Key Ecosystem Services: Who Protects, and Who Pays?

Abstract

Fair distribution of natural resources has attracted considerable attention within debates on global justice. To date, the discussions presume a conception natural resources as stocks of discrete, physical objects of potential use or consumption. Less attention has been paid to key ecosystem services, such as the atmosphere, and oceans, which have a vital role to play in sustaining human life as we know it. Often an entity will provide both natural resources in the conventional sense and ecosystem services: a forest will provide a stock of timber and act as a carbon sink. The distribution of rights and responsibilities for key ecosystem services raises distinct normative challenges. Who, if anyone, should be charged with protecting them? How should the costs of protecting them be allocated? Should we see nation-states as the custodians of the rainforests, for example, with the implication, perhaps, that they should both bear the costs, and reap the rewards, of the ecosystem services they sustain? Or should the costs of protection be shared globally, and if so, on what basis, and with what distributive implications? Schemes for geoengineering - such as afforestation, enhanced weathering and ocean-fertilisation - also require answers to some difficult normative questions which have thus far received very little attention. If such schemes are successful in increasing the stock of key natural resources, should the parties responsible be paid for their efforts? How much, and by whom? Would it be legitimate for private parties to own the absorptive capacity of such schemes, or should they revert to the state or to 'the commons'? The convenors welcome proposals for papers on the following themes: - Theorising key natural resources, and their protection - Allocating rights over key natural resources - from national to global? - Allocating the costs of protection - payments for ecosystem services?

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