ALAMEIN INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Elective Course - PSC207

Contemporary Global Issues

Ecosystem Health and Human Well-being
Sami Z. Mohamed, PhD, SSBB
Environmental Integrated Planning, GIS/RS

2024 - 2025
3
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
Human societies have long been aware of their reliance on the goods and services provided by
nature, especially food, fuel, and fiber. The value of less tangible services, such as climate control,
water filtration, soil fertility, and recreational and cultural services, has become more apparent. As
understanding deepens about human dependence on natural processes across varying temporal
and spatial scales, so does the need to measure and value these ‘ecosystem services’ within
economic and management frameworks.
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES - Definition
“Ecosystem services are the benefits provided to humans through the transformations of
resources (or environmental assets, including land, water, vegetation, and atmosphere)
into a flow of essential goods and services, e.g., clean air, water, and food.”

In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment identified and categorized ecosystems and their
resulting services identified the links between these services and human societies, and the direct and
indirect drivers and feedback loops. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework identified
ecosystem services within four categories as shown in figure 4:
1. Provisioning services, such as food and water
2. Regulating services, such as flood and disease control
3. Supporting services, such as nutrient cycling, that maintain the conditions for life on Earth,
4. Cultural services, such as spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits.
General categories of ecosystem
services following the
classification of the Millennium
Assessment
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
Historically, humans have modified natural ecosystems to favor those species that yield directly.
Benefits (e.g., agricultural commodities), generally overlooking the unseen but essential ecosystem
services (e.g., pollination, soil fertility, insect control, and erosion control) that, if lost, are expensive
and sometimes impossible to replace.

Some ecosystem services, such as the regulation and stabilization of climate, water flow, and the
movement of nutrients have been even less visible until recent times, when disturbance to these
systems have exacerbated climate change, soil erosion, or eutrophication.

Like all complex systems, ecosystems can appear to be working well until they suddenly collapse, as
the supporting base may have eroded without obvious warning symptoms. A well-known example is
fisheries, which may abruptly collapse even when the level of catch has been stable for years.
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
Another example is evident in the landscape, where crops and pastures have replaced native
vegetation. They have shallow root systems that do not use nearly as much of the rain or irrigation
water that percolates into the soil as native plants. The excess water finds its way to the
groundwater up to 10 times faster. Consequently, groundwater levels slowly rise, dissolving the
natural salt in the weathered soils. These changes can take 10 to 100 years to bring salt to the land
surface or into streams.

However, many ecosystem services have been difficult to observe until they cease flowing. Hence,
they have not been formally counted in economic systems, or the effects of their loss have been
counted as ‘externalities.’ However, when these externalities become a significant cost burden to
society, such as restoring degraded river systems, it becomes a priority to understand and value
ecosystem services and to integrate them into economic frameworks.
Key concept of ecosystem services, biodiversity and resilience

BIODIVERSITY
BIODIVERSITY - the engine room of ecosystem services
Biodiversity - comprising animals, plants, and microorganisms, their genetic variation, and their
organization into populations that assemble into ecosystems is fundamental to the provision of
ecosystem services.

The diversity of organisms is the direct source of many services, such as food and fiber, and
underpins others, including clean water and air, through the role of organisms in energy and
material cycles.

Changes in and the loss of biodiversity directly influence the capacity of an ecosystem to produce
and supply essential services and can affect the long-term ability of ecological, economic, and social
systems to adapt and respond to global pressures.
BIODIVERSITY - the engine room of ecosystem services
The precise nature of the relationship between biodiversity, the resilience of ecosystems, and the
production of ecosystem services is complex and the subject of much active research and ongoing
scientific debate. Some key issues that have been identified include:
• The combination of species clearly matters in determining the capacity of an ecosystem to produce
services. Conserving or restoring the structure and, therefore, the functioning of ecosystems, rather than
just maximizing species numbers, is critical to maintaining ecosystem services. The varying structural
components of ecosystems change at different speeds and scales under different disturbances or stresses
but retaining the underlying structure is vital.
• The degree of biodiversity richness that is necessary to maintain the production of ecosystem services is
less clear. Ecosystems often include species with a degree of functional redundancy or duplication.
However, this does not make those species dispensable or replaceable, lost species diversity is usually
difficult or impossible to replace. Hence, retaining the richness of biodiversity is likely to provide natural
insurance against the loss of ecosystem services over time.
• Many ecosystem services are not generated by just one ecosystem. Water, for example, will flow through
and be affected by many ecosystems, each of which needs to be functionally sound to regulate water
quality and volume.
BIODIVERSITY - the engine room of ecosystem services
Modified ecosystems can deliver production services, such as food and fiber, although productivity
relies on the continuation of the underlying ecosystem services. The extent to which ecosystems are
modified to produce services, combined with specific management interventions and the additional
use of fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and water, becomes important when considering the
maintenance of all ecosystem services in the long term. An ongoing focus on some services (e.g.,
food) at the expense of others (e.g., soil formation or nutrient cycling) may eventually compromise
the functioning, and hence the sustainability, of the ecosystems that provide these services.
The role of biodiversity in maintaining essential services in human-modified landscapes is often
poorly understood and undervalued.
Modified ecosystems are generally ecologically simpler and, therefore, have less resilience to
external pressures (e.g., variations in climate) than complex ecosystems. Hence, they have a greater
risk of failure or need to increase artificial inputs to keep delivering services over the long term. The
current state of an ecosystem does not necessarily give a clear indication of what the future state is
likely to be, especially in the face of changing or extreme conditions or events.
Key concept of ecosystem services, biodiversity and resilience

RESILIENCE
RESILIENCE - the key to sustaining ecosystem services
Resilience describes the capacity of a system to maintain its equilibrium in the face of impacts or
pressures that arise from natural or human-made interactions or events. ‘Resilience’ comes from
the Latin word resilire, which means to ‘leap back’ after adversity.

A resilient system has the capacity to absorb disturbance and essentially retain the same function,
structure, and feedback.
Resilience thinking is often applied to socioecological systems where people and the environment
are linked together. Resilience is not a static state and does not imply indestructibility. It has a close
relationship to the concept of ‘health’ and is similarly difficult to define. A system can have the
capacity to be resilient to changed conditions yet may reach a point where it is vulnerable to decline
or even collapse because the rate and scale of change are too great or because the system reaches a
threshold where its essential processes are changed.
RESILIENCE - the key to sustaining ecosystem services
A simple analogy to describe resilience is the bicycle
wheel. A wheel can afford to lose some spokes and
still function, although not optimally, but once a
threshold number of spokes has been lost, the wheel
will no longer operate effectively and may pose a
danger to the cyclist. Complex systems can have
many thousands of ‘wheels’, and the malfunction of
one will pass on pressures to the others; often, the
wheels with the most vital functions are so small as
to be almost indiscernible. If the bicycle is traveling
down a road where the number of potholes ahead is
hard to predict, wheels with fewer spokes will fail
sooner.
RESILIENCE - the key to sustaining ecosystem services
Ecosystem resilience is thought to be a product of the diversity of ecosystem functional groups, the
diversity of species within those functional groups, and the diversity within species and populations.
These different aspects of biodiversity maintain ecological and evolutionary phenomena, flows, and
processes across a spectrum of local and global scales. For example, the presence of high-order
predator species may make an ecosystem less susceptible to a new invasive species, while the
presence of multiple species that fulfill similar functions increases the potential for different
responses to human landscape modification and other global changes.

Resilience has been an important quality of the ecology of Australia’s biodiversity, as ecosystems
have had to develop a range of evolutionary strategies to cope with the naturally high variability of
rainfall, poor soils, and the long-term drying of the continent. Pressures that can affect ecosystems
include drought, fire, overgrazing, disease, and invasive species.
THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION