would argue that we ought to know. If you don’t believe me would you do so if I told you that a dense timber of Curupay was more carbon rich than the more open cell structure of Birch? of cause you would. No one with even a basic understanding of the environment questions that an Oak tree supports more ecology that a Sika Spruce, so the concept of relative value exists. There are tools out there already which measure these things, i-Tree Eco provides an assessment of current and projected asset values, so why not use them?

Clearly we must get to a point where we know the answer to these questions, if the King Edward is indeed a better cropper, better nutritionally and a better carbon sink than the Desiree, by a factor of say 5%, then at a national level it absolutely does count which we are eating.

Yes we live in a world threatened by existential threats such as climate change. However we also live in a world where technology and AI already allow us to understand our options and the impact of our choices, it is simply unacceptable to continue to ignore these aides. So ecosystem services is vital to our economy, to our society, to our planet and we can no longer afford to ignore it.

As Minecraft shows we create the worlds we live in and who or what we share them with, the successful player develops the smarter survival strategies.