Cultural Ecosystem Services

The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Ecosystem Services provides an overview of Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES), which are the nonmaterial aspects of benefits that people derive from nature. These diverse and multifaceted contributions can include experiences, capabilities, and identities, among others. The Handbook addresses how these CES are valued, how they reflect human-nonhuman relationships, and what roles they can play in improved human well-being, ecosystem management, and trajectories towards sustainability.

This Handbook presents a wide array of perspectives on the roles CES can play in understanding relationships to nature, and on how those relationships might translate into policy. The Handbook includes philosophical approaches to CES, typologies and classifications of types of CES, and case studies of places, people, policies, and projects engaging CES. Across seven distinctive Parts, the chapters deliver a number of important practical lessons on how to understand, measure, and value CES, and use examples and applications from around the world, including how CES apply across different biomes. The Handbook also includes a selection of compelling artworks that represent CES in different cultural contexts. The 91 authors represent 19 different countries, providing a rich range of experiences, including a strong focus on the Global South.

This book can serve as a comprehensive guide to researchers who are new to CES and wish to understand more about the field, and as a set of go‑to instructions for experienced CES researchers. It can also inform policymakers who wish to better incorporate CES into their work (from the preface).

While this is clearly an academic book full of references and detailed diagrams, it does touch on many issues of interest to IEF. In defining cultural ecosystem services, it highlights the place-based specificity of such services, aligning with the local community culture and traditional ecological knowledge. It also warns about the political dimension and the risks that a superficial treatment can permit or hide continuing injustices. It explores different categories of such services, from the psychological dimension when people feel better in nature, to the role of natural capital, and even tourism and leisure.

It further develops the concept of place and identity, through examples of sacred landscapes in Tibet, sacred groves, more general connections to place, and even wildlife conservation. It explores the services generated by different ecologies, such as wetlands, forests, agricultural landscapes, coastal and marine ecosystems, and climate impacts in cities in the Global South.

For the practitioner, there are chapters on methods and valuation, for instance of human/wildlife interactions, measuring techniques for values, the use of art, situated practice, mapping, urban gardening, monetary evaluations and deliberative methods. The book then discusses CES in management and policy, such as human well-being indicators, values, socio-cultural valuation, disaster impacts, environmental policies in South-East Asia, paying for such services, carbon credits and plural values. It concludes with some new directions to explore such as Indigenous invisible forest beings, the relationship to well-being and action, and possible ways forward.

For those who want to learn about any of these topics in more depth, the relevant chapters will provide a good entry to the academic literature. The general approach highlights the importance of looking at environmental issues beyond a purely scientific materialistic perspective to see the relevance of the social, cultural and spiritual ways that people interact with the natural world, and how broadly cultural ecosystem services benefit humanity and must be respected and preserved. The book is available in open access, so anyone can consult it online or download it (69mb).

SOURCE: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003414896/routl…
available in open source