Andrew Watts

Rptm 220 Sustainability, Society, and Well-being

Dr. Edwin Sabuhoro

11/21/21

Payment for Ecosystem Services

As resources become harder to get due to an increase in population and industrialization,

people are creating the idea that you could put a price on nature. This is a new way of thinking

because it is a good way to see how much we value nature while we are taking it for granted.

Because of the extreme amount of people on earth, this causes humans to produce more food and

shelter along with products to make life more comfortable. This has created a money-driven

world that looks at economic profits over protecting nature and resources that are becoming

scarce. By having many people money-driven in our society, we are going to need to view

nature as a commodity so more people will value it. Repairing our ecosystem will most likely be

impossible to get back to completely normal and extremely expensive to even attempt.

Through the last few decades, we have been trying to save the ecosystem because it is the

right thing to do with no reward in the form of economic profit (Banking Nature). In order to

keep people from taking shortcuts in production at the expense of the environment’s health, we

need to give people a reason to keep the production of major resources clean. If the government

can give small rewards for keeping large-scale productions as clean as possible, we can reduce

the amount of pollution and waste created in the process. Normally companies would have to

pay for any damages made to natural resources or the environment, I think these costs should be

increased in order to fund the benefits of other companies as their incentive to stay clean. Mark

Tercek said that when he worked at Goldman Sachs, he saw many flaws within their system
regarding funding specific companies that are not ecosystem friendly but they did not know. He

then goes on to say that there is a better chance of educating these major banking companies to

fund the right companies rather than trying to fight them into making the right decision. By

fighting them, they will only win and think of Nature Conservation as an enemy.

As a whole population, we are using too many resources to survive in the future. We

need to limit the amount of energy used every day to decrease the expense of creating this power

and the pollution. We can see now that we are using the energy from one and a half Earths

(Banking Nature). By 2030 we will be using 2 and 2050 we will be using two and a half Earths

(Banking Nature). This trend will only increase the amount needed with the growing population

unless we start to limit the number of resources we are using every day.

Wildlife around the world has been suffering from our use of the planet. All different

types of ecosystems have been affected from rain forests to oceans and lakes. This is making

many species endangered or extinct. The damage we have done to our ecosystems is also

making some species flourish uncontrollably but also killing off others. The Del High Sand

loving fly was a victim of too much industrialization over its habitat that it became the first fly to

be on the endangered species list in America (Banking Nature). In 1993, the government

stopped the production of resources within the fly’s hometown in order to let the fly regain

control of its population (Banking Nature). This caused the people in the area to lose their jobs

because of rapid expansion onto the fly’s habitat. If this was avoided, the people living in this

town would still have their jobs and would have not bothered this fly’s population that is very

close to extinction.

In order to save what we have left of our planet, we need to stop causing environmental

problems then fix them if we have the ability to prevent the problem in the first place. By
detecting these problems, we can save money, endangered species all over the world, and have

fewer problems to solve in the future. This can be done by adding an incentive to having a

cleaner industry of production and by closely monitoring the animals and plants in the

surrounding environments to make sure the is nothing endangered in the area. If we all work

together, we can change the future of our Earth and how we use the resources available.
 References

“Banking Nature.” Docuseek2, https://docuseek2-

com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/view/check/148346360810000000287100000900/1/0/0#.