Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Sustainable Wellbeing, Prof. Robert Costanza

Ecosystems are connected to human well-being in a number of complex ways at multiple time and space scales. The challenge is understanding and modeling these interconnections, with a range of purposes including providing information to decision-makers. In order for ecosystem services (the benefits provided to humans by the rest of nature) to occur, natural capital (natural ecosystems and their products that do not require human activity to build or maintain) must interact with other forms of capital. These include built or manufactured capital, human capital (e.g., human labor and knowledge), and social capital (e.g., communities and cultures). Thus, understanding ecosystem services requires an integrated, transdisciplinary approach that is concerned with the way these four types of assets contribute to sustainable human well-being and the synergies and trade-offs among them. The process of valuation of ecosystem services is about quantifying and modeling these synergies and trade-offs to allow better managem