Writing an essay providing a critique (including both positive and negative views) . Essays should be a maximum of 2500 words excluding references. Essay Topic ( How can the ecosystem services approach be used to inform sustainable land management and decision-making? )

Societies everywhere benefit from the many resources and processes supplied by nature. Collectively these are known as ecosystem services, and include the provisioning services of clean drinking water, edible and non-edible biological products, processes that decompose and transform organic matter, carbon sequestration, biologically fixed nitrogen; regulatory services that control air quality, soil erosion, pest and diseases, natural hazards; and supporting services of soil formation, nutrient cycling, water cycling, pollination (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). These ecosystem services operate at various nested levels from field scale to agro-ecological or watershed scale and beyond.

In using this approach, there is potential for conflict as different land uses are associated with the maintenance, supply and/or regulation of different ecosystem services. Decision concerning sustainability and land management methods can impact planning policies, prioritization of resources for production and/or conservation, social benefit, biodiversity benefits and ecosystem functions. Methods for the assessment of sustainability using our understanding of ecosystem services are still in their infancy relative to more traditional measures (e.g. maintenance of biodiversity, extent of pollution, sustainability indices, carrying capacity etc.) making it more difficult to measure and interpret the benefits and limitations of the ecosystem services approach. A few manuscripts, Daily et al. (2009), Butler et al. (2013), Kline et al. (2013), Schulte et al. (2013), provided in the Moodle site are an excellent starting point for your critique.

Proposed structure: Begin your assignment with a brief 1 page introduction of the topic, defining terms such as ecosystem services, outlining differences in land management methods, the ecosystem services sustained and the types of indicators available to assess sustainability. The main body of your essay is a review of the literature on the issues arising from using ecosystem services as indicators of sustainable land management, the potential benefits and limitations. Provide examples of how this approach might compare against other approaches, where the ecosystem services approach has been used successfully and unsuccessfully. In the final section, propose a way forward for using ecosystem services to measure sustainability that addresses the benefits and limitations arising from this approach.