Abstract
This chapter identifies core principles of ecology and environmental science applicable to the nexus and discusses the tightly coupled socio-ecological systems that establish ecosystems services (ES) within the nexus. The chapter begins by outlining key ecological principles and their interdependencies, demonstrating how ecosystem services are provided related to food, energy, and water. It then illustrates how ecosystems and ecosystem services are valued with respect to the nexus. Next, it outlines the relationship of ecosystem services to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (see Sect. 3.7) before concluding with a case study examining the importance of ecosystem services in erosion control services and conservation agriculture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Allan, T., & Matthews, N. (2016). The water, energy and food nexus and ecosystems: The political economy of food non-food supply chains. In F. Dodds & J. Bartram (Eds.), The water, food, energy and climate nexus: Challenges and an agenda for action (pp. 78–89). Routledge - Earthscan: Oxon.
Andersson, J. A. & D’Souza, S., 2014. From adoption claims to understanding farmers and contexts: A literature review of Conservation Agriculture (CA) adoption among smallholder farmers in southern Africa. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 187, pp.116–132. Retrieved January 5, 2015, from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0167880913002685.
Aylward, B., Bandyopadhyay, J., Belausteguigotia, J. C., Borkey, P., Cassar, A. Z., Meadors, L., Saade, L., Siebentritt, M., Stein, R., Tognetti, S., & Tortajada, C. (2005). Freshwater ecosystem services. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Policy Responses, 3, 213–256.
Bell, A., Matthews, N., & Zhang, W. (2016). Opportunities for improved promotion of ecosystem services in agriculture under the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-016-0366-9.
Bockstael, N. E., Freeman, A. M., Kopp, R. J., Portney, P. R. & Smith, V. K. (2000). On measuring economic values for nature.
Bundy, L. G., Andraski, T. W., & Wolkowski, R. P. (1993). Nitrogen credits in soybean-corn crop sequences on three soils. Agronomy Journal, 85, 1061–1067.
Carpenter, S. R., Stanley, E. H., & Vander Zanden, M. J. (2011). State of the world’s freshwater ecosystems: Physical, chemical, and biological changes. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 36, 75–99.
CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity). (1992). CBD convention text. Retrieved March 15, 2017, from http://www.cbd.int/convention/text
Costanza, R., Fioramonti, L., & Kubiszewski, I. (2016). The UN sustainable development goals and the dynamics of well-being. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14, 59. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1231.
Daily, G. C., Söderqvist, T., Aniyar, S., Arrow, K., Dasgupta, P., Ehrlich, P. R., Folke, C., Jansson, A., Jansson, B. O., Kautsky, N., & Levin, S. (2000). The value of nature and the nature of value. Science, 289(5478), 395–396.
DeClerck, F. A. J., Jones, S., Attwood, S., Bossio, D., Girvetz, E., Chaplin-Kramer, B., Enfors, E., Fremier, A., Gordon, L. J., Kizito, F., Lopez Noriega, I., Matthews, N., McCartney, M., Meacham, M., Noble, A., Quintero, M., Remans, R., Soppe, R., Willemen, L., Wood, S., & Zhang, W. (2016). Agricultural ecosystems and their services: The vanguard of sustainability? Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 23(December 2016), 92–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2016.11.016.
Freeman, A. M. (2003). The measurement of environmental and resource values: Theory and methods (2nd ed.). Washington DC: Resources for the Future.
ICSU ISSC. (2015). Review of the sustainable development goals: The science perspective. Paris: International Council for Science (ICSU). Retrieved March 23, 2016, from http://www.icsu.org/publications/reports-and-reviews/review-of-targets-for-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-science-perspective-2015/SDG-Report.pdf
Lavelle, P. (1997). Faunal activities and soil processes: Adaptive strategies that determine ecosystem function. Advances in Ecological Research, 27, 93–132.
Losey, J. E. & Vaughan, M. (2006). The economic value of ecological services provided by insects. Bioscience, 56(4), 311–323.
Matthews, N. (2016). People and freshwater ecosystems: Pressures, responses, and resilience. Aquatic Procedia, 6, 99–105.
Montgomery, D. R. (2007). Dirt: The erosion of civilizations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Pannell, D. J., et al. (2006). Understanding and promoting adoption of conservation practices by rural landholders. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 46(11), 1407. Retrieved from http://www.publish.csiro.au/?paper=EA05037.
Pearce, D. (1998). Cost benefit analysis and environmental policy. Oxford review of economic policy, 14(4), 84–100.
Pimentel, D., Wilson, C., McCullum, C., Huang, R., Dwen, P., Flack, J., Tran, Q., Saltman, T., & Cliff, B. (1997). Economic and environmental benefits of biodiversity. BioScience, 47(11), 747–757.
Ringler, C., Willenbockel, D., Perez, N., Rosegrant, M., Zhu, T., & Matthews, N. (2016). Global linkages among energy, food, and water: An economic assessment. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 6(1), 161–171.
Shiferaw, B., Freeman, H. A., & Navrud, S. (2005). Valuation methods and approaches for assessing natural resource management impacts. In B. Shiferaw, H. A. Freeman, & S. M. Swinton (Eds.), Natural resource management in agriculture: Methods for assessing economic and environmental impacts (pp. 19–51). Wallingford: CABI Publishing.
Sukhdev, P., May, P., & Müller, A. (2016). Fix food metrics. Nature, 540, 33–34.
Swinton, S. M., & Zhang, W. (2005). Rethinking ecosystem services from an intermediate product perspective. Selected paper, the annual meeting of American Agricultural Economics Association, Providence, Rhode Island, July 24–27, 2005.
Vörösmarty, C. J., McIntyre, P. B., Gessner, M. O., Dudgeon, D., Prusevich, A., Green, P., Glidden, S., Bunn, S. E., Sullivan, C. A., Reidy Liermann, C., & Davies, P. M. (2010). Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity. Nature, 467, 555–561.
Walker, B., Salt, D., & Reid, W. (2006). Resilience thinking: Sustaining people and ecosystems in a changing world. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Ward, P. S., Bell, A. R., & Parkhurst, G. M. (2015). Heterogeneous preferences and the effects of incentives in promoting conservation agriculture in Malawi, Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/129169
Wood, S. L., & DeClerck, F. (2015). Ecosystems and human well-being in the Sustainable Development Goals. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 13, 123. https://doi.org/10.1890/1540-9295-13.3.123.
Wood, S. L., Jones, S. K., Johnson, J. A., Brauman, K. A., Chaplin-Kramer, R., Fremier, A., Girvetz, E., Gordon, L. J., Kappel, C. V., Mandle, L. & Mulligan, M. (2018). Distilling the role of ecosystem services in the Sustainable Development Goals. Ecosystem services, 29, 70–82.
World Energy Council. (2016). World energy resources. Retrieved September 26, 2018, from https://www.worldenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/World-Energy-Resources-Full-report-2016.10.03.pdf
Zhang, W., & Swinton, S. M. (2009). Incorporating natural enemies in an economic threshold for dynamically optimal pest management. Ecological Modeling, 220, 1315–1324.
Zhang, W., & Swinton, S. M. (2012). Optimal control of soybean aphid in the presence of natural enemies and the implied value of their ecosystem services ecological economics. Journal of Environmental Management, 96(1), 7–16.
Further Reading
CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land, and Ecosystems (WLE). (2014). Ecosystem services and resilience framework (p. 46). Colombo: International Water Management Institute (IWMI). CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land, and Ecosystems (WLE). https://doi.org/10.5337/2014.229 Retrieved from file:///C:/Users/Nathanial%20Matthews/Downloads/Ecosystem%20Services%20and%20Resilience%20Framework-revised.pdf.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2005). Retrieved from http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.html
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). (2018). Retrieved from https://www.ipbes.net/library
WWF. (2016). Living planet report. Retrieved from http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_living_planet_report_2016.pdf
World Energy Council. (2016). World Energy Resources. Retrieved September 26, 2018, from https://www.worldenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/World-Energy-Resources-Full-report-2016.10.03.pdf
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Matthews, N., Zhang, W., Bell, A.R., Treemore-Spears, L. (2020). Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services. In: Saundry, P., Ruddell, B. (eds) The Food-Energy-Water Nexus. AESS Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29914-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29914-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29913-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29914-9
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)